Welcome back to the History Thread! This will probably be the last thread of the year, since next Thursday is Christmas. We’ll celebrate with my semi-annual tradition of recapping the best history books I’ve read over the past year. My reading dropped off a bit in 2025 – I checked my list and there’s an unusually high number of rereads – but I still found plenty of interesting volumes.

10. Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (1973, Jan Morris)

Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy kicked off with the same-titled book, focusing on the British Empire at its apogee in 1897. Heaven’s Command assesses the first 60 years of Queen Victoria’s reign, as the Empire slowly, hesitantly grew to the world’s dominant superpower. Morris’s books are prodigies of popular historical writing: her prose is limpid, driving and insightful, with skillful portraits of important political and military figures, from rivals Gladstone and Disraeli to generals Garnet Wolseley and Robert Napier, explorers Richard Burton and John Henning Speke, Irish nationalist Charles Parnell and doomed Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah. Even readers familiar with this period will relish her colorful narratives of key events, ranging from military debacles (the disastrous retreat from Kabul and the fall of Khartoum) to triumphs (victories at Rorke’s Drift and the suppression of the Indian Mutiny) to disasters and atrocities (the Irish potato famine and extermination of Tasmania’s population), all vividly rendered, alongside less-familiar events like Canada’s Red River Rebellion and the haphazard colonization of Ionia in the Aegean. Morris can be faulted for her overly romanticized view of her subject: she dutifully details the Empire’s crimes and shortcomings, and regularly grants sympathy towards its often-unwilling subjects (noting that the complex society of the Ashanti in the Gold Coast, or India’s rich and ancient civilization, hardly demanded “civilization” by Europeans), but also insists that most imperialists had good motives at heart. Whenever possible, she stresses pageantry and moral triumphs like suppression of the slave trade over crimes and atrocities. Read with a critical eye, Morris’s work still affords a colorful narrative of the Victorian Age that’s rarely been bettered, for sheer scope and readability.

9. The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe (2021, Mark Mazower)

Mark Mazower’s The Greek Revolution is a sweeping account of the 1821 uprising of the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire. Mazower sketches his topic in the context of both the Ottoman Empire’s decline (its borders and political reach had slowly receded since its 16th Century heyday) and the rise of European nationalism, which made the idea of an ethnic nation-state seem appealing to Balkan peoples who had grudgingly accepted Turkish rule for centuries. Thus a local uprising against corrupt Ottoman authorities exploded into a massive rebellion, the kind that the Ottomans had typically put down without much difficulty, but which foundered before stubborn resistance and an uncoordinated response. Mazower does a fine job dovetailing the rise of Greek nationalism with foreign interest in the Revolution, which ensured it an impact far beyond the Aegean: the Romantics who viewed Greece as a case study for Enlightenment Freedom against Turkish despotism, Christian zealots who viewed it as a clash of civilization against backwards Muslims, imperial powers like England, France and Russia who viewed the decay of the Turkish Empire as both opportunity and threat to their own interests. And the conflict had a ripple effect within the Ottoman Empire, weakening Constantinople’s central authority and giving precedent for client states to weaken it – not least Muhammad Ali, the Albanian general who fought against Greek insurgents then used his Army to carve out his own empire in North Africa. A dense, daunting topic that Mazower, a skilled and experienced historian of modern Europe (Hitler’s Empire, Dark Continent, etc.), renders into a highly readable narrative analysis.

 

8. The Evolution of Charles Darwin:The Epic Voyage of the Beagle That Forever Changed Our View of Life on Earth (2022, Diana Preston)

Diana Preston’s The Evolution of Charles Darwin is an engaging narrative of the famous naturalist’s life and discoveries. As the subtitle indicates, most of the book focuses on Darwin’s epochal voyage on the HMS Beagle, during which time he explored South America, Africa and Oceania, encountering a variety of far-flung cultures and climates, observing unique species in their natural habitats which inspired him to craft a theory of evolution. Preston, an experienced pop historian, does a fine job weaving Darwin’s personal growth (starting as intellectually curious, ambitious but unfocused young man who found an extraordinary calling, almost by accident) with the Beagle’s journey and their discoveries in the Tropics; she interrogates Darwin and his colleagues’ interactions with recently-independent South Americans and their culture, which the Europeans viewed with a mixture of curiosity and condescension. While light on science for a book about a scientist, Preston’s quite engaging chronicling the unique creatures (from rare marsupials and his famous finches, to “disgusting” iguanas and tasty giant tortoise) and the sense of wonder they inspired in those encountering them for the first time; and also gives an idea of how Darwin began formulating his theories on the spot, later refining them in a painstaking process of research, writing and collaboration with like-minded naturalists (which ultimately broke Darwin’s health). Preston allows that Darwin’s views on race weren’t especially progressive (his initial respect for indigenous South Americans soon turns to condescension, causing him to muse on the difference between “savage” and “civilized races”), but stresses that he scarcely imagined the later misuse his theories would be put by eugenicists, bigots and “Social Darwinists.” Later sections of the book feel underdeveloped, with Preston retracing the actual writing of Origin of Species and later books, the furor over their publication and the famous Oxford debate between Thomas Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce dutifully, if not excitingly. While scientists might find little new material, lay readers will certainly appreciate Preston’s portrait of this extraordinary man and his work.

