The Histories – Herodotus (The "Father of History")
History of the Peloponnesian War – Thucydides
The Annals – Tacitus
The Twelve Caesars – Suetonius
Parallel Lives – Plutarch
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbon
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome – Mary Beard
The Muqaddimah – Ibn Khaldun (Foundational work of historiography)
The Alexiad – Anna Komnene
Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization – Barry Kemp
The Campaigns of Alexander – Arrian
The War with Hannibal – Livy
The Jewish War – Josephus
The Fall of the Roman Empire – Peter Heather
The Inheritance of Rome – Chris Wickham
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World – Peter Frankopan
A Study of History – Arnold J. Toynbee
The Rise of the West – William H. McNeill
Plagues and Peoples – William H. McNeill
The Great Transformation – Karl Polanyi
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II – Fernand Braudel
Europe: A History – Norman Davies
The Great Divergence – Kenneth Pomeranz
Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World – Timothy Brook
A Little History of the World – E.H. Gombrich
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 – Tony Judt
The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 – Tim Blanning
Vanished Kingdoms – Norman Davies
The Guns of August – Barbara Tuchman (WWI)
The Face of Battle – John Keegan
Stalingrad – Antony Beevor
Battle Cry of Freedom – James M. McPherson (US Civil War)
The Second World War – Winston Churchill
A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution – Orlando Figes
The Black Jacobins – C.L.R. James (Haitian Revolution)
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich – William L. Shirer
The Crimean War – Orlando Figes
The Napoleonic Wars – Alexander Mikaberidze
The Age of Revolution – Eric Hobsbawm
Embers of War – Fredrik Logevall (Vietnam)
Rites of Spring – Modris Eksteins
The Crusades: The Authoritative History – Thomas Asbridge
The Thirty Years War – C.V. Wedgwood
A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
The Radicalism of the American Revolution – Gordon S. Wood
1776 – David McCullough
The Hemingses of Monticello – Annette Gordon-Reed
The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents – Isabel Wilkerson
Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West – William Cronon
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln – Doris Kearns Goodwin
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Brown
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism – Edward E. Baptist
The Power Broker – Robert Caro
Mayflower – Nathaniel Philbrick
Empire of the Summer Moon – S.C. Gwynne
These Truths – Jill Lepore
The Fiery Trial – Eric Foner
The Making of the English Working Class – E. P. Thompson
The Cheese and the Worms – Carlo Ginzburg
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy – Jacob Burckhardt
The Civilizing Process – Norbert Elias
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century – Barbara Tuchman
The Return of Martin Guerre – Natalie Zemon Davis
The Great Cat Massacre – Robert Darnton
London: The Biography – Peter Ackroyd
A History of the World in 6 Glasses – Tom Standage
Salt: A World History – Mark Kurