Every month, hundreds of intriguing history books are published—far more than we have time and space to cover. So each month, we publish a list of books that have joined our TBR piles. We don’t include books that we are covering in reviews and interviews, so we can spread the love.
Below, we’ve noted a few books coming soon that caught our eye. What are you looking forward to reading in November?
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Judy Cox, Lady Insurrectionists: Women, Reform, and Revolution in Victorian Britain. Verso, November 3.
In a time when women are leading the way in American street protests and political reform movements, Lady Insurrectionists looks like a great read with a strong tie to current events. Cox’s attention to working class women and the power of their strikes, boycotts, petitions, and speeches is particularly welcome and promises to be inspiring at a critical time in our own history. —MKN
Brian Fairbanks, Life is a Cabaret: The Amazing Story of the Real Lives Who Inspired the Iconic Musical. Da Capo, November 3.
I was sold on this one from the moment I heard the premise: a group biography of the complicated people who inspired Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (including Isherwood himself), which in turn became the musical Cabaret. If you, like me, are in the center of the Venn diagram of musical theater geeks and history nerds, then right this way, your table’s waiting… —KBC
Carlos Alonso Nugent, Imagined Environments: The Making of the Borderlands. University of California Press, November 3.
I am a sucker for books about place-making, and the US-Mexico borderlands is one of the most important and resonant material and imagined environments in American life. Nugent takes an interdisciplinary approach (also my jam), so I can’t wait to see what he does with sources as wide-ranging as Apache pictographs, US and Mexican water infrastructure, and land use laws. —MKN
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James Gleick, The Telephone: A New History. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, November 10.
In this new history of a transformative but ubiquitous technology, award-winning writer James Gleick examines the changes wrought by the telephone, from introducing new words and new professions to altering our sense of distance and space. The writer in me is also eager to see how Gleick enlivens a subject that, in the wrong hands, could be as monotonous as a dial tone. —KBC
Harriet A. Washington, Renaissance Men: Agents of Medical and Cultural Modernity. Little Brown and Company, November 10.
One of Washington’s previous books was Medical Apartheid, a powerful and horrifying examination of the history of Black Americans as unconsenting experimental medical subjects. In Renaissance Men, she brings us a biography of three pioneering but little-known Black physicians in New York. These were men who not only fought against staggering barriers but pursued professional excellence. Washington’s gift for bold storytelling promises to add significantly to the history of medicine and doctors in America. —KBC
Illia Ponomarenko, The Land of Tears and Hope: The Ukrainian Story. Bloomsbury Publishing, November 10.
In 2024, journalist Ponomarenko’s first-person account of the Battle of Kyiv brought readers into the heart of Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s attacks. Now, he brings readers a popular history of Ukraine that covers more than 1,000 years. Ponomarenko is eager to introduce us to the country he loves, and I’m looking forward to following him to a place that dominates our headlines but that I don’t know nearly enough about. —KBC
Julie Pineau, Introducing the Medieval Snail. University of Wales Press, November 13.
If the title of this book does not intrigue you, I am not sure what to do with you. And if the promised chapter on the “snail-combat motif” does not spark an interest, all hope in you is lost. This is another book focused on the history of a seemingly quotidian and mostly ignored subject—and one that promises images of ferocious mollusks. How can I resist? —MKN
Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy, Policing Passengers: Black Women and the Fight Against Bus Violence. UNC Press, November 17.
If you think that bus passenger protests against Jim Crow started with Rosa Parks—or even Claudette Colvin—let Murphy take you back as far as the 1920s, when Black women bus riders first started to resist and speak out against policing, surveillance, and segregation on buses in both the North and South. —KBC
Susanne E. Hakenbeck, Crossing the Danube: Life Along a Frontier at the End of the Roman Empire. Princeton University Press, November 17.
Rivers are fascinating historical subjects; always shifting and changing, they are hard to pin down with a single historical argument. Hakenbeck’s new book takes on the Danube, a 2,000-mile long political boundary and living landscape; it will be fascinating to see how she brings the histories of Romans and “barbarians” together through this single waterway. —MKN
Martha Saxton, The Conversions of Edward Gibbon: A Modern Biography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 24.
I was drawn to this book from the cover alone. But when I realized what it was—a feminist history of historian Edward Gibbon (!), author of the The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the last book written by Saxton before her death in 2023—well, it shot to the top of my TBR pile. —KBC