7. River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile (2022, Candice Millard)

Candice Millard’s River of the Gods brings her deft narrative style to the 19th Century exploration of the Nile, revisiting the collaboration and rivalry between Richard Burton and John Henning Speke. There’s really not much that will be new to anyone who’s read previous works on this subject, like Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile or Tim Jeal’s Explorers of the Nile, though it’s certainly not a bad thing to revisit an old story with fresh eyes. Millard deftly captures the clashing personalities of Burton, a controversial, fiercely-opinionated “Orientalist” and Speke, a very proper English gentleman who seemed driven by a lust for fame; they share unbelievable hardships sailing up the Nile, fighting off disease, insects, hostile natives and their own egos and misstep. As in her Teddy Roosevelt volume The River of Doubt, Millard relishes the gruesome details, from Burton’s jaw getting impaled by a spear to Speke being deafened by a beetle, which have made this story appealing in a gruesome Boys Own fashion. The last third of the book devotes to Burton and Speke sparring over credit in England, leading to a series of lectures, debates, press attacks that culminated in Speke’s untimely demise – and the further blackening Burton’s reputation, and already depressive mindset. Like Moorehead, Millard definitely favors the colorful Burton (unfortunately downplaying his racism, vicious even by standards of the time) over the rather vapid Speke, understandable from a dramatic perspective but undercut by the fact that, in the final debate, Speke was correct about the source of the Nile and Burton was not. She does break from earlier writers with a welcome focus on Sidi Mubarak Bombay, an ex-African slave who served as an invaluable third member of the team, helping negotiate with native leaders and mediating between his colleagues. Overall, a good, engrossing adventure story that presents a familiar narrative in a colorful new package.

6. Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America (2025, Clay Risen)

Clay Risen’s Red Scare provides an updated survey of the postwar climate of anticommunist hysteria and repression in the United States. Making ample use of recent research, Risen shows that the era’s “witch hunts” were partially motivated by serious security concerns in the wake of World War II – the presence of Soviet spies, now well-documented, in the US government and a number of progressive organizations, the threatening expansion of Stalin’s USSR into Eastern Europe, Mao’s victory in China and the development of atomic weapons – but largely, indeed overwhelmingly by domestic cultural and political concerns: conservative backlash against the New Deal, which was easily conflated with communist influence (not least when Roosevelt advisers like Alger Hiss were exposed as spies), fears of progressive labor and civil rights movements, and a generalized resentment at the social mores disrupted and changed, first by the Great Depression and then by World War II. More government involvement in citizens’ lives, more women and African-Americans in the workforce, more tolerance towards changing sexual mores (including an ever-so-slightly more visible gay community), a more interconnected world threatening small town America and fears of crime, juvenile delinquency and family disruption. A lot of familiar American anxieties and resentments, for which Communism proved an easy, acceptable explanation – and grist for no shortage of opportunistic demagogues. Risen’s work rehearses the era’s usual set pieces: the trials of Alger Hiss, the Hollywood Ten and the blacklist, the Peekskill Riot targeting singer-activist Paul Robeson, the execution of the Rosenbergs, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s downfall and of course Joe McCarthy’s rise and fall. But he also folds in accounts of bureaucrats fired from government, gay and lesbian employees persecuted, teachers forced from jobs and labor leaders hounded out of the country. The book also explores the powerful anticommunist organizations and networks, from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the American Legion to a veritable army of citizens’ organizations, who fanned the flames of fear, along with politicians from McCarthy to Richard Nixon who used the hysteria to advance their careers. Risen folds these stories into a cohesive, engaging narrative, stressing that the Red Scare didn’t just affect the corridors of Washington and Hollywood screenwriters, but profoundly impacted broader American society and culture in ways that are still being felt. A solid work of popular history, with modern parallels obvious enough that Risen needn’t spell them out.

