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How ‘freedom’ got twisted in the American mind, fueling fascism

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By Timothy Snyder Crown Publishing: 368 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future

By Jason Stanley Atria/One Signal: 256 pages, $28.99 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

As fascism rose in Europe a century ago and escalated into the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany, Americans told themselves: “ It can’t happen here .”

Think again.

In two September releases by noted Yale scholars, philosopher Jason Stanley and historian Timothy Snyder argue that America’s myth of its own exceptionalism makes the United States especially fertile ground in which fascist weeds proliferate. In “Erasing History,” Stanley shows that the recent attacks on public education culminate from fascist policies going back to the Reagan administration. “On Freedom” explores a path away from such trends, as Snyder sets out to define “positive” freedom — not just rejecting autocratic rule, but moving toward liberty.

Both Snyder and Stanley make strong cases that American notions of “freedom” ultimately choke individual liberty, and both see changes in the social contract under President Reagan as setting up this moment of growing attacks on education, civil rights and the free proliferation of ideas.

In part, they fault journalists. By covering book bans and curriculum restrictions as discrete problems driven by white, Christian populism, the news industry fails to connect the dots that these incidents are focused on a common aim of a government based on a merger of corporate and fascist ideas and have been bankrolled by tech billionaires and right-wing groups representing wealthy interests. That way lies fascism.

To understand how fascist ideals have been embraced in all levels of American society and government , it’s helpful to reacquaint ourselves with what fascism is: a system of authoritarian, ultranationalist government that promotes theories of “racial purity” and hypermasculinity, which naturalizes oppressive domestic policies.

In my own education on 20th century fascism, I found Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay on the topic to be a great distillation of its aim. In the tradition of that article, Stanley crafts a list of 21st century criteria by which to recognize fascism . It emphasizes how notions of racial superiority drive fascist ideology. Like Snyder, he’s less worried about semantics than about pointing to the authoritarian, even totalitarian regimes that have risen in Russia, Hungary , India , Turkey , Israel and Italy . It is a growing global threat. It can happen here.

Stanley focuses his attention on the ideological, politically driven battles occurring over education nationwide. He breaks down how their aims to create a single narrative of American history are part of a larger project to create a docile electorate that will follow a charismatic politician who promises to simplify a complex world. In looking at historical precedents and examples from nations where similar attacks on education have succeeded, he notes five characteristics of a fascist education: “national greatness; national purity; national innocence; strict gender roles; and the vilification of the left.”

The movement against gendered (and transgendered) multicultural interpretations of American history, including the targeting of the 1619 Project and a deliberate misinterpretation of critical race theory, seeks to create a fundamentalist Christian and extreme conservative portrayal of America as “ an exemplary nation ,” as the Trump White House once described it. The goal is not simply to ignore the histories of slavery and continuing Black oppression, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the contributions made by nonwhite immigrants, and the very existence of gay and transgender people. The larger agenda is to create a narrative in which America’s greatness lies in a divine unity of purpose given to its white founders, which must be safeguarded by white people.

In his compelling and reader-friendly prose, Stanley connects Nazi methods — rewriting German history to exclude Jewish contributions and to assert a right to other nations’ lands — with modern American trends such as the efforts of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, including book bans , attempts to erase mentions of race or sexuality and gender in public schools, and the dismantling of Florida’s institutions of higher education . Similar policies have plagued other states.

As both scholars argue, these attacks on education soften the ground for totalitarianism by further dismantling notions of what constitutes a fact, along with the assertion that the only truth is an official truth. When traditional sources of knowledge such as news media, public education and scientific expertise are discounted, fascists can create their own reality and get away with a lot. We have already seen this in the U.S.: Russian disinformation campaigns fueled sham “debates” about the Kremlin’s sovereign right to annex Ukraine, and so what is a simple fact — Russia does not have the right to invade its neighbors — became a point of debate, weakening international support for Ukraine.

As Snyder writes about these and similar efforts, we are offered a “reassuring story”: “Politics can be safely located in legend. Time loops back to a mythical moment when the tribe was great. What was lost since then is the fault of some other group.”

Snyder’s work on German and Soviet history led him to write earlier books about how regimes in those nations eroded freedom. His deep political and philosophical examination of how to do the opposite, how to create and sustain freedom, provides a hopeful view for the future. The work may daunt some readers, but like Stanley, Snyder renders political theories and complex philosophical debates about epistemology and ethics into friendly language that engages and educates.

One example from Snyder is a radically fresh understanding of the founders’ worldview. Rather than embracing the “freedom to,” our understanding of the Constitution and political culture is built on notions of “freedom from.” As a result, American conservatism has built itself on notions of economic restraint as guaranteeing the rights of the individual, as though people have liberty if they are free from taxation, free from government regulation and free from the needs of others. After 9/11, many Americans were persuaded that it was right to give up civil liberties for “security.” Snyder observes that such negative notions of freedom also convey that the U.S. government and other Americans are a constant threat.

Snyder argues that positive freedom is necessary for creation of the whole self. The freedom to become a mature individual necessitates access to nutrition, healthcare, education and financial resources. No individual is free when basic survival is a struggle.

Snyder zeros in on a chapter in American history when a negative understanding of freedom was taken to an extreme: the Reagan years, when “me, me, me” thinking prevailed. White members of the baby boom, who directly benefited from government programs that nurtured and protected them, promptly pulled up the ladder when they voted for Reagan’s plans to dismantle the federal government. The 2020s’ vast economic disparities are its result.

Negative views of freedom foster a zero-sum mindset, as though each of us must strive to be free from the burden of being part of a society. This fuels racism, xenophobia and misogyny as tools to keep others from getting a piece of the pie. A population so resentful of others’ progress is an easy target for leaders who promise a strict government regime to curb others’ access to education, health and safety. Even now, mass incarceration mimics an apartheid state, depriving millions of civil rights such as voting, largely along racial lines.

Snyder takes readers through historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate how we can make progress, and are much better served, by embracing positive freedoms. A positive freedom that guarantees everyone access to affordable healthcare would give many in the middle class the liberty to pursue career opportunities without losing health benefits. The development of children’s minds in well-funded schools ensures creative and thoughtful individuals who invent new solutions that will benefit our nation’s future.

What we see in the United States today — attacks on the governmental institutions that provide support to all and the emergence of an educational system devoted to maintaining white supremacism — robs the American people of the critical skills they need to recognize authoritarian rhetoric and to see the promise of democracy and equality.

Lorraine Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.

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Two Centuries of ‘The Guardian’

May 27, 2021 issue

Katy Stoddard

Alan Rusbridger, then editor of The Guardian , addressing the newsroom after the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on the documents leaked by Edward Snowden, London, April 2014

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The Guardian has never been much of a business. Its owners never got rich; in fact, they gave the newspaper away. Its history is peppered with financial crises and near-death experiences. Perhaps it was placed on earth to make “righteousness readable” (in the centenary words of Lord Robert Cecil), but the paper has nearly always struggled to make it remunerative.

And yet this year it is celebrating its two hundredth anniversary. Born on the day Napoleon Bonaparte died—May 5, 1821— The Guardian now has around $1.4 billion in the bank, more than a million paying supporters or subscribers, and profitable operations in the US and Australia, which enable it to report around the clock and to reach well over 1.5 billion online readers around the world every year. Not bad for a paper that began life being cranked out on a primitive handpress at 125 copies an hour.

The 750 journalists who work at The Guardian today can reflect that their predecessors eventually got around to reporting the death of Napoleon nearly two months later and recorded the celebrations for the coronation of George IV the same year. The paper had a man on the spot to capture in perhaps too much graphic detail the death throes of William Huskisson, a member of Parliament taken unawares in 1830 by the speed of the engineer George Stephenson’s Rocket steam locomotive. (“Lord Wilson put a handkerchief round the mangled limb and twisted it with a stick to form a tourniquet for the purpose of stopping the effusion of blood.”) It had a ringside seat for the great struggle for parliamentary reform in 1832 and backed Prime Minister William Gladstone’s Home Rule for Ireland campaign fifty-odd years later.

In 1887 the paper’s features (“colour”) writer attended Queen Victoria’s garden party in celebration of her fifty years on the throne and made a note of her “swimming, sweeping gait.” One of its reporters was on the beach at Gallipoli in 1915, another made it to Dublin in time for the climax of the Easter Rising the following year, and yet another was at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in December 1917 when it was stormed by the Bolsheviks. Its correspondent conducted a day-long interview with Leo Tolstoy in 1905. (“Russian ladies nowadays write excellently…only, they have nothing to say.”) Lenin granted a somewhat shorter interview in 1919.

The Guardian saw Niccolò Paganini perform in Manchester in 1832 and Henry Irving play Charles I in 1873. Its music critic watched from the wings as Richard Wagner rehearsed his singers for the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. The paper’s critics were still puzzled by Gustav Mahler in 1920 but impressed by Sergei Eisenstein’s silent film Battleship Potemkin when it was shown in the UK in 1929. After seeing a Luigi Pirandello play on a prototype Baird television set in August 1930, its drama critic was reluctant to write the medium off altogether.

Its reporter C.B. Marriott sent dispatches from the Paris Commune siege in 1871. J.M. Synge wrote on Irish poverty in 1905, Arthur Ransome on famine in the Volga region in 1921, F.A. Voigt on the rise of fascism in March 1933, and Martha Gellhorn on Vietnam in 1966. When Neville Chamberlain pronounced peace with honor in October 1938, The Guardian didn’t believe him.

The paper has, in other words, seen a lot, and has had a lot to say.

The original investors were not in it for a quick buck: indeed, they were quite ready to lose their seed capital. They came together to start a newspaper because they felt that Manchester—a city built on the growth of the cotton industry, powered by new factories and mills, and gripped by the hunger for political reform—needed one, even though it already had at least five.

A clue to their motives can be found in the Peterloo Massacre of August 16, 1819. Eighteen people were killed and as many as 670 were injured when the cavalry, encouraged by the local Manchester magistrates, charged into a crowd of working-class protesters peacefully demanding greater political representation.

How public opinion was formed in 1819 was not so different from the present day. There were widely conflicting accounts of what had happened, with the magistrates keen to promote their version through the press and the courts: that their forces had come under attack from a violent mob. They were not short of newspapers that would put political interests above the truth.

Whom to believe? John Edward Taylor, a prominent cotton merchant and civic leader, was in the crowd that day and predicted the tide of propaganda, which began with the magistrates sending false accounts to the Home Office. He also knew The Times ’s correspondent, John Tyas, was in custody and unable to file a report. So he wrote a hurried account himself and got it on the mail coach to London. It was published on August 18. It is fascinating to read The Times over the subsequent days, as the paper’s great editor, Thomas Barnes, attempted to establish a common foundation of evidence for what had happened. He used what we might now call crowd-sourcing (“I was there”) and aggregation (“here’s the Liverpool Mercury and the Manchester Herald account”) to build up a kaleidoscope of eyewitness testimony. It was, in the end, overwhelmingly supportive of Taylor’s account.

The historian E.P. Thompson later described this battle for truth as one between the “OK witness” (i.e., bishops and generals) and the “non-OK witnesses” (i.e., working-class). Thanks in large part to Taylor, Tyas, and The Times , the non-OK side eventually triumphed. Thompson’s judgment, written in 1957, was that “never since Peterloo has authority dared to use equal violence on a peaceful British crowd.” Peterloo, according to The Guardian ’s centenary historian and chief reporter, William Haslam Mills, marked “the début of the reporter in English public life.” 1

About eighteen months later Taylor hatched a plan to launch The Manchester Guardian . The dozen founders were all Nonconformists (Protestants outside the Church of England), and at least ten were Unitarians (a church linked with social reform). Most were liberal campaigners, although connected with the cotton trade. Each contributed £100 (around $15,000 in today’s currency). If the paper succeeded, their investment would be repaid; if it failed, they would write off their losses. Sophia Russell Scott, Taylor’s future wife, wrote to her brother, Russell: “Their view was public advantage. They were willing to take the risk without wishing to have any share in the profits.”

The first edition—a four-page folio—carried a stamp to indicate compliance with the four-penny tax then levied on all newspapers (there was an additional tax of three shillings and six pence on each of the forty-seven advertisements). The stamp duty “tax on knowledge” deliberately put newspapers beyond the means of anyone but the elite, but they were passed from hand to hand and read aloud at large public meetings. Each copy might be devoured by as many as thirty people.

It seems clear that in starting The Guardian , Taylor had two aims: to bear reliable witness in a world of information confusion and to shape views. “A newspaper in that age had much soul and very little substance,” wrote Mills in the centenary history. “It was most probably established, not to make money, but to make opinion. It had something to say but very little to tell. It thought much more than it knew.”

Twin purposes, but not to be muddled. “Comment is free, but facts are sacred,” The Guardian ’s greatest editor, C.P. Scott, pronounced one hundred years after its birth. Over that period the paper had built up a reputation for both fair and, at times, fearless reporting alongside the influencing of opinion. Then as now, it was important to distinguish between the two.

One of the first hires was Jeremiah Garnett, whose skills included printing, reporting, and, later, editing. Another early hire was John Harland, of the Hull Packet , who for thirty years used his formidable proficiency at shorthand to record political speeches. For the first time in history a wide public could read verbatim accounts of the main agitators for—and against—political reform.

The paper may have been born in an age of radical ferment—some feared a revolution because of dissatisfaction with Parliament, which was riddled with “rotten boroughs” having virtually no voters, and just 2 percent of the population had the vote—but its politics, at least in its early days, remained what Mills termed “studiously moderate and opportunistic.” Its centrist views (doubtless trimmed so as not to alienate the new cotton middle class) sometimes managed to offend Tories as well as Radicals (supporters of parliamentary reform), but it was successful in attracting a broad readership. By 1840 the paper was the market leader in Manchester and the third-biggest provincial paper in the UK, but it dismayed those seeking more reforming fire and campaigning edge.

The paper initially fared well financially. Advertising flooded in. There are purists who deplore the (until recently) overwhelming dependence of newspapers on advertising, but they forget that—as the press historian Francis Williams wrote in 1957—“the daily press would never have come into existence as a force in public and social life if it had not been for the need of men of commerce to advertise.” The Guardian and newspapers like it published small ads on the front page, which bought them, at last, independence from political parties. The ads also meant that Taylor could repay the original investors, with interest.

In 1824 Taylor married Sophia, his first cousin. The bond between their families was further strengthened with the appointment of Sophia’s twenty-five-year-old nephew, C.P. Scott, as editor of the paper in 1872. By the time he retired fifty-seven years later, Scott had become a towering figure in local, national, and international journalism. He had also become his own proprietor, having purchased the paper along with the consistently profitable Manchester Evening News (using his own personal means and borrowed money) in 1907.

Whether as owner or editor, Scott never doubted that the editorial imperative trumped any commercial considerations. His centenary essay was clear:

A newspaper has two sides to it. It is a business, like any other, and has to pay in the material sense in order to live. But it is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies…. It may educate, stimulate, assist, or it may do the opposite. It has, therefore, a moral as well as a material existence, and its character and influence are in the main determined by the balance of these two forces. It may make profit or power its first object, or it may conceive itself as fulfilling a higher and more exacting function. I think I may honestly say that, from the day of its foundation, there has not been much doubt as to which way the balance tipped…. Had it not been so, personally I could not have served it.

In a speech on his eightieth birthday, in 1926, Scott underlined these priorities, describing a newspaper as “a public-utility service…essential to the interests of the public.”

Six years later Scott was dead. Within four months, his forty-eight-year-old son, Ted, who had briefly succeeded him as editor, drowned while sailing. C.P.’s third child, J.R., now manager of the family business, placed the two papers into a trust—the Scott Trust, formally established in 1936 (and reconstituted in 1948, and again in 2008).

In effectively giving away the paper, J.R. Scott prevented it from being snapped up by a press baron such as Lord Beaverbrook or Lord Northcliffe. For the rest of his working life he drew only a normal salary. “He could have been a rich man,” wrote Sir William Haley, later the editor of The Times . “He chose a Spartan existence.” (Not everyone approved of this singular act of philanthropy. Gavin Simonds, the future Lord Chancellor, who was advising Scott, told him, “It seems to me that you are trying to do something very repugnant to the law of England. You are trying to divest yourself of a property right.”)

The sole official object of the Scott Trust, which continues to own The Guardian (and still has a Scott on its board), is that the newspaper “shall be conducted in the future on the same lines and in the same spirit as heretofore.” Since 1936, that is the only instruction given to incoming editors (of which there have, since that date, been just six): “As heretofore.”

Numerous books have been written about newspaper proprietors, from William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and Edward Scripps to Lord Northcliffe, Robert Maxwell, and Rupert Murdoch. Less examined is what it means for journalists not to have one. What if no one is telling you what to write, or whom not to offend?

Editors with no proprietor have a freedom—and assume a power—that is unthinkable under the watchful eye of a Murdoch or a Barclay brother (owners of the Telegraph ). They are likely to have a different kind of relationship with their staff and with their readers. The organization is bound to be less of a pyramid, pointing up to a usually elusive figure on high. It is likely to listen more closely to the reporter in the field than any voice from above.

Decision-making among peers can undoubtedly be messy and subject to group-think. The morning editorial conference—open to all—can be a fermentation vessel for ideas, and can also be a place of furious disagreement. There is no “line to take” on Europe, Putin, whom to support in a general election, Israel-Palestine, or Syria. The editorial staff, with the editor, have to decide for themselves.

The trust officially has no views. When I was editor of The Guardian , from 1995 to 2015, I sometimes turned to the chair of the trust for advice—being first to publish the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013 (rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize, shared with The Washington Post ) was certainly one such moment—but I felt free to ignore it without consequences.

There are, inevitably, occasional tensions between the trust—there to protect the “heretofore” of editorial independence—and the business-side executives (with their own management and oversight boards) who have to keep the paper afloat (the preferred internal term is “profit-seeking” rather than “nonprofit”). One wonder of the past two hundred years is how seldom those tensions have broken through.

James Murdoch famously concluded a lecture in 2009 with the ringing cry: “The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit.” The more alert in the room asked themselves, “Independence from whom?” No amount of profit will buy you independence from Rupert Murdoch, if he happens to own you. Scott and his successors were free to think and report what they liked—even, sometimes, at a short-term cost to the business.

Somewhat to the alarm of his business managers, Scott became more radical in his politics from the mid-1880s onward. He vigorously supported Gladstone’s drive for Irish self-rule within the UK, and went on to oppose imperialism in Africa, to support the suffragists, and to help define the liberal politics that grew out of the decline of the Whigs. “Scott threw the whole weight of the paper on the side of Home Rule, that is to say, to the left,” wrote Dennis McKeown in a 1972 Ph.D. dissertation on him, “and this just as its readers were going over in droves to the right.” 2 Scott didn’t stop there, vociferously opposing the Boer War and publishing searing accounts from his correspondent Emily Hobhouse on the disgraceful conditions in the concentration camps the British had constructed in South Africa to hold Boer families who had been burned out of their farms.

Large sections of the public, in full patriotic fervor, loathed what they saw as the paper’s treachery. The Guardian ’s offices and Scott’s house were put under police protection. The paper lost a dangerous number of readers, leading David Ayerst to write in his “Guardian”: Biography of a Newspaper (1971), “What happened between the Diamond Jubilee in 1897 and the end of the Boer War in 1902 nearly killed the Guardian .”

There was a similarly virulent reaction in 1956, when Britain and France seized the Suez Canal. “An act of folly without justification in any terms but brief expediency,” rasped the editorials written by the newly installed Alastair Hetherington. “It pours petrol on a growing fire…. It is wrong on every count—moral, military, and political.” These were rousing phrases, but caused initial mass defections among readers, as the circulation manager reported to then chairman Laurence Scott. He told Hetherington not to let the figures influence his editorial judgment.

In both cases it proved good for business in the longer term for the paper to hold its editorial nerve. Readers can often have an acute instinct for when a newspaper is acting out of principle—a relevant lesson in the present age, when metrics can be designed to reward or prioritize content that is seen to please the audience (or, at the very least, not alienate it). Metrics might have demanded support for Britain’s actions in South Africa and Suez. Metrics would have been wrong.

The reluctance of the Scott Trust, not to mention the boards that oversee the paper on its behalf, to intervene in editorial issues can give the newsroom a rare shield of protection. When, in 2013, a number of parliamentarians tried to persuade the Guardian Media Group board and the Scott Trust to prevent me, as editor, from reporting on Snowden’s surveillance revelations, both bodies responded that they literally had no powers to intervene.

The cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, had done his best to persuade us that, about two weeks after the first story appeared, it was time to stop. Fearing that we would face an injunction, we transferred the top-secret leaked material to The New York Times , since there is greater protection against prior restraint in the US. I was then hauled in front of a House of Commons select committee—with two police officers, by then investigating me, waiting in the next room as I was asked by an MP , “Do you love your country?”

It was at moments such as this that trust ownership came into its own.

There have been both lean and comfortable times over the decades. The 1930s—battered by an economic depression—were precarious. The late 1850s had been as well, mainly due to the rising cost of paper and the rising cost of producing a newspaper by then selling for only a penny: the severe cutbacks in the editorial budget were remarked on by Friedrich Engels, who wrote to Karl Marx in April 1858, “The Guardian chaps have reduced all expenses, correspondents’ contributions etc. Their attempt to produce a first-class provincial paper has completely collapsed.”

By the end of World War I advertising revenues were healthy and profits were rising. In subsequent lean years The Guardian came to rely on cross-subsidies from the much more profitable Manchester Evening News , which raked in local advertising and had none of the national or international editorial costs of its sister paper.

