Hundreds of intriguing history books are published every month—far more than we have time and space to cover.
Below, we’ve noted a few books coming in October that have joined our TBR piles. We have not included books that we are covering in reviews and interviews, so we can spread the love. What are you looking forward to reading next month?
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David Treuer, The Savage Mind: An American Legacy. Little, Brown, October 6.
Treuer (Ojibwe), whose previous book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, was a New York Times best seller and a National Book Award finalist, began writing a letter to his children in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the January 6 insurrection. His meditation on the origins and reverberations of frontier violence, The Savage Mind, promises to be another book that is both compelling and provocative. —MKN
Stacey Patton, Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children. Beacon Press, October 6.
I can’t look at this cover without feeling sick to my stomach, but it’s as important as ever not to look away. (The photograph is of a World War I era “mock lynching,” as the book description notes.) It is vital that we confront this history, even more so when a string of Black hanging deaths are drawing questions across the U.S. Patton’s book shows how racial violence is transmitted across generations, even–maybe especially–in children. This one should drive a lot of needed conversation. —KBC
Andrew Pettigree, The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century. Basic Books, October 13.
A book about bookselling is sure to please book nerds everywhere, including us. This one promises to take the reader on a journey from book stalls to department stores to railroad stations as Pettigree investigates how books have found their way into readers’ hands across space and time. What could be better? Reading this book in a bookshop, maybe. —MKN
Andrew Coe, American Bread: A History. University of California Press, October 13.
As a person with a possibly unreasonable number of bread cookbooks, I’m thrilled to see this history from James Beard-award winning author Coe. Focused specifically on Americans’ relationship with bread over time, it organizes each chapter around a loaf, from “Rye and Indian” and “Graham Bread” to “Bagels” and “Hippie Bread.” Even if you’ve neglected your pandemic sourdough starter, this one is sure to be delicious. —KBC
Neil Price, The Sea-King and the Sorceress: Life and Death in the Viking Age. Basic Books, October 13.
I am not one of those people who has spent a lot of time pondering the Viking Age. But this book promises an immersive reading experience and a beautifully rendered depiction of the world that the Vikings traveled through and created for themselves. Plus, there are archaeological digs and “ancient secrets revealed.” I am intrigued! —MKN
Kevin Waite, The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West. University of California Press, October 13.
The first book-length biography of a Black woman who was forced by her enslaver to walk to California and labor there for five years before suing for her emancipation in 1856. With her freedom, she built an exceptional life in Los Angeles and died a wealthy real estate entrepreneur. What a story! Too few histories connect the legacy of American slavery with the development of California, and I cannot wait to dig into this one. —KBC
Lindsey Fitzharris, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes. Macmillan, October 20.
We historians like to think of ourselves as detectives, which explains why so many of us like reading detective novels. Fitzharris, a medical historian who has previously written about plastic surgeons and pioneers in germ theory, turns in her latest book to the life story of an Edinburgh doctor whose deductive skills inspired the creation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic Sherlock Holmes. It’s an unbeatable mashup of history, medical mysteries, and true crime. —MKN
Miriam Posner, Seeing Like a Supply Chain: The Hidden Life of Logistics. Yale University Press, October 20.
You may not know this about me, but what I do spend a lot of time pondering is logistics. I became obsessed with the way people move things around during my Civil War West research, and the way the pandemic destabilized the supply chain just heightened my interest. So I am very much looking forward to Posner’s new book, which is a wide-ranging investigation of the networks that have driven the global economy and that have increasingly protected corporations from the deleterious effects of their business. —MKN
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Timothy R. Romans, The Silver Lords of Nagasaki: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Last Great Maritime Dynasty. Yale University Press, October 20.
The mature, professional part of me will tell you that I have been curious to learn more about this period of Japanese history since I read Amy Stanley’s Stranger in the Shogun’s City. But realistically, I have just one word for you: pirates! —KBC
Rachel A. Shelden, The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History. UNC Press, October 27.
For better or worse (mostly worse), this history of the political and partisan roots of the Supreme Court and its justices couldn’t be more timely. As the Supreme Court’s decisions continue to be at the center of America’s political debates—not to mention its future—and justices continue to insist that they are apolitical, Sheldon’s book will give us essential context for the origins of our modern Supreme Court. —KBC
Joan Martelli, The Widow Van Gogh: Tragedy, Triumph, and the Woman Who Made Vincent van Gogh a Legend. Pegasus Books, October 27.
Much more attention deserves to be given to the people—often women—who worked to bring great artists the acclaim they deserved after their deaths. Perhaps no one deserves attention more than Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who is largely the reason that Vincent van Gogh, a man who sold one painting in his lifetime, is a household name today. —KBC
Nandini Das, This Little World: A New History of Tudor and Stuart England. Yale University Press, October 27.
In the vein of Brett Rushforth and Christopher Hodson’s Beyond the Ocean and Lauren Working’s A Golden World, Das brings us a book that reframes an early modern empire through the people who moved between countries and connected England to the rest of the world. The press copy describes Das as “attentive to the textures of daily life yet alive to the sweep of history,” a sweet spot that not many historians manage to find. I can’t wait to see how she does it. —KBC
