Popular history books

All books

A comprehensive list of recent popular history books below! Click the covers to see more details on that book, also our review if available.

For more info see notes. You can also have a poke around the underlying data, which allows you to do a text search, and lets you see a few extra details.

Showing the 100 most recently published history books

Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome

Motherland: A Journey Through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity

The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History

Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Sublime and the Magical Power of Language

The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe

The Sound of Utopia: Musicians in the Time of Stalin

A History of Ancient Rome in Twelve Coins

Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity

Life in the Viking Great Army: Raiders, Traders, and Settlers

Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe

The Last Stand of the Raven Clan: A Story of Imperial Ambition, Native Resistance and How the Tlingit-Russian War Shaped a Continent

Everyday Politics, Ordinary Lives: A New History of British Democracy, 1918-1992

Freedom Soldiers: The Emancipation of Black Soldiers in Civil War Camps, Courts, and Prisons

A Short History of the World in 50 Failures

The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs

Elizabeth of York and the Birth of the Tudor Dynasty: Uniting the Roses

Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe's Medieval Monuments

The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad: A True Story of Science and Sacrifice in a City Under Siege

The Monastic World: A 1,200-Year History

The Rose, the Bastard and the Saint King: The Murder of Henry VI

The History Gossip: Was Anne of Cleves a Minger? and 365 Other Historical Curiosities

A History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard

Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome's Imperial Women

The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women

Paris in Ruins: The Siege, the Commune, and the Birth of Impressionism

Adventures in Time: Nelson, Hero of the Seas

Ancient Christianities: The First Five Hundred Years

Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery

Predator of the Seas: A History of the Slaveship That Fought for Emancipation

The Eagle and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV

Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China

Republic: Britain's Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660

The Burning Earth: A Material History of the Last 500 Years

Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

The Rest is History Returns: An A-Z of Historical Curiosities

Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity

Forgotten Vikings: New Approaches to the Viking Age

Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

Henry V: The Astonishing Rise of England's Greatest Warrior King

Ocean: A History of the Atlantic Before Columbus

The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome: A History of the Ptolemies

The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World

Tracks on the Ocean: A History of Trailblazing, Maps and Maritime Travel

The Greatest Nobodies of History: Minor Characters from Major Moments

Land Between the Rivers: A 5000-Year History of Iraq

Eighteen: The Young Lives of 18 Leading Britons

History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts

The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages

Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age

To Catch a Spy: How the Spycatcher Affair Brought MI5 in from the Cold

Flint Tools Field Guide: Identifying Stone Age Tools

Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich

Green Ages: Medieval Innovations in Sustainability

This Earthly Globe: A Venetian Geographer and the Quest to Map the World

How to Fit All of Ancient Greece in an Elevator

Nelson's Pathfinders: A Forgotten Story in the Triumph of British Sea Power

The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power

Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World

Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great

Son of Prophecy: The Rise of Henry Tudor

Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land

The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution

All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil

Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah

The Busy Narrow Sea: A Social History of the English Channel

History Hit Guide to Medieval England: From the Vikings to the Tudors - and Everything in Between

Jerusalem Through the Ages: From Its Beginnings to the Crusades

Vertigo: The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany

To the Ends of the Earth: How Ancient Explorers, Scientists, and Traders Connected the World

The Fall: Last Days of the English Republic

Civilisation, An Unnatural History: How Human Nature Shaped Our Past and Imperils Our Future

Inside the Stargazer's Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe

How the West Became Antisemitic: Jews and the Formation of Europe, 800–1500

Spycraft: Tricks and Tools of the Dangerous Trade from Elizabeth I to the Restoration

Medieval Saints and Their Sins: A New History of the Middle Ages Through Saints and Their Stories

Bennelong and Phillip: A Relationship Unravelled

The Missing Thread: How Women Shaped the Course of Ancient History

Out of One, Many: Ancient Greek Ways of Thought and Culture

Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World

Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean

...use the filter above to show more books.

Notes (return to top ↑)

The purpose of this list is to give you a good feel for all the history books published recently in hardback in the UK, ordered by publication date with the newest at the top. When you first load the page it will show the first 100 most recently published books, but you can see many more less recent books if you use the filter. It is a reasonably exhaustive list but…
- I have excluded military history books which I see as a category all on its own (and would if included have swamped the non-military history books).
- I have excluded history books that I see as too “local” eg the many books on particular aspects of the US Civil War, or the many books focussing on relatives of medieval English kings.
The filter is an AND filter. For example if you select ' 2021' and ' Political' then only books that have both attributes will be shown - 2021 AND Political. I think this is most useful because it allows you to narrow down your search to smaller and smaller subsets.
This history book database is hand-curated - the categories for the books are chosen by me when I do my monthly roundup. This means they can't be manipulated to boost sales (“hey my book is in all the categories...”) but also that you may or may not agree with my judgement 🙂.
Links are provided to Amazon UK and US for convenience only, with no affiliation on my part. Please ignore them if you want to shop elsewhere.
Finally for the more technicially minded among you: this book filter is the front end of a Datasette read-only SQLite database using the API that is generated automatically when you pass SQL queries through a Datasette URL.