In 1959 The Guardian dared to drop “Manchester” from its title in bold anticipation of being regarded as a truly national paper. There was a near-death crisis after it started printing in London in 1961 and moved its editorial headquarters there in 1964. By 1965 Laurence Scott believed The Guardian couldn’t survive: it was losing £900,000 a year (about $21 million in today’s money). He began covert negotiations to merge it with The Times , but the plan was scuppered when Hetherington heard about it. Editors of The Guardian did not inevitably have veto power, but, in C.P. Scott’s 1921 phrase, they marched “just an inch or two in advance” of the business manager.

Financial salvation eventually came in two forms. The first was the astute buildup of classified job advertising: by 1992 the paper had a commanding position in the UK market. (This went into reverse with the collapse of “small ads” in print and the rise of not only Craigslist but Big Tech, as a result of which The Guardian last made a profit in 2004.) The other was the purchase and development of Auto Trader , a magazine and subsequently a website for selling used cars. As the revenues from the Manchester Evening News also began to decline, The Guardian became more reliant on a subsidy from the profits of Auto Trader .

In 1993 the Scott Trust acquired the highly unprofitable Observer , the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, in a bid to stave off competition from the burgeoning Independent and Independent on Sunday . The Guardian and The Observer now coexist, sharing a number of journalists and back-office facilities. By 2014 the trust was able to sell the flourishing Auto Trader and create an endowment of around $1.3 billion to help secure the future of The Guardian . In 2019–2020 The Guardian and The Observer (by now jointly accounted for) lost around $39 million—covered by a cautious drawdown from the endowment. The company recently announced a £16 million ($22 million) “cash outflow” for 2020–2021.

Twenty-five years into the digital whirlwind it is obvious that ruthless and indiscriminate cutting back on editorial costs combined with the merging of more and more titles into ever larger asset-stripping vehicles is seldom a recipe for editorial or commercial success. Any news business that does not place journalism at its heart cannot expect to flourish.

The Guardian has chosen to remain accessible by all while attracting both subscriptions and voluntary support. In 2017 the trust also announced the creation of theguardian.org, a US-based nonprofit with tax-exempt status to attract philanthropic giving in support of public interest journalism, including projects on climate change, guns, and health inequality. In 2012 it had come up with the idea of some form of membership to The Guardian , in the hope that readers would support “their” paper as a public good (“I pay so that everyone can read it”) rather than a private one (“I pay so that I can read it”). The company recently announced that readers contributed £69 million ($95.7 million) in subscriptions and donations in 2020–2021—a growth of 61 percent. The Australian edition, launched in 2013, is now profitable and, with reader donations, employs more than seventy journalists.

The paper was simultaneously investing heavily in investigative journalism. The Wikileaks releases about secret US Defense Department documents and diplomatic cables relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan caught international attention. The five-year investigation into phone-hacking at News Corps led to the closure of the News of the World , the jailing of its editor, and the subsequent government inquiry into press ethics. There followed influential series on corporate and individual tax avoidance, torture and rendition by Western intelligence agencies, modern slavery around the world, and toxic dumping by Western companies in African countries. A long investigation into undercover surveillance, involving police officers who formed relationships with activists, including members of environmental and black justice groups, sometimes even fathering children with them, has led to another public inquiry. The Snowden revelations again catapulted The Guardian to international notice in 2013.

That reporting—challenging, expensive, legally fraught, and unpredictable as it was—turned out to be a kind of business model, attracting readers who might think, “If that’s the kind of journalism you produce, I’ll support it.”

Of course, The Guardian will never be universally admired. Paul Dacre, the former editor of The Daily Mail , a large-circulation conservative tabloid, denounced in a 2007 lecture what he termed the “subsidariat”—he included The Times , the BBC , The Independent , and The Guardian —for being unable to connect with enough readers to be commercially viable in the way tabloids do. He found this both morally and editorially reprehensible. A self-appointed elite, he argued, was able “to impose minority values on the great majority.”

But the criticisms come as often from the left. Capitalism’s Conscience , a collection of essays published to coincide with The Guardian ’s bicentenary, contests the notion that—in the words of the book’s editor, Des Freedman of Goldsmiths College, University of London—“the Guardian has ever been a reliable ally for the left.” In his introductory essay, Freedman deplores the tendency (by Guardian staff, he says, as well as its chroniclers) to “fetishize” the actions of the founder, John Edward Taylor, as those of a brave truthteller:

It is an uncomfortable reality for the Guardian that the capital required for its start-up came largely from an industry whose own wealth was intimately bound up with the profits accrued from the slave trade, and the prospectus clearly illustrates that the title was designed to be the house organ of cotton interests.

Gary Younge, until recently a prominent columnist on the paper, writes in the collection that The Guardian can never live up to the left’s expectations:

The Guardian is perceived as a left-wing paper in relation to what else is on offer. People on the left, therefore, expect more from it—more from it than it has ever given and more than it probably would ever give. But because it’s the one place where people on the left feel that they may see themselves or their worldview, then it disappoints more keenly precisely because they expect more from it.

Very similar things were written about the paper in the 1820s.

The most recent disappointment for those on the left was the paper’s failure—as they saw it—to wholeheartedly embrace Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. Younge writes:

The issue I raised internally, repeatedly, was not that we should support Corbyn—newspapers should not act as adjuncts to political parties—but that we should be more curious about what he represented and why. It wasn’t our job to predict the outcome but it was necessary to describe and interpret what we saw.

Capitalism’s Conscience does acknowledge remarkably positive and progressive aspects of The Guardian ’s more recent history, including in-depth coverage of the developing world, a better-than-some track record on diversity, a commitment to investigative reporting, and a balanced approach to Brexit. The Guardian ’s women’s page, started in 1957, became “an important site of consciousness raising for what was then unfolding in the UK to become the Women’s Liberation Movement,” according to an essay by Hannah Hamad. On the other hand, Mareile Pfannebecker and Jilly Boyce Kay criticize the paper’s “centrist feminism,” which is, they say, pitted against trans rights.

So the paper can disappoint the left and anger the right. To my understanding of its “heretofore,” some of the criticism stems from some confusion about its origins. The point of Taylor’s response to Peterloo was not that he should have backed all the demands of the Radicals. He simply believed no progress was possible without an agreed-upon version of the facts.

Maybe, after recent years of increasingly not knowing whom or what to believe, we can look back at that modest two-hundred-year-old aspiration with a degree of gratitude. No one now buys a newspaper to make long-term profits. Maybe the Taylor-Scott vision of news as public service could return to fashion.

May 27, 2021

Ending the Kennedy Romance

Russian Metamorphoses

A Snob’s Progress

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Alan Rusbridger is the Principal of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and Chair of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. For twenty years he was Editor in Chief of The Guardian . He sits on the Facebook Oversight Board. His most recent book is News and How to Use It . (May 2021)

The Manchester Guardian: A Century of History (London: Chatto and Windus, 1921).  ↩

Michael Dennis McKeown, The Principles and Politics of “The Manchester Guardian” Under C.P. Scott to 1914 , Ph.D. dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 1972.  ↩

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Book Reviews

The Historian  is the publication for general members of the HA. One of its regular features is book reviews. The reviews cover everything from the popular new history books to some of the more obscure, specialist books that make you proud that publishers still value history books. Find out what is hot on the history shelves here.

J.L. Petit: Britain’s Lost Pre-Impressionist

J.L. Petit: Britain’s Lost Pre-Impressionist, Philip Modiano, RPS Publications, 122p. 2022, £20. ISBN 978-1-9164931-2-4.  Philip Modiano’s championing of prolific Victorian water-colourist and pioneering campaigner for the preservation of ancient buildings, Reverend John Louis Petit [1801-1868], continues to raise the profile of this neglected Staffordshire artist. His new book follows on...

Greek Secrets Revealed: Hidden Scottish History Uncovered Book 1 – Edinburgh

Greek Secrets Revealed: Hidden Scottish History Uncovered Book 1 – Edinburgh, Ian McHaffie, self-published, 2022, 200p, £12-00 [including p+p]. ISBN 978-0-9546681-7-4. Copies can be ordered via [email protected] Professor W. G. Hoskins once commented that one of the principal joys of local history was its inter-disciplinary nature. He could see how...

Working-class Lives in Edwardian Harrogate

Working-class Lives in Edwardian Harrogate, Paul Jennings, Palatine Books, 2022, 264p, £14.99. ISBN 978-1-910837-37-5. Instinctively most people would identify Harrogate in modern times as a rather well-built and prosperous tourist centre. Of course, it is more than that because the real impetus to its history was its emergence as a...

Cemeteries and Graveyards

Cemeteries and Graveyards, Celia Heritage, Pen and Sword, 2022, 236p, £15.99. ISBN 978 1 52670 237 1. This is a most thorough and engaging book. Its focus is specifically the widest context of burials in England and Wales. As a handbook to be used by anyone wanting to understand burial...

Tracing Your Family History with the Whole Family

Tracing Your Family History with the Whole Family: A Family Research Adventure for All Ages, Robin C. McConnell, Pen and Sword, 2022, 151p, £14.99. ISBN 9781399013888. This is a very well-intentioned book, based on the exceptionally strong idea of inter-generational collaboration. Robin McConnell is very persuasive in his proposition that...

The Great Passion

The Great Passion, James Runcie, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022, 260p, £16.99. ISBN 978-1-4088-8551-2. One of my academic mentors, Professor Alan Everitt, believed that novels set in carefully researched setting could be a very reliable contemporary source for historians. My experience confirms his judgement: Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat...

S.E.19: My London Life, 1937-63

S.E.19: My London Life, 1937-63, Roger Ward, Over Bite Press, 2022, 222p, £10-00. ISBN 978-1-9­­15292-39-1. This is a deeply personal book, written by Professor Roger Ward to describe and explain his early life in Upper Norwood for his children. It is reminiscent of Roy Hattersley’s A Yorkshire Boyhood [1983] and...

Clarke, Petit and St Mark’s: A 19th Century journey on the Isle of Man

Clarke, Petit and St Mark’s: A 19th Century journey on the Isle of Man, Philip Modiano, RPS Publications, 2022, 44p., £9.00 [plus postage]. ISBN 9781916493117. Contact via [email protected] In this extraordinary booklet Philip Modiano explains the architectural and personal relationship built up between the notable water-colourist, the Revd John Louis Petit,...

London’s Railway Stations

London’s Railway Stations, Oliver Green, Shire Publications, 2022, 64p, £9.99. ISBN 978 1 78442 505 0  Genuinely authentic Londoners will be familiar with all thirteen of its railway terminuses and this book, by a recognised expert on London’s railway provision, provides an excellent introduction to the topic which will now...

The Grand Tour

The Grand Tour, Mike Rendell, Shire Publications, 2022, 64p, £8-99. ISBN 978-1-78402-695-4.  ‘The Grand Tour’ became a major rite of passage for many young aristocrats and was at its peak in the mid-18th century, when Europe experienced a rare three decades of relative peace. It was inspired by Catholic priest and...

