“History may not repeat, but it certainly rhymes.” — Attributed to Mark Twain
“History is merely all the data we have so far.” — Paul Graham
There is no better way to understand our present than by understanding our past.
History is the light which shines on the present day, revealing the origin and ethos of the forces that shape the world around us.
While reading the newspaper or a magazine often feels productive in the moment, my experience has been that it is seeing the long arches of history that has allowed me to make better sense of today’s events.
It takes me out of the myopia of my limited life experience and gives me a look at the breadth of the human condition.
In that vein, I’ve put together the top 10 history books which have most shaped my thinking about both the past and what it means for the present.
This list heavily biases biographies. I’ve found the narrative structure of biographies more helpful to actually understanding the impact and shape of history. Humans are narrative driven creatures and it’s easier to read and learn from a story than a dry list of facts.
If you want to learn about Post WWII American business, try a biography of Warren Buffett.
If you’d like to understand the history of Finance, what better way than a biography of J.P. Morgan. will do the trick.
These best history books are “epic” in the sense that they are all long. The shortest on the list clocks in at 496 pages and the longest at over 1200. History is complex and interdependent. Seemingly small and meaningless events can end up having tremendous impact. Shorter works necessarily have to hit only the high points, creating an illusion of linearity and predictability.
History is complex because humans are complex and these works reflect that. Rockefeller could in the same day donate a tremendous fortune to philanthropy while ruthlessly stamping out a competitor.
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1. Guns, Germs and Steel
Jared Diamond
This was the first big history book I’ve ever read and it made me fall in love with the genre. Big history tries to answer the big questions in life (Why are we here? Why is the world the way it is?) but in an empirical and smart way. Instead of shunting the complexity of the world into a linear narrative, it embraces and works with it.
Drawing heavily on his biology background, Diamond argues that European culture came to dominate the world because of environmental differences rather than any intellectual, moral, or genetic superiority.
There is a 200 page section on the different breeds of domesticable crops and animals in each world region that gives you a sense for how seemingly arbitrary differences — the fact that horses could be bred in captivity but zebras can’t — end up influencing the fate of nations.
2. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
William L. Shirer
Starting with Adolf Hitler’s birth in 1889 and running until the end of World War II in 1945, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is considered the definitive work on Nazi Germany.
The author, William Shirer, spent six years living in Germany in the lead up to WWII and another decade after researching the work.
The book contains detailed portraits of Hitler and the Nazi high command based on the diary of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and offers a look into how totalitarian regimes emerge. Hitler’s rise to power was meteoric. Shirer shows how the Nazis went from being totally unrepresented in Germany to being the largest party in less than a decade.
3. Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Ron Chernow
John D. Rockefeller, Sr. was history’s first billionaire and the patriarch of America’s most famous dynasty. The son of a snake-oil salesman and a straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from small origins to create the most powerful company in America.
The life of Rockefeller is weaved into a vivid tapestry of late 19th/early 20th century America.
Alongside Rockefeller himself, America was rising from a second tier member of the group of nations to a pre-eminent power.
The vastness of Rockefeller’s fortune is hard to fathom. Chernow recounts a scene in which one of Rockefeller’s assistants comes into his office timidly to warn him that he must hire people to give away his money because it was piling up so fast that they had lost the ability to keep track of it.
When J.P. Morgan died in 1913, he had as estate of $80 million, roughly $1.2 billion today. When Rockefeller read this in the papers he remarked, “And to think, he wasn’t even a rich man.”
Beyond just his ability to make money, Chernow reveals a complex, nuanced, and quirky man who could, in a single day, be a cold-blooded monster and a great philanthropist showing again that no one is as simple as they may at first appear.
4. Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
An exploration following a simple prompt: If aliens landed on Earth tomorrow, what would they think of this homo sapien “experiment?”
Harari’s answer, told through the story of homo sapien life over the last 70,000 years, is hilarious, insightful, and original.
Sapiens blends anthropology, history, and science to make you consider new explanations of human history and connect past developments with present day concerns.
5. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
Doris Kearns Goodwin
How did a one-term congressman and prairie lawyer rise from obscurity to become president?
In Team of Rivals, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin makes the case that Lincoln possessed an extraordinary ability to put himself in the place of others, feel what they were feeling, and understand their motives and desires.
This enabled Lincoln to not only reach the presidency, but also bring his one-time opponents together to create a government that won the then-worst war in American history.
Lincoln’s career shows how leaders can thrive not by ignoring their critics, but empathizing and building alongside them.
6. The House of Morgan
Ron Chernow
Starting with the Morgans’ obscure beginnings in Victorian London, and ending with the crash of 1987, Chernow tells the epic story of the rise of modern finance through the rise of it’s most powerful financiers: the Morgan banking dynasty.
Though Rockefeller might have sneered at J.P. Morgan’s “small” $80 million fortune, MOrgan’s power wasn’t in his own millions, but the billions he controlled. From single-handedly bailing out the entire country with a single pronouncement during the Panic of 1907 to financing Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, the Morgan banking dynasty operated behind the scenes as the financiers of global power for nearly a century.
In a world where finance has become one of the dominant global forces, this book provides the history of where it came from and how it works.
7. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
Robert Caro
What is power? How does one get it? How does one wield it? Does it inevitably eat one alive?
Caro weaves all that and more into the life of New York’s master builder, Robert Moses. The book focuses on Moses’s acquisition and use of power in local and state politics over the first 60 years of the 20th century.
Moses story is a masterclass in how politicians and public figures can wield the media to accomplish their aims and the dangers of a singular quest for power.
It has repeatedly been named as one of the best biographies of the 20th century and was cited by Barack Obama as the most influential book he’s ever read.
The works of Robert Moses.
8. The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
Alice Schroeder
A touching portrait of Warren Buffett, and a wonderful history of the post-War American business world, The Snowball tells the story of Buffett’s business life starting from renting out gumball machines in Omaha to becoming the world’s richest man at the center of American life.
Schroeder had unparalleled access to Buffett who spent hours responding to questions and interviews. Through The Snowball, Buffett is revealed for the complex human he is: a mix of strengths and frailties, triumphs and failures, love and loss.
9. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
Robert Coram
With most of his life’s work buried in the military complex, Boyd may be the least known, great thinker of the 20th century.
By some colleagues in the Air Force, he was remembered as the greatest fighter pilot they’d ever seen, never losing in real or simulated air-to-air combat. By others, he was remembered as a subversive pain in the ass.
Over the course of his later life, Boyd developed a general theory of strategy called the OODA loop that has been adopted across the world in militaries and corporate boardrooms and has caused some to call him the greatest strategist since Sun Tzu.
10. Debt: The First 5000 years
David Graeber
If this book were a crappy joke, it would be “An anthropologist walks into an economists’ bar and points out that everyone is wrong about everything.”
Anthropologist David Graeber marshalls historical evidence that money did not emerge out of barter, but money was just a formal way to track already existing debts. As banal a subject as debt might seem, Graeber shows that it is, in fact, a driving force in the global economy and our individual lives.
Arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China and continue to drive our modern world.
The book shaped the way I thought about debt, finance, geopolitics, power and community.
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Last Updated on January 24, 2020 by Taylor