5. House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (2017, Daniel Beer)

Daniel Beer’s The House of the Dead recounts the brutal policy of exile in late Tsarist Russia. Taking his title from Dostoyevsky’s autobiographical novel about his time in Siberia, Beer explores how the system of Katorga gradually developed through the 18th and 19th Centuries, with an informal series of prison camps, forced labor and distant settlements in the forbidding, distant climates of Siberia and the Russian Far East. The policy served multiple purposes in allowing the government to forcibly settle and develop their Far Eastern possessions (displacing the Indigenous population in the process), but mostly served as (in the words of one Tsarist official) “a deep sack into which we tossed our social sins” – criminals, dissidents, failed rebels and general malcontents all found themselves uprooted and forced into a forbidding new climate. From the failed Decembrist rebels to Polish nationalists, to intellectuals like Dostoyevsky and Alexander Radischev, to Bolsheviks Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, the system encompassed a massive roster of the Russian Empire’s discontented. While not as systematic as the Soviet gulags, Katorga was arbitrary in its cruelties: some exiles enjoyed relatively stable, undisturbed lives, while others were enslaved to work mines and build roads, brutalized by overseers or preyed upon by bandits. Sporadic rebellions, outbreaks of crime and a general disconnect from Moscow caused the region to become “a hothouse of revolution”; turns out, gathering radicals together in isolation while subjecting them to random violence wasn’t the best policy for reform. Eventually, exposes by writers both foreign (George Kennan, uncle of the famous diplomat) and domestic (Anton Chekhov, whose writings on the Sakhalin Island penal colony caused it to be shut down) caused Nicholas II to curb the program’s worst excesses – but Katorga continued until the Revolution of 1917. Of course, Siberia enjoyed only the briefest respite, as the Romanovs’ successors erected a similar, even more repressive system in its place. Not light reading, but Beer assures that readers won’t completely despair by studding the narrative with pen portraits and stirring quotations from Siberia’s exiles, who struggled to retain personal identity and beliefs in the face of brutality.

4. The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj (2019, Anita Anand)

Anita Anand’s The Patient Assassin reconstructs one of the seminal events of the Indian Independence Movement: the Amritsar or Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of April 13, 1919 where Brigadier General Reginald Dyer slaughtered hundreds of civilians in the course of a peaceful protest. Anand chooses as her central figure Udham Singh, an itinerant nationalist who, decades later, assassinated Michael O’Dwyer in London; O’Dwyer being the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab whom he held responsible for the mass murder. Singh’s life is a fascinating story on its own, with Anand reconstruction its unusual twists and turns: a soldier in the Raj’s army, a nationalist radicalized by the massacre (which he claimed to have survived), an auto worker who flitted between the US, UK, France and India plotting O’Dwyer’s demise which, in March 1940, he finally carried out. The book’s vivid, forensic reconstruction of Jallianwala Bagh is equally effective: Anand dismisses Imperial apologists claiming that the authorities had a righteous fear of a second Indian Mutiny, noting that despite earlier protests and riots the situation was well in-hand by the time Dyer arrived. Dyer comes off as a blunt instrument of Empire who was absolutely the wrong man to peacefully diffuse a tense situation – but the perfect person to “inflict a lesson” upon recalcitrant subjects. While Anand affords Dyer some modest sympathy for being scapegoated for the Raj’s brutality, causing him much private anguish and even regret, she has no compunction about treating the arrogant, bigoted and wholly unreflective O’Dwyer as embodying everything rotten about the British Empire. And it’s impossible not to sympathize with Singh or his compatriots; if less palatable for liberal international opinion than Gandhi’s nonviolence, their violent nationalism played its part in shaking the foundations of the Raj. An engaging mixture of biography, true crime thriller and narrative history.

3. The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1871-1921 (1954, Isaac Deutscher)

Isaac Deutscher’s three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky has such a vaunted reputation that for years I was intimidated to even try it, despite my interest in the Russian Revolution. Fortunately, after finding the first two volumes at a bookstore I found them easy, engrossing reads. The Prophet Armed covers the first half-century of Trotsky’s life, from student revolutionary to Bolshevik leader, culminating in the Bolshevik consolidation of power after the Civil War. Deutscher, an Old Left historian, is undoubtedly enthralled by his subject and finds Trotsky one of the Great Men of History; he stresses wherever possible his brilliant mind, charisma, boundless energy and far-sighted ideology which made him the locomotive of the Red October. Yet Trotsky is too complex a figure to flatten into a simple hero: Deutscher dutifully illustrates his ideological evolution (a longtime social democrat who long despised the Bolsheviks, only to join them shortly before the Revolution), abrasive personality and reluctance to compromise his principles, all of which made him easy meat to Stalin, who slowly gathered power in the shadows. While Trotsky could be credited with the Revolution’s undoubted successes, it was also easy to blame him for its shortcomings; Deutscher struggles to maintain sympathy when discussing Trotsky’s crushing of the Kronstadt Mutiny, something even Trotskyists regard as a low point in his career. The book ends with Trotsky, lacking Stalin’s and having alienated many of his comrades, falling from power, setting in motion a long exile and evolution from a communist leader to living avatar of Revolution. While a modern reader can fault Deutscher’s heroic portrait of Trotsky, it’s hard to resist his engrossing prose, portrait of early 20th Century Russia or his insightful depiction of leftist ideology in its fullest, most aggressive (but also bloodiest, and most repressive) flower. A masterpiece of biography.

2. Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998, Ron Rosenbaum)

Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler offers a fascinating examination of the lore and legacy surrounding the 20th Century’s most notorious dictator. Rosenbaum notes that while the bare elements of Adolf Hitler’s life are well-known, there remains a great dispute about the darker corners of his personality: his motivation, ancestry and personal life remain shrouded with innuendo, with some writers claiming he had a Jewish grandfather, others that there was some psychosexual key to his behavior (be he a repressed homosexual, a man of sordid kinks, or victim of goat-inflicted castration). While Rosenbaum does a good job examining, and largely debunking these myths (no real evidence of Jewish ancestry or abnormal sexuality, aside from a weird proclivity for much-younger women) he suggests that Hitler’s crimes were so enormous that writers, from biographers to writers of fiction, feel compelled to find a silver bullet that explains it all. Chapters assess biographers Hugh Trevor-Roper, who viewed Hitler as a self-hypnotized fanatic, and Alan Bullock, who argued that he was an apolitical “mountebank” concerned about power over ideology (a view he later revised). Historians from Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executions, to the Hitler apologist David Irving, before his cagey fascist sympathies blossomed into open Holocaust denial, are also discussed along with the controversy attending their works. Rosenbaum also assesses contemporary opponents of Hitler like the left wing Munchener Post, which tried to expose the rising dictator at great risk, and the sordid climate of blackmail and whispers in the Nazis’ early years that contributed to his mystique as a man of secrets – secrets that, if only they could be plumbed, could explain the phenomena of Fascism, the Holocaust and perhaps the very nature of Evil. Rosenbaum doesn’t draw a conclusion himself: with so much Hitler discussion wrapped up in innuendo, rumor and parboiled psychoanalyzing, one almost sympathizes with filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whom Rosenbaum depicts as offended by the very idea that there could be an explanation for Hitler. Yet Rosenbaum shows that, for all the smoke and mirrors, Hitler was utterly explainable: an angry petit borugeois who blamed his failures on Jews and other elements in society, whose ability to channel broader social concerns into a simple ideology of Hate doomed Europe to its greatest catastrophe. One hardly needs to blame the Final Solution on demonic inspiration, a syphilitic Jewish prostitute or a missing testicle, when the intersection of Man and History ought to be enough. An impressive mixture of biography, historical investigation and historiographic treatise; a must-read for anyone seeking to understand not only the Third Reich, but the way we remember and talk about it.

1. The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (1986, Robert Hughes)

Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore is an incredible work of history, chronicling the early years of British settlement of Australia in the 17th and 18th Century. Hughes starts with a vivid sketch of Georgian England, a country with graphic class stratification and overpopulation, that treated poor people, immigrants and criminals (often viewed as interchangeable) with extraordinary brutality. Thus came the idea to use Britain’s empire as a release valve for its undesirables, starting in 1788 with the shipment of 775 convicts to Botany Bay, setting in motion a long experiment in servitude and rehabilitation. Hughes is unsparing in his portrait of the brutalities of early Australia; for many, the new colony proved an even brutal prison, with many luckless criminals imprisoned in gulag-like establishments on Tasmania and Norfolk Island which offered little hope for escape, or even survival. Even the freer settlers struggled to adapt to their new lifestyle, developing a rough-hewn independent culture that nonetheless reflected its own social stratification (the working class English and Irish convicts, the sailors and Marines who formed a sort of privileged Middle Class, and colonial administrators who tried turning the country into a mini-England overseas). Topics from the rise of the bushrangers (outlaws like Ned Kelly who became celebrity heroes, much like America’s Western gunslingers) to the role of women in shaping the colony are also explored. And Hughes also describes the brutal displacement of Australia’s aboriginal peoples, who were treated almost from the first as subhuman enemies to be subjugated or where possible destroyed to make room for the new land. Hughes’ book makes for grim, gripping reading; the book captures how Australia’s unique sense of national pride and fiercely independent identity developed, but also the brutalities under which reverberate to this day. My favorite read of 2025, which comes highly recommended.

What have you read, watched or otherwise discovered in 2025?