Ten Cities that Led the World: From Ancient Metropolis to Modern Megacity

Ten Cities that Led the World: From Ancient Metropolis to Modern Megacity, Paul Strathern, Hodder and Stoughton, 2022, 260p, £25-00. ISBN 978-1-529-35934-2. This book has such a level of coherence and insight that it will be read in a single session. Any book that manages to encompass the notion of...

Uncommon Courage: The Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II

Uncommon Courage: The Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II, Julia Jones, Adlard Coles, 2022, 310p, £20-00. ISBN 978-1-4729-87105 Historians are frequently obsessed with defining what constitutes a primary source, a source which will be guaranteed to yield reliable data. What Julia Jones has done is to produce a book which...

Victorian Stained Glass

Victorian Stained Glass, Trevor Yorke, Shire Publications, 20222, 64p, £8-99. ISBN 978-1-78442-483-1 This is an extraordinarily helpful introduction to the art and manufacture of stained glass. Its extra attraction is that it offers much more than the title suggests. Trevor Yorke provides a very succinct but clear explanation of the...

Wingfield: Suffolk’s Forgotten Castle

Wingfield: Suffolk’s Forgotten Castle, Elaine Murphy, Poppyland Publishing, 2021, 396pp., £19.95. ISBN 978-1-909796-88-1.  Grade 1 listed Wingfield Manor, ancestral home of the Wingfield family was inherited by Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, in 1385, less than four weeks after his marriage to Katherine Wingfield, sole heir of her...

How Norwich Fought Against the Plague: Lessons from the Past

How Norwich Fought Against the Plague: Lessons from the Past, Frank Meeres, Poppyland Publishing, 2021, 138p, £9.95. ISBN 9781909796898 The importance of this book has already been acknowledged at a regional level by having been awarded the 2021 East Anglia Book Award for History and Tradition. What Frank Meeres has...

Europe’s 100 Best Cathedrals

Europe’s 100 Best Cathedrals, Simon Jenkins, Penguin Books Ltd, 2021, 360pp., £30, ISBN: 978-0-241452-63-9. Ever leafed through one of the visitor books found in many of our churches and read the comments? ‘Very peaceful’, ‘Lovely’, ‘Beautiful’, and similar well-meaning but bland observations are typical. Coming up with something more meaningful isn’t...

The Historic Sporting Landscape

The Historic Sporting Landscape, Trevor James, Lichfield Press, 2021, 114p, £10-00. ISBN 978-0-905985 978  Having in a recent book effectively surveyed England’s saintly landscape, Trevor James has now turned his attention to the rather less saintly sporting landscape. He believes implicitly that England has been and is ‘the most enthusiastically...

Beleaguered and Besieged: A Year in a Place of Rocks

Beleaguered and Besieged: A Year in a Place of Rocks, Hugh Gault, Gretton Books, 2021, 124p, £10-00. ISBN 978-1-999851-9-5 Long-standing contributor to The Historian Hugh Gault has developed a novel approach to the study of the siege of Mafeking. The novelty occurs in two forms. He has created a diary...

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain

The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain, Tristram Hunt, Allen Lane, 2021, 323pp., £25. ISBN 978-0-24128-789-7.  As MP for Stoke-on-Trent, Tristram Hunt was prominent in the 2014 fight to save the Wedgwood Museum at Barlaston and prevent its contents going to auction. As director of the Victoria...

Welfare in Widecombe 1700-1900: An illustrated journey through local archives

Welfare in Widecombe 1700-1900: An illustrated journey through local archives, Roger Claxton, Widecombe History Group, 2019, 194p, £17-00 [plus postage and packing], ISBN 978-1-9162849-0-6. More details from www.widecombe-in-the-moor.com/welfare/ Meticulous research has enabled Roger Claxton to produce his Welfare in Widecombe 1700-1900, with its longer and highly significant title of an...

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Book Reviews

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Crater Lake Simon and Schuster hide caption

Rachel Kushner's new espionage thriller may be her coolest book yet

September 10, 2024 • In Creation Lake, a hard-drinking American spy infiltrates a radical farming collective in a remote region of France. Kushner challenges readers to keep up with her and not to flinch.

'We're Alone,' but together, in Edwidge Danticat's remarkable essays

September 9, 2024 • With clear, concise prose that delves into harsh topics without losing its sense of humor, Danticat once again proves that she is one of contemporary literature's strongest, most graceful voices.

'Colored Television' is an ungentle satire set in post-post-racial America

September 9, 2024 • Danzy Senna's new novel is an exhilarating yet poignant riff on the struggling artist as a wannabe middle-aged sellout. The writing is endlessly quotable and meaningfully provocative.

Everything is the worst in this 'Banal Nightmare'

September 8, 2024 • Novelist Halle Butler understands our worst enemy is sometimes our own brain. Her dark, chaotic novel manages to be often hilarious yet relentlessly uncheerful.

'I Just Keep Talking' is a refreshing and wide-ranging essay collection

September 5, 2024 • Scholar, historian, artist and raconteur Nell Irvin Painter is the author of The History of White People and Old in Art School. Her latest book is an insightful addition to her canon.

Gather 'round — we have some fall reading recommendations for you. Above, children listen to a story in Central Park on Oct. 23, 2017. Don Emmert/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Here are the new books we're looking forward to this fall

September 4, 2024 • Bad news: Summer's over. Good news: Fall books are here! We've got a list of 16 titles — fiction and nonfiction — you'll want to look out for.

This is genius: A new graphic novel imagines conversations between Einstein and Kafka

August 28, 2024 • Turns out Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka lived in Prague at the same time and had the same circle of friends. In a new graphic novel, Ken Krimstein puts us in the room with two 20th century geniuses.

'Interpretations of Love' is debut novel for 82-year-old author

August 24, 2024 • Two years ago, Cat Brushing, a collection of provocative stories about older women still very much in touch with the sensual side of life, put Jane Campbell on the map.

Paradise Bronx Macmillan Publishers hide caption

Frazier's 'Paradise Bronx' makes you want to linger in NYC's 'drive-through borough'

August 21, 2024 • Ian Frazier’s signature voice — droll, ruminative, generous — draws readers in. But his underlying subject here is even bigger than the Bronx: It’s the way the past “bleeds through” the present.

A Wilder Shore Penguin Random House hide caption

'A Wilder Shore' charts the course of a famous bohemian marriage

August 19, 2024 • Camille Peri's lively and substantive dual biography of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson offers a glimpse of their unconventional marriage — and an inspiration for living fearlessly.

Wendell Berry veers from gratitude to yearning in 'Another Day'

August 15, 2024 • In his sequel to 'This Day,' Berry’s themes, including bringing alive the joys and sorrows of hard-working rural Kentuckians. are revisited in ways both familiar and fresh.

Pop Culture Happy Hour

Three great fiction audiobooks.

August 8, 2024 • It's summer, and whether you're taking a trip – or simply staying out of the heat with the AC running – there's nothing like relaxing with a good audiobook. So in this encore episode, we are recommending three of our favorite fiction audiobooks.

Blindsided by 'The Most': This is a superb novel of a marriage at its breakpoint

July 30, 2024 • The story takes place in Newark, over the course of a single day in 1957, which we experience from the two spouses' alternating points of view. Jessica Anthony's novel deserves to become a classic.

Naval vessels participate in a Taiwanese military drill near the naval port in Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan on Jan. 27, 2016. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Year of Global Elections

These dictators are different. 'autocracy, inc.' explains how.

July 24, 2024 • The dictators of today aren't united by ideology, writes Anne Applebaum: They operate like companies, focused on preserving their wealth, repressing their people and maintaining power at all costs.

Someone Like Us Penguin Random House hide caption

'Someone Like Us' is a fresh, idiosyncratic novel about immigrating to the U.S.

July 24, 2024 • Dinaw Mengestu's ingenuity and eloquence as a writer are on display in this novel about an Ethiopian American man who returns home only to learn that his father has just died.

'Liars' is an autopsy of a bitterly disappointing marriage

July 22, 2024 • In her fierce second novel, Sarah Manguso writes a requiem for a failed relationship from the point of view of a survivor, the wife left behind.

Chef Mustapha Kachetel serves a couscous royal in the restaurant Le Fémina, in Noailles. Emilienne Malfatto for NPR hide caption

A new French cookbook explores Marseille as a cultural melting pot

July 20, 2024 • A new cookbook celebrates Marseille, France's second-largest city.

A new French cookbook shows the diversity Marseille through its cuisine

8 hot new love stories from a stellar lineup of Black authors

July 19, 2024 • Some of the most fabulous romances by Black authors still fly under the radar. So we have recommendations for your summer reading enjoyment.

'This Great Hemisphere' tackles racism, classism, and political power struggles

July 18, 2024 • Mateo Askaripour's sophomore novel is a sprawling speculative-fiction narrative that delivers a heartwarming story about a young woman learning to navigate the world.

This absorbing debut novel about writing takes its cue from 'Mrs. Dalloway'

July 16, 2024 • Rosalind Brown's debut novel, Practice , centers on an undergraduate student trying to write an essay on Shakespeare. Along the way, we are treated to the fleeting insights of the the brain at work.

It's Been a Minute

Simmering over summer books.

July 15, 2024 • We're at the peak of summer, which means sunny days on the grass with a good book! Bestselling authors Tia Williams and Jean Chen Ho join host Brittany Luse to give their recommendations for great summer reads. They also offer some armchair theories on why we love a gossipy summer novel.

'State of Paradise' effortlessly blends the commonplace and the extraordinary

July 10, 2024 • With exquisite prose, smart lines on every page, a building sense of growing strangeness tinged with dread, and surprises all the way to the end, this might be Laura van den Berg's best novel so far.

Jonathan Todd/Graphix hide caption

In 'Timid,' there is bravery under the surface

June 29, 2024 • Many assume that timidity -- or its close cousin, shyness -- is solely a negative trait. But longtime cartoonist Jonathan Todd shows this is not always the case in this semi-autobiographical tale.

Catapult hide caption

'The Liquid Eye of a Moon' is a Nigerian coming-of-age story

June 26, 2024 • In Uchenna Awoke’s debut novel, we come to understand that 15-year-old Dimkpa’s choices are painfully constricted by the caste system into which he was born.

Holiday Gift Guide

The Ten Best History Books of 2020

Our favorite titles of the year resurrect forgotten histories and help explain how the country got to where it is today

Meilan Solly

Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

In a year marked by a devastating pandemic, a vitriolic presidential race and an ongoing reckoning with systemic racism in the United States, these ten titles served a dual purpose. Some offered a respite from reality, transporting readers to such varied locales as Tudor England, colonial America and ancient Jerusalem; others reflected on the fraught nature of the current moment, detailing how the nation’s past informs its present and future. From an irreverent biography of George Washington to a sweeping overview of 20th-century American immigration , these were some of our favorite history books of 2020.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

In this “ Oprah’s Book Club” pick , Isabel Wilkerson presents a compelling argument for shifting the language used to describe how black Americans are treated by their country. As the Pulitzer Prize–winning author tells NPR , “racism” is an insufficient term for the country’s ingrained inequality. A more accurate characterization is “ caste system ”—a phrase that better encapsulates the hierarchical nature of American society. 

