Every month, hundreds of intriguing history books are published—far more than we have time and space to cover. So every month, we plan to publish a list of books that have joined our TBR piles. We won’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 September?
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Lucy Worsley, Queens and Kings: An Unusually Personal History. Pegasus Books, September 1.
Worsley is a historian celebrity (did you know there was such a thing?). She’s a regular host and guest of history programs, especially on the BBC, and she also hosts the Lady Killers podcast. More relevant to this book’s subject, she was the joint chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces for more than two decades (that’s the organization that manages the unoccupied palaces in the UK). In this book, she promises an insider’s view of the history of the monarchy and the places where key moments occurred. It sounds like the next best thing to a personal castle tour. —KBC
Colin Duncan Taylor, The Pyrenees: A Human History. Yale University Press, Sept. 8.
I love a good landscape biography, especially one that focuses on a mountain range that I often sigh over while watching the Tour de France. And one that reveals the mutually constitutive relationship between a mountain range and all of the communities that have written their histories upon it. —MKN
Hans van de Ven, Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia. Basic Books, Sept. 8.
Despite the fact that the primary title belongs more to a video game than a history book, this new study by a Dutch historian and expert in modern Chinese history intrigues me. Any book that promises a new vantage point on a very well-known conflict is welcome, especially one based on cross-continental archival research. —MKN
Molly Brookfield, Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States. UNC Press, Sept. 8
Here’s another one about something so common you forget that it might have a history. Even so, it’s hard to imagine how you would write that history. There’s no archive of catcalling, after all. But Brookfield is up to the challenge, combing “newspaper reports, popular culture, women’s writings, public history, and more” to look at street harassment of American women from the 1860s to the 1980s. It’s an examination of what it’s like to exist in public as a woman–a frustratingly relevant history. —KBC
Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker. Simon & Schuster, Sept. 8.
It has become a cliché for publishers to claim that a historical event is “forgotten” as a way to market the book’s originality. The 1851 standoff between enslavers and the enslaved at the center of Cristin O’Keefe’s Aptowicz’s new book is not unknown, but an excerpt from the Prologue promises a deep dive into this violent conflict, and also the making of its memory. O’Keefe Aptowicz is a poet as well as a nonfiction writer, so I am looking forward to reveling in her approach and her writing. — MKN
Andrew Rankin, Yakuza: A 400-Year History of the Japanese Underworld. Basic Books, Sept. 15.
Admittedly, this is a subject about which I know next to nothing, but I’m intrigued by the claim that this is “the definitive history of Japanese organized crime.” The cover art alone stopped me in my tracks. I’m eager to find out if it’s as full of a “lively cast of extortionists, smugglers, hit men, and corporate crime lords” as the description promises. —KBC
Bryant Simon, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality. University of Chicago Press, Sept. 21.
I love a book that takes on a material object that you see everywhere but rarely think about - until you need to, of course. For Customers Only’s focus on public bathrooms as an ordinary place with extraordinary power in American cities hits on all cylinders for me: urban history, public architecture, and cultural conflict. —MKN
Kelly Lytle Hernández, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of Immigration Control. W.W. Norton, Sept. 22.
Bancroft Prize-winning and MacArthur genius Kelly Lytle Hernández has a new book out? Yes, please. And that book, Racist by Design, is an “act of sabotage” that will expose the whites-only roots of the U.S. immigration system? I cannot press “order” fast enough. —MKN
Richard Kurin, History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery. Crown, Sept. 22.
When this title first appeared in the catalog, the author’s name was missing. There was no description of the book, either. Strange! When I looked again later, I understood why: This is the account of a hair found in Thomas Jefferson’s Bible in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and the “unprecedented scientific quest,” as the press blurb says, to figure out if researchers could recover Jefferson’s DNA and once and for all determine the paternity of Sally Hemings’ children. We haven’t gotten our hands on a copy of this yet, but no matter what it says it’s sure to get people talking. —KBC
Marion Gibson, Witchland: A Deadly Moral Panic in Seventeenth-Century Britain. Scribner, Sept. 22.
Two years ago, Gibson, an emeritus professor of renaissance and magical literatures, hit the bestseller list with Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials. Now she’s back with a second trade book, this time focused on a decade-long witch panic in England and Scotland that resulted in more than 300 deaths. This one promises not just a salacious history of a witch hunt, but a history that “gives voice to the accused and defenseless.” We’re eager to hear it. —KBC