The 100 Best History Books of All Time

From Gibbon to Mary Beard, this volume offers a sweeping journey through the evolution of historical thought, focusing mainly on the great historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries while treating Gibbon as the work that set the modern standard for historical writing. Each of the 100 entries provides a lucid, engaging overview of a classic work, explaining its ideas, its context, and its continuing influence. The book also traces intellectual shifts in the discipline, charting movements from kings to commoners, from nations to networks, and from chronicle to critique. It includes contextual essays on schools of thought and appendices on Tolstoy’s theory of history, types of historical method, and the moral uses of the past.