Drawing parallels between the United States, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson identifies the “ eight pillars ” that uphold caste systems: Among others, the list includes divine will, heredity, dehumanization, terror-derived enforcement and occupational hierarchies. Dividing people into categories ensures that those in the middle rung have an “inferior” group to compare themselves to, the author writes, and maintains a status quo with tangible ramifications for public health, culture and politics. “The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson explains. “It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”

The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster that Launched the War on Cancer

When the Nazis bombed Bari, a Mediterranean port city central to the Allied war effort, on December 2, 1943, hundreds of sailors sustained horrific injuries. Within days of the attack, writes Jennet Conant in The Great Secret , the wounded started exhibiting unexpected symptoms , including blisters “as big as balloons and heavy with fluid,” in the words of British nurse Gwladys Rees, and intense eye pain. “We began to realize that most of our patients had been contaminated by something beyond all imagination,” Rees later recalled.

American medical officer Stewart Francis Alexander, who’d been called in to investigate the mysterious maladies, soon realized that the sailors had been exposed to mustard gas. Allied leaders were quick to place the blame on the Germans, but Alexander found concrete evidence sourcing the contamination to an Allied shipment of mustard gas struck during the bombing. Though the military covered up its role in the disaster for decades, the attack had at least one positive outcome: While treating patients, Alexander learned that mustard gas rapidly destroyed victims’ blood cells and lymph nodes—a phenomenon with wide-ranging ramifications for cancer treatment. The first chemotherapy based on nitrogen mustard was approved in 1949, and several drugs based on Alexander’s research remain in use today.

Read an excerpt from The Great Secret that ran in the September 2020 issue of Smithsonian magazine .

Uncrowned Queen: The Life of Margaret Beaufort, Mother of the Tudors

Though she never officially held the title of queen, Margaret Beaufort , Countess of Richmond, fulfilled the role in all but name, orchestrating the Tudor family’s rise to power and overseeing the machinations of government upon her son Henry VII ’s ascension. In Uncrowned Queen , Nicola Tallis charts the complex web of operations behind Margaret’s unlikely victory, detailing her role in the Wars of the Roses —a dynastic clash between the Yorkist and Lancastrian branches of the royal Plantagenet family—and efforts to win Henry, then in exile as one of the last Lancastrian heirs, the throne. Ultimately, Margaret emerges as a more well-rounded figure, highly ambitious and determined but not, as she’s commonly characterized, to the point of being a power-hungry religious zealot. 

You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington

Accounts of George Washington’s life tend to lionize the Founding Father, depicting him as a “marble Adonis … rather than as a flawed, but still impressive, human being,” according to Karin Wulf of Smithsonian magazine . You Never Forget Your First adopts a different approach: As historian Alexis Coe told Wulf earlier this year, “I don’t feel a need to protect Washington; he doesn’t need me to come to his defense, and I don’t think he needed his past biographers to, either, but they’re so worried about him. I’m not worried about him. He’s everywhere. He’s just fine.” Treating the first president’s masculinity as a “foregone conclusion,” Coe explores lesser-known aspects of Washington’s life, from his interest in animal husbandry to his role as a father figure . Her pithy, 304-page biography also interrogates Washington’s status as a slaveholder, pointing out that his much-publicized efforts to pave the way for emancipation were “mostly legacy building,” not the result of strongly held convictions. 

Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife

Nine years after Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code popularized the theory that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, Harvard historian Karen L. King announced the discovery of a 1,600-year-old papyrus that seemingly supported the novel’s much-maligned premise. The 2012 find was an instant sensation, dividing scholars, the press and the public into camps of non-believers who dismissed it as a forgery and defenders who interpreted it as a refutation of longstanding ideals of Christian celibacy. For a time, the debate appeared to be at an impasse. Then, journalist Ariel Sabar —who’d previously reported on the fragment for Smithsonian —published a piece in the Atlantic that called the authenticity of King’s “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” into question. Shortly after, King publicly stated that the papyrus was probably a forgery .

Veritas presents the full story of Sabar’s seven-year investigation for the first time, drawing on more than 450 interviews, thousands of documents, and trips around the world to reveal the fascinating figures behind the forgery: an amateur Egyptologist–turned–pornographer and a scholar whose “ideological commitments” guided her practice of history. Ultimately, Sabar concludes, King viewed the papyrus “as a fiction that advanced a truth”: namely, that women and sexuality played a larger role in early Christianity than previously acknowledged.

The Other Madisons: The Lost History of a President's Black Family

Bettye Kearse ’s mother had long viewed her family’s ties to President James Madison as a point of pride. “Always remember—you’re a Madison,” she told her daughter. “You come from African slaves and a president.” (According to family tradition, as passed down by generations of griot oral historians, Madison raped his enslaved half-sister, Coreen, who gave birth to a son—Kearse’s great-great-great-grandfather—around 1792.) Kearse, however, was unable to separate her DNA from the “humiliation, uncertainty, and physical and emotional harm” experienced by her enslaved ancestor. 

To come to terms with this violent past, the retired pediatrician spent 30 years investigating both her own family history and that of other enslaved and free African Americans whose voices have been silenced over the centuries. Though Kearse lacks conclusive DNA or documentary evidence proving her links to Madison, she hasn’t let this upend her sense of identity. “The problem is not DNA,” the author writes on her website . “... [T]he problem is the Constitution,” which “set the precedent for the exclusion of [enslaved individuals] from historical records.” 

The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West

While Union forces fought to end slavery in the American South, a smaller cadre of soldiers waged war in the West, battling pro-secessionist troops for control of the resource-rich Arizona and New Mexico Territories . The campaign essentially ended in late 1862, when the U.S. Army pushed Confederate forces back into Texas, but as Megan Kate Nelson writes in The Three-Cornered War , another battle—this time, between the United States and the region’s Apache and Navajo communities—was just beginning. Told through the lens of nine key players, including Apache leader Mangas Coloradas, Texas legislator John R. Baylor and Navajo weaver Juanita, Nelson’s account underscores the brutal nature of westward expansion, from the U.S. Army’s scorched-earth strategy to its unsavory treatment of defeated soldiers . Per Publishers Weekly , Nelson deftly argues that the United States’ priorities were twofold, including “both the emancipation of [slavery] and the elimination of indigenous tribes.” 

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965

In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act , a eugenics-inspired measure that drastically limited immigration into the U.S. Controversial from its inception, the law favored immigrants from northern and Western Europe while essentially cutting off all immigration from Asia. Decisive legislation reversing the act only arrived in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson (no relation), capitalizing on a brief moment of national unity sparked by predecessor John F. Kennedy’s assassination, signed the Hart-Celler Act —a measure that eliminated quotas and prioritized family unification—into law. 

Jia Lynn Yang ’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide artfully examines the impact of decades of xenophobic policy, spotlighting the politicians who celebrated America’s status as a nation of immigrants and fought for a more open and inclusive immigration policy. As Yang, a deputy national editor at the New York Times , told Smithsonian ’s Anna Diamond earlier this year, “The really interesting political turn in the '50s is to bring immigrants into this idea of American nationalism. It’s not that immigrants make America less special. It’s that immigrants are what make America special.”

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X

When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Les Payne died of a heart attack in 2018, his daughter, Tamara, stepped in to complete his unfinished biography of civil rights leader Malcolm X. Upon its release two years later, the 500-page tome garnered an array of accolades, including a spot on the 2020 National Book Awards shortlist. Based on 28 years of research, including hundreds of interviews with Malcolm’s friends, family acquaintances, allies and enemies, The Dead Are Arising reflects the elder Payne’s dedication to tirelessly teasing out the truth behind what he described as the much-mythologized figure’s journey “from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.” The result, writes Publishers Weekly in its review, is a “richly detailed account” that paints “an extraordinary and essential portrait of the man behind the icon.”

The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom

In this dual biography, H.W. Brands seeks to address an age-old question : “What does a good man do when his country commits a great evil?” Drawing on two prominent figures in Civil War history as case studies, the historian outlines differing approaches to the abolition of slavery, juxtaposing John Brown’s “violent extremism” with Abraham Lincoln’s “coolheaded incrementalism,” as Alexis Coe writes in the Washington Post ’s review of The Zealot and the Emancipator . Ultimately, Brands tells NPR , lasting change requires both “the conscience of people like John Brown” (ideally with an understanding that one can take these convictions too far) and “the pragmatism and the steady hand of the politician—the pragmatists like Lincoln.”

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Latest books from Reviews in History

May 23, 2020 | Features & Articles , Publications , Reviews in History

The IHR’s Reviews in History publishes weekly commentaries on new books. Our reviews are longer than those in many academic journals and focus on titles published in the last 6-12 months. Many reviews also include responses from the book’s author.

Reviews in History began in 1996 and now includes reviews on over 2400 books, searchable by theme. We’ve also recently introduced a new angle to the service : inviting short notes from readers on a recent book, article or essay that’s impressed and which you recommend to others.

Below you’ll find a selection of the most recent Reviews in History, published over the past couple of months. Titles range from medieval marriage to early modern medicine and the modern media, published by — among others — OUP, Yale, Penguin, North Carolina, University of London Press, Princeton and Boydell & Brewer.

New reviews are posted each Friday and are sent by email: signing up for next week’s is easy.

Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies: Wealth, Power, and Slavery / P. J. Marshall

Natalie Zacek’s review challenges aspects of an illuminating study of Burke’s place in the politics of Britain and its West Indian colonies in the 18th century. P.J. Marshall responds

That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 / Hannah Barker

Janel Fontaine explores “a case study of great importance”, on late medieval slave trading practices in the Mediterranean.

On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore / Eric L. Goldstein, Deborah R. Weiner

Toni Pitock explores a history of the Jewish community in Baltimore, a ‘middle ground’ of contradictions and ambiguities. 

The Family Firm: Monarchy, Mass Media and the British Public, 1932-53 / Edward Owens

Arianne Chernock reviews this perceptive analysis of the way the monarchy harnessed mass media to forge stronger ties with the British public from 1932 to 1953. 

The Decline of Magic: Britain in the Enlightenment / Michael Hunter

Jan Machielsen reviews Hunter’s work, which questions the received wisdom that science displaced magic in Enlightenment Britain. Michael Hunter responds. 

Married Life in the Middle Ages 900-1300 / Elisabeth van Houts

Amy Livingstone reviews this important study, “rich in novel ideas” about the roles of women, the clergy, and emotions in medieval marriage. 

India and the Cold War / ed. Manu Bhagavan

Marc A. Reyes enjoys this work on India’s pivotal role in the Cold War, appreciating its challenge to established arguments and its broad view of an understudied area.

Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London / Lena Liapi

Jonah Miller reviews a compelling and challenging look at what pamphlets on the early modern rogue were really about. 

Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America / Matthew Fox-Amato

Earnestine Jenkins reviews a well-researched, significant contribution to visual studies and the relationship between race, representation, and photography.

Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War / Tim Bouverie

Adam Timmins reviews a highly-readable account of the appeasement policy, and questions whether it uncovers new views of this well-tilled ground. 

Studio Lives: Architect, Art and Artist in 20th-Century Britain / Louise Campbell

Lynne Walker reviews Campbell’s beautifully illustrated, fresh perspective on life inside the modernist British studio, and the work which emerged from it.

Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th-Century Britain / Kevin Siena

Michelle Webb reviews this look at how the memory of the plague held the poor responsible for epidemic disease in 18th-century Britain.

The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment / Ethan H. Shagan

David Manning reviews this “erudite, intellectually electrifying” look at how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being.

If you could recommend one recent History book to others, what would it be – and why? We’re looking to start something new at the IHR: inviting you to submit short pieces on a book or article that’s really impressed you — and which others should know about. Find out more

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari review – rage against the machine

The author of the bestselling Sapiens offers a penetrating critique of the insidious dangers of machine learning and its capacity to manipulate the truth

W hat jumps to mind when you think about the impending AI apocalypse? If you’re partial to sci-fi movie cliches, you may envisage killer robots (with or without thick Austrian accents) rising up to terminate their hubristic creators. Or perhaps, a la The Matrix , you’ll go for scary machines sucking energy out of our bodies as they distract us with a simulated reality.

For Yuval Noah Harari , who has spent a lot of time worrying about AI over the past decade, the threat is less fantastical and more insidious. “In order to manipulate humans, there is no need to physically hook brains to computers,” he writes in his engrossing new book Nexus . “For thousands of years prophets, poets and politicians have used language to manipulate and reshape society. Now computers are learning how to do it. And they won’t need to send killer robots to shoot us. They could manipulate human beings to pull the trigger.”

Language – and the human ability to spin it into vast, globe-encircling yarns – is fundamental to how the Israeli historian, now on his fourth popular science book, understands our species and its vulnerabilities. In his 2014 mega-hit Sapiens ( originally published in Hebrew in 2011), he argued that humans became dominant because they learned to cooperate in large numbers, thanks to a newfound aptitude for telling stories. That aptitude, which enabled our ancestors to believe in completely imaginary things, lies at the root of our religions, economies and nations, all of which would dissolve if our narrative-spinning faculties were somehow switched off.

Sapiens has sold 25m copies to date – a testament to Harari’s own storytelling prowess – though it’s had its share of detractors. Academics questioned its accuracy and the idea of cramming 70,000 years of human history into 450 pages. Sitcoms poked fun at Harari superfans who wave the book around like a modern-day bible. The appeal of Sapiens lies in its dizzying scope but, as a 2020 New Yorker profile pointed out, Harari’s zoomed-out approach can have the effect of minimising the importance of current affairs.

Nexus could be seen as a rebuke to that criticism. Though it executes its own breakneck dash through the millennia, hopping back and forth in time and between continents, it is very much concerned about what’s happening today.

If stories were fundamental to the schema of Sapiens , here it’s all about information networks, which Harari views as the basic structures undergirding our societies. “Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans,” he writes, and the “glue” that holds these networks of cooperation together is information, which “many philosophers and biologists” see as “the most basic building block of reality”.

But information doesn’t reliably tell the truth about the world. More often, Harari emphasises, it gives rise to fictions, fantasies and mass delusions, which lead to such catastrophic developments as nazism and Stalinism. Why is Homo sapiens , for all its evolutionary successes, so perennially self-destructive? “The fault,” according to Harari, “isn’t with our nature but with our information networks.”

Casting his eye over how information has led us astray in the past, Harari has no shortage of examples to draw on. One of the more gorily memorable is Malleus Maleficarum , written by the Dominican friar Heinrich Kramer in 1480s Austria. A guide to exposing and murdering witches in deliriously horrible ways, the book wouldn’t have travelled far had the printing press not been invented a few decades earlier, allowing Kramer’s deranged ideas to spread across Europe, stoking a witch-hunting frenzy.

Harari’s basic point is that information revolutions can give rise to periods of human flourishing but always come at a cost. When we invent shiny new technologies that carry words and ideas farther and faster than ever before, much of the information that spews out is dross or actively dangerous. It’s not helped by the fact that, when it comes to maintaining social order, fictions tend to be more reliable binding agents than truths.

What’s scary about the AI revolution isn’t just that we’ll be overwhelmed with misinformation from chatbots, or that the powers that be will use it to crunch data on our private lives. Unlike previous technologies such as books and radios, writes Harari: “AI is the first tool that is capable of making decisions and generating ideas by itself.” We saw an early warning of this in Myanmar in 2016-17, when Facebook algorithms, tasked with maximising user engagement, responded by promoting hateful anti-Rohingya propaganda that fuelled mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

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Harari makes a strong case for why we should regard such algorithms as autonomous agents and how, if we’re not careful, humans could become tools for AI to manipulate with ever more terrible force. Unless we take immediate action, this burgeoning “alien intelligence”, as he prefers to call it, could trigger catastrophes we can’t even imagine, up to and including the destruction of human civilisation.

This pessimistic take on AI is nothing new: “doomers” such as Eliezer Yudkowsky have been warning of its apocalyptic potential for years and even the AI industry has started voicing concerns . What Harari seeks to add to the debate is the long view. By applying his lens to previous information revolutions and showing how different forms of government have reacted to them, he believes we can prepare ourselves for the earthquakes to come.

Nexus has some curious blind spots; it’s odd, in a critique of a technology driven largely by profit-seeking corporations, that capitalism is hardly mentioned at all. But whether or not you agree with Harari’s historical framing of AI, it’s hard not to be impressed by the meticulous way he builds it up, speckling what could be a rather dry analysis with vivid examples, such as the story of Cher Ami, a first world war messenger pigeon, used here to tease out information’s fundamental slipperiness. As in previous books, he relies heavily on lists (“the two main challenges”, “the five basic principles”) and binaries (truth versus order, democracy versus dictatorship), but this serves to organise his thinking rather than dull the writing.

The solutions he proposes to restrict AI’s power range from the sensible (ban bots from impersonating humans) to the laughable (encourage artists and bureaucrats to “cooperate” to help the rest of us understand the computer network), but Nexus operates primarily as a diagnosis and a call to action, and on those terms it’s broadly successful. If it sells anywhere near as well as Sapiens did, we’ll be that bit better equipped as a species to deal with the rise of the machines.

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Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States Hardcover – August 22, 2017

• Print length 312 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; 1st edition (August 22, 2017)
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•   The best historical fiction books of 2024, and all time

The best historical fiction books of 2024, and all time

Historical fiction allows us to immerse ourselves in eras long past. here are our top picks for when you want to lose yourself with a cast of characters in another time and place..

The best historical novels are meticulously researched and wonderfully evocative of times gone by. Whether you’re looking for the sweeping historical romance of Winston Graham’s historical fiction series Poldark , or feminist retellings of ancient Greek myth like Natalie Haynes’ Stone Blind , there’s a historical fiction novel for everyone. Here, ancient history expert and historical fiction fan Dr Jean Menzies shares some of the very best historical novels of all time.

There’s a reason we’re drawn to the past. History is inescapable. Decisions are made on the back of past events, and lives are affected by the stories of those that came before us. Historical fiction books resonate with modern readers because they give us the chance to immerse ourselves in another time. Each of the historical fiction novels on this list tells the stories of different characters, from the plains of Ancient Greece, the dark middle ages, or the battlefields of WWI and WWII.

The best historical fiction of 2024

By kristin hannah.

Frankie McGrath, a nursing student in 1965 California, has her world transformed when she's told "women can be heroes, too." Joining the Army Nurses Corps to follow her brother to Vietnam, Frankie faces the harsh realities of war and its aftermath. Amidst chaos and heartbreak, she finds strength in female friendship and learns the value of sacrifice and commitment. This emotionally charged novel illuminates the often-forgotten stories of women who bravely served their country. With a memorable heroine, searing insights, and lyrical beauty, The Women is a poignant tale of courage guaranteed to move any book club.

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A complete guide to Kristin Hannah's books

Maude horton's glorious revenge, by lizzie pook.

When Constance Horton mysteriously disappears, her older sister Maude learns that she had disguised herself as a boy and boarded a ship to the Arctic, never to return. The Admiralty calls it a tragic accident, but Maude suspects foul play. Discovering Constance’s journal, Maude uncovers evidence of a sinister cover-up. Determined to find the truth and seek justice for her sister, Maude plunges into London’s dark underbelly, facing powerful and dangerous men who thrive on the city’s horrors. Adventurous and beautifully written, Maude Horton's Glorious Revenge is a twisty and addictive historical thriller.

The King's Witches

By kate foster.

If you enjoy historical fiction with a touch of scandal, The King’s Witches is for you. Set in sixteenth-century Scotland, this beautifully written novel follows the intertwined lives of three women during the witch trials. Princess Anna of Denmark, betrothed to King James VI of Scotland, must prove herself worthy as the new queen. By her side is Kirsten Sorenson, her pious lady-in-waiting with secret desires. Meanwhile, young housemaid Jura, known for her healing charms, flees to Edinburgh, only to be caught in the witchcraft hysteria gripping the capital. Based on true events, this novel gives voice to the women whose lives were impacted by the Scottish witch trials.

The Burial Plot

By elizabeth macneal.

Alone in London, when Bonnie meets charismatic Crawford she falls head-over-heels for him and is soon helping him grift his way through the city. But, when Crawford shares his latest plot, that Bonnie will take on a job as the maid to the eccentric Moncrieff family, she starts to wonder if her lover isn’t the knight in shining armour she’d thought him to be. Set in the heart of Victorian London’s seedy underbelly, The Burial Plot is the chilling new historical thriller from Elizabeth Macneal, bestselling author of The Doll Factory .

Long Island

By colm tóibín.

What actually happened when Eilis returned to New York?  Long Island  is the long-awaited sequel to Colm Tóibín's prize-winning, bestselling novel  Brooklyn . Eilis and Tony have built a secure, happy life; twenty years married and with two children looking towards a good future. But then a man with an Irish accent knocks on their door, and everything changes. Did Eilis make the wrong choice marrying Tony all those years ago? Is it too late now to take a different path? 

The World and All That It Holds

By aleksandar hemon.

Rafael Pinto's life hasn't quite turned out as he expected. But he is, on the whole, happy. He spends his time crushing herbs at a pharmacy, a far cry from his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna. And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for is the attentions of fellow soldier, Osman. Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. As they travel all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto’s love for Osman that will truly survive.

by Kate Morton

A gripping mystery set between Australia and London, Homecoming , is the much-anticipated new novel by Kate Morton. When 89-year-old Nora's health takes an unexpected turn for the worse, Jess boards the first plane out of London, her home of twenty years, to be by her grandmother's bedside in Sydney. Soon, she discovers that the usually stoic Nora has been hiding a family secret and vows to get to the heart of the mystery of what happened on a fateful Christmas Eve sixty years before. 

Discover more books my Kate Morton

By james hynes.

Set against the backdrop of the crumbling Roman Empire, we meet Sparrow, a young boy with no known origin. His world is confined to the kitchen, a loud and dangerous tavern, and the upstairs where the women who raise him work. Life is harsh, and freedom is a distant dream. As the only family he's ever known scatters, Sparrow faces a transformative journey where he must decide whether to succumb to his fate or rise above it. This is a book with one of the most powerfully affecting and memorable characters of recent fiction, brought to life through James Hynes's meticulous research and bold imagination.

by Percival Everett

In Percival Everett's latest novel, he lays out a precise and painful depiction of the Antebellum South. The novel is told from the perspective of James (formerly ‘Jim’), the affable companion of Huckleberry Finn in Mark Twain’s eponymous novel. Crucially in Everett’s re-telling, James is resurrected from the graveyard of racist archetypes (in this case, the docile, obedient, noble slave who values his master’s life over his own), and is given multiple dimensions and a character arc of his own: when James embarks on a quest to secure his wife and daughter’s freedom, Huck tags along for the ride.

A guide to Percival Everett's books

The square of sevens, by laura shepherd-robinson.

Set in Georgian high-society, The Square of Sevens is a historical fiction novel packed with fortune-telling, travels and mystery. A girl known only as Red, the daughter of a Cornish fortune-teller, travels with her father making a living predicting fortunes using the ancient method: the Square of Sevens. When her father suddenly dies, Red becomes the ward of a gentleman scholar. But soon, she can't ignore the burning questions about her family. The pursuit of these mysteries takes her across the country in an epic tale of intrigue, heartbreak and audacious twists. 

Other Women

By emma flint.

Emma Flint’s evocative historical novels transport you to another time and place. In her new book, Other Women , the destination is London, devastated by the impact of the Great War. For unmarried Beatrice Cade, the war has robbed her of the chance to find true love and have a family, just like it has for millions of others. One day a chance encounter changes her life, and she falls head over heels in love with someone she should never have met. An enthralling tale of obsession, murder and lives intertwined by forbidden love, Other Women is a novel that you won’t be able to put down. 

A Divine Fury

By d. v. bishop.

Cesare Aldo is back in A Divine Fury , the fourth novel in D. V. Bishop’s award-winning historical crime series set in Renaissance Italy. A killer is haunting Florence, and only one man can stop him. Back on patrol after being exiled, Aldo is forced to pay his dues on the night watch, guarding the streets inhabited by the city’s drunk and down-and-out. But, when in pursuit of a suspect he discovers a crime scene with a man mutilated to resemble a crucifixion, he knows he’s stumbled upon his biggest case yet. And, as more victims are found all over the city, Aldo realises that he’s chasing a serial killer the likes of which Florence has never seen. 

The best historical fiction of 2023

A thrilling historical murder tale and so much more besides, The Maiden is inspired by a real-life case from seventeenth-century Edinburgh. Lady Christina is newly married, wealthy and respected. A year later she is on trial for the murder of her lover, James Forrester, her story splashed across newspapers: Adulteress. Whore. Murderess. Why did she risk everything for an affair? And did it really end in murder? She certainly wasn't the only woman who might have wanted Forrester dead. . .

Stone Blind

By natalie haynes.

This retelling of the famed myth of Medusa asks who the real monsters are, after all. The sole mortal raised in a family of gods, Medusa is alone in her ability to experience change and to be hurt. Then, when the sea god Poseidon commits an unforgivable act in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can – and she is changed forever. Writhing snakes replace her hair, and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. Unable to control her new power, she is condemned to a life of shadows and darkness. Until Perseus embarks upon a quest . . .

A guide to Natalie Haynes' fiction & non-fiction books

The armour of light, by ken follett.

A spellbinding historical epic set in the early nineteenth century amidst the turbulence of the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, The Armour of Light follows the lives of three interconnected families as they navigate a world of rapid change and escalating conflict. In England, the struggle for workers' rights brings strife and hope to the lower classes, while in France, the war reshapes the destinies of both soldiers and civilians. Rich in historical detail and character-driven drama, The Armour of Light is the final book in Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series , illuminating an era of profound transformation and the indomitable spirit of those who lived through it.

Ken Follett's Kingsbridge novels in order

Once a monster, by robert dinsdale.

Twelve-year-old orphan Nell has always felt out of place in the grim streets of the city until her life takes an extraordinary turn when she discovers a hidden world beneath London – a realm inhabited by mythical creatures and ancient legends. There, Nell befriends an enigmatic and tormented figure known only as the Monster. As dark forces threaten both worlds, Nell and the Monster must navigate a perilous journey filled with magic, danger, and self-discovery. Robert Dinsdale brings Victorian London to life in this unusual blend of historical fiction with ancient myth.

The Dance Tree

By kiran millwood hargrave.

It's 1518 in Strasbourg, and in the intense summer heat a solitary woman starts to dance in the main square. She dances for days without rest, and is joined by hundreds of other women. The city authorities declare a state of emergency, and bring in musicians to play the devil out of the dancing women. Meanwhile pregnant Lisbet, who lives at the edge of the city, is tending to the family's bees. The dancing plague intensifies, as Lisbet is drawn into a net of secret passions and deceptions. Inspired by true events, this is a compelling story of superstition, transformative change and women pushed to their limits.

The House of Fortune

By jessie burton.

A glorious, sweeping story of fate and ambition, The House of Fortune is the sequel to Jessie Burton’s bestseller  The Miniaturist . Amsterdam, 1705. Thea Brandt is about to turn eighteen and she can't wait to become an adult. Walter, her true love, awaits Thea at the city's theatre. But at home on the Herengracht things are tense. Her father Otto and Aunt Nella bicker incessantly and are selling furniture so the family can eat. And, on her birthday, the day her mother Marin died, secrets from Thea's past threaten to eclipse the present. Nella is feeling a prickling sensation in her neck, which recalls the miniaturist who toyed with her life eighteen years ago.

A guide to Jessie Burton's books

The ghost ship, by kate mosse.

The third book in the Joubert Family Chronicles beging on the Barbary Coast in 1621. A mysterious vessel floats silently on the water. It is known only as the Ghost Ship. For months, its captain - Louise Reydon-Joubert - and her courageous crew has hunted pirates to liberate those enslaved during the course of their merciless raids. But now the Ghost Ship is under attack – its hull splintered, its sails tattered and burnt, and the crew at risk of capture. But the bravest among them are not who they seem.

Kate Mosse’s books in order

By hannah kent.

It's 1836 in Prussia, and teenage Hanne is finding the domestic world of womanhood increasingly oppressive. She longs to be out in nature, and finds little companionship with the local girls. Until, that is, she meets kindred spirit Thea. Hanne is from a family of Old Lutherans, whose worship is suppressed and secret. Safe passage to Australia offers liberty from these restrictions. But a long and harsh journey lies ahead, one which will put the girls' close bond to a terrible test.

Learned by Heart

By emma donoghue.

In 1805, at a boarding school in York, two fourteen-year-old girls cross paths. Eliza Raine, an orphan with an Indian heritage, feels isolated due to her differences. Anne Lister, a rebellious spirit, defies societal norms for women. Their love story blossoms, creating a profound bond that transcends time and shapes their lives forever. Learned By Heart is the heartbreaking story of the love of two women – Anne Lister, the real-life inspiration behind Gentleman Jack, and her first love, Eliza Raine – from the bestselling author of  Room  and  The Wonder.

A complete guide to Emma Donoghue's books

Moonlight and the pearler's daughter.

It's 1886, and the Brightwell family has just arrived at Bannin Bay in Western Australia after a long sea voyage from England. Ten-year-old Eliza has been promised bright pearls, shells like soup plates and good fortunes in a new land. Ten years later, and Eliza's father Charles Brightwell is the most successful pearler on the bay. When he goes missing from his boat at sea, rumours of mutiny and murder swirl across the bay. But Eliza refuses to believe that her father is dead and, in a town mired in corruption, she sets out to find the truth.

The Midwife

By tricia cresswell.

1838. A violent storm has hit the Northumberland coast, and a woman is found alone, naked and on the verge of death. She has no memory of how she got there, but she can speak fluent French, dress a wound and help women give birth. She starts to rebuild her life, helping those around her and finding a fragile happiness. Until tragedy strikes and she must go into hiding. Meanwhile in London, respectable Dr Borthwick assists mothers and babies in high society, and in the slums of Devil's Acre. The solitary doctor has a secret though, one which threatens to engulf him.

by André Dao

Anam takes us on a poignant journey from 1930s Hanoi to Saigon, Paris, Melbourne, and Cambridge, exploring memory, inheritance, colonialism, and belonging. The narrator, born into a Vietnamese family in Melbourne, grapples with his grandfather's haunting tale of imprisonment in Chi Hoa prison under the Communist government. Straddling his Australian upbringing and Vietnamese heritage, he faces the impact of his grandfather's death and the birth of his daughter on his own life's trajectory. André Dao artfully weaves fiction and essay, theory and personal experience, revealing forgotten aspects of history and family archives. 

Mrs Porter Calling

By aj pearce.

The third in A J Pearce's charming and uplifting World War Two series find Emmy Lake enjoying huge success at Woman’s Friend  magazine, where she is the much-loved agony aunt. But the arrival of a glamorous new owner puts this all at risk, as Mrs Porter's plans are slowly revealed and it becomes clear she will destroy everything readers love about the magazine.

The Librarian of Auschwitz: The Graphic Novel

By antonio iturbe.

Based on the life of Dita Kraus, a holocaust survivor , The Librarian of Auschwitz tells the story of the smallest library in the world – and the most dangerous. Imprisoned by the Nazis at Auschwitz aged fourteen along with her mother and father, Dita is asked to take charge of the eight precious books the prisoners have managed to smuggle past the guards. But in the children's block of Auschwitz, where the slightest transgression can result in execution, Dita must risk her life to keep the books alive. Out of one of the darkest chapters in human history, this graphic novel tells an extraordinary story of courage and hope. 

by Hernan Diaz

Everyone in 1920s New York knows of Benjamin and Helen Rask, the Wall Street tycoon and the daughter of bohemian aristocrats. They live in a sphere of untold wealth, but what is the true cost of their fortune? This mystery sits at the heart of Bonds , a bestselling 1938 novel that all of New York has read. But, like all stories, there are different perspectives, and Hernan Diaz puts these different narratives into conversation with each other, in a novel that tracks across a century and documents the truth-bending power of money, with provocative revelations at each turn. 

A Jewish Girl in Paris

By melanie levensohn.

Against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Paris in 1940, Judith, a young Jewish girl, falls in love with the son of a wealthy banker and Nazi sympathiser. As restrictions on Jews tighten, the couple plans to escape, but Judith mysteriously disappears before they have the chance. 1982, Montreal: Lica Grunberg confesses to his daughter, Jacobina, that she has an older half-sister, Judith. Determined by the encouragement of her friend Béatrice, Jacobina takes on the mission to uncover the truth. Delving into the past, they unearth a concealed family secret spanning continents and decades, forever altering the course of their lives.

The best historical fiction of all time

Dead man's walk, by larry mcmurtry.

The first book in the famed Lonesome Dove series from Larry McMurtry, Dead Man's Walk takes us into the heart of the American West. Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call first encounter the untamed frontier that will form their characters. The two young men experience their first great adventure in the barren, empty landscape of the great plains, in which arbitrary violence is the only law – whether from nature, or from those whose territory they must cross in order to reach New Mexico. Danger, sacrifice and fear test Gus and Call to the limits of endurance, as they seek the strength and courage to survive against almost insurmountable odds.

Les Misérables

By victor hugo.

A historical fiction classic, it took seventeen years for Hugo to write this epic novel set in impoverished 19th-century Paris. Made up of interrelated stories that follow his characters’ lives, Les Miserables explores how deprivation leads to crime, and ends with the Paris Uprising of 1832. Using big theatrical scenes, extremes of characters, and a fondness for ‘The Fallen Woman’, Hugo’s novel has a fairytale quality which delivers his message with a punch.

Blood Meridian

By cormac mccarthy.

Written in 1985, but set in the 1850s Blood Meridian explores the anarchic world opened up by America’s westward expansion. Through the hostile landscape of the Texas–Mexico border wanders the Kid, a fourteen year-old Tennessean who is quickly swept up in the relentless tide of blood. But the apparent chaos is not without its order: while Americans hunt Indians – collecting scalps as their bloody trophies – they too are stalked as prey. Powerful, mesmerizing and savagely beautiful, Blood Meridian is considered one of the most important works in American fiction of the last century.

A guide to the literary great: Cormac McCarthy

The miniaturist.

In 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman knocks at the door of a house in the wealthiest quarter of Amsterdam. She has come from the country to marry merchant trader Johannes Brandt, but instead she is met by his sharp-tongued sister, Marin. Only later does Johannes appear and present her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a cabinet-sized replica of their home. It is to be furnished by an elusive miniaturist, whose tiny creations mirror their real-life counterparts in unexpected ways. Does the miniaturist hold their fate in her hands? And will she be the key to their salvation or the architect of their downfall?

The Lamplighters

By emma stonex.

Inspired by true events, Emma Stonex’s debut historical novel is a riveting mystery which will grip the reader, and a beautifully written exploration of love and grief. In Cornwall in 1972, three keepers vanish from a remote lighthouse, miles from shore. The door is locked from the inside, and the clocks have stopped. Twenty years later, the women they left behind are still struggling to move on. And then a writer approaches them. He wants to give the women a chance to tell their side of the story. What happened to those men, and to the women they left behind?

The Land Beyond the Sea

By sharon penman.

Set in 1172 the Kingdom of Jerusalem is also known as Outremer – the land beyond the sea. When the men of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem from the Saracens in 1099, many crusaders stayed on and built a life in this new world of blazing heat, exotic customs and enemies who are also neighbours. But now Saladin, leader of the vast Saracen army, is seeking retribution for the massacre in 1099 In The Land Beyond the Sea, Penman expertly weaves a complicated tapestry to create a historical fiction saga of epic proportions. 

She Who Became the Sun

By shelley parker-chan.

An absorbing historical fantasy,  She Who Became the Sun  reimagines the rise to power of the Ming Dynasty’s founding emperor. In 1345, China lies restless under harsh Mongol rule. And when a bandit raid wipes out their home, two children must somehow survive. The boy despairs and gives in. But the girl resolves to overcome her destiny. So she takes her dead brother’s identity and begins her journey. Can she escape what’s written in the stars, as rebellion sweeps the land? Or can she claim her brother’s greatness – and rise as high as she can dream?

Kololo Hill

By neema shah.

Neema Shah’s debut is a heartbreaking historical fiction novel set in Uganda and Britain. Uganda, 1972. When a devastating decree is announced which says all Ugandan Asians must leave the country in ninety days, Asha and Pran and Pran’s mother Jaya must leave everything they’ve ever known for a new life in Britain. But as they try to rebuild their lives, a terrible secret hangs over them. Neema Shah’s extraordinarily moving novel explores what it means to leave your home behind, what it takes to start again, and the lengths some will go to protect their loved ones.

The Attic Child

By lola jaye.

It's 1907, and twelve-year-old Celestine is locked in the attic of a house by the sea. He has been forcibly removed from his home in Africa and is treated as a servant. He dreams of home and family, even as his mother's face, and his real name, begin to fade. Decades later a young orphan girl is banished to the same attic. Under the floorboards she finds mysterious artefacts, and on a wall there is a sentence etched in a language she does not recognise. What she does recognise though, is that she is not the first child to be held captive in the attic. This dual-narrative tale of love, loss and family secrets shines a light on the early Black British experience. 

The Pillars of the Earth

Welcome to medieval England, where a civil war ravages the country and a monk is on a mission. Ken’s The Pillars of the Earth follows Philip, a devoted monk, who joins forces with Tom, a talented builder, to undertake the most ambitious project either has ever set themselves to. In a world in turmoil, however, their journey will not be a smooth one. The first book in Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series, this historical saga is one to get lost in.

The Sin Eater

By megan campisi.

Set in a thinly disguised 16th century England, Megan Campisi’s debut novel is a wonderfully woven tale of treason and treachery, women and power. When fourteen year old May is arrested for stealing a loaf of bread she is sentenced to become a Sin Eater, a devastating sentence that will see her shunned by society and exiled to the edge of town. For a Sin Eater hears the confessions of the dying and eats their sins as a funeral rite, and is believed to be stained by these sins. When May is called to hear the deathbed confessions of two of the Queen’s courtiers she hears whispers of a terrible rumour her invisibility allows her to investigate. 

Ross Poldark

By winston graham.

Historical fiction is often the basis for some of the most acclaimed and popular period dramas, and Winston Graham’s Poldark series is no exception. In the first book Ross Poldark, the eponymous hero, returns home to Cornwall, tired from a grim war in America. But the joyful homecoming he has anticipated turns sour, for his father is dead, his estate is derelict and the girl he loves is engaged to his cousin. Then, his sympathy for the destitute miners and farmers leads him to rescue an urchin girl –  an act which alters the course of his life. 

The Water Dancer

By ta-nehisi coates.

This is the historical novel that Oprah Winfrey called, ‘One of the best books I have ever read in my entire life.’ Hiram Walker was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation, but one fateful decision will take him away from his plantation family and into the heart of the underground war on slavery. For Hiram is a man with a secret, a mysterious power he was gifted at birth. 

Dissolution

By c. j. sansom.

This is the first book to feature Matthew Shardlake , Sansom’s insightful Tudor lawyer. Set in 1537 as Henry VIII becomes Supreme Head of the Church and the bloody dissolution of the monasteries is beginning, Shardlake investigates the shocking murder of one of Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners. But Shardlake's investigation soon forces him to question everything he hears, and everything that he intrinsically believes. Dissolution  is the first book in this bestselling phenomenon, where C. J. Sansom creates both a stunning portrait of Tudor England, and an unforgettable character in Matthew Shardlake. 

The Underground Railroad

By colson whitehead.

Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and also a major TV series, The Underground Railroad is Colson Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North. At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, as his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. 

by Ian McEwan

One of the Guardian's 100 best books of the 21st century, Atonement is a formidable modern classic. On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her too is Robbie Turner who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever, as Briony commits a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone. 

Things Fall Apart

By chinua achebe.

First published in 1958, Chinua Achebe's stark, coolly ironic novel reshaped both African and world literature. Okonkwo is the greatest wrestler and warrior alive, and his fame spreads throughout West Africa like a bush-fire in the harmattan. But when he accidentally kills a clansman, things begin to fall apart. Then Okonkwo returns from exile to find missionaries and colonial governors have arrived in the village. With his world thrown radically off-balance he can only hurtle towards tragedy.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

By gabriel garcia marquez.

Originally written in Spanish, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves a mesmerizing tapestry of magical realism and generational storytelling. The novel is set in the fictional town of Macondo, where the Buendía family's triumphs and tribulations unfold across generations. As the Buendía family navigates love, war, and the passage of time, Márquez delves into the intricate web of human connections. With its vivid imagery and lyrical storytelling, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a timeless exploration of love, loss, and the inexorable march of time.

War and Peace

By leo tolstoy.

War and Peace traverses the tumultuous landscape of early 19th-century Russia, interweaving the lives of a diverse cast against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. The novel follows aristocratic families as they grapple with love, ambition, and existential questions during a time of immense societal upheaval. Pierre Bezukhov's quest for meaning, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky's search for purpose, and Natasha Rostova's journey of self-discovery are among the narrative threads that converge. The novel's canvas spans grand ballrooms, bloody battlefields, and intimate chambers, deftly blending historical events with profound philosophical musings. 

by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko is a captivating multigenerational saga set against the backdrop of 20th-century Korea and Japan. The novel centers on Sunja, who, after becoming pregnant by a wealthy man, becomes determined to forge her own path. The story delves into the lives of Sunja's descendants as they grapple with discrimination, ambition, and the complex ties that bind a family together. Pachinko is a deeply moving journey through generations, inviting readers to witness the enduring power of love, the pursuit of belonging, and the indomitable human spirit that thrives even in the face of adversity.

by Hilary Mantel

Set in 16th century England, Wolf Hall follows the rise of Thomas Cromwell, a shrewd and capable commoner, in the court of King Henry VIII. As Henry VIII seeks to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, Cromwell becomes instrumental in navigating the complex political and religious landscape of the time. The book delves into the intricate power struggles, religious conflicts, and personal ambitions of the characters and provides a fresh perspective on the events leading to the English Reformation and the establishment of the Church of England. A Booker-prize-winning novel, this is an essential read for all fans of historical fiction. 

Set in the 1950s, Brooklyn traces Eilis Lacey's journey from a small Irish town to Brooklyn, New York. Eilis grapples with homesickness but gradually forges a life in America, working and falling in love. Unexpectedly, a family crisis summons her back to Ireland, where she becomes torn between her two worlds. The book delves into Eilis's inner conflict as she navigates questions of identity and belonging. The novel is a poignant exploration of personal growth and cultural displacement, showcasing the complexities of choosing between two lives.

For even more historical fiction recommendations, don't miss this episode of Book Break:

Delve into our top picks of unforgettable long reads that you won't be able to put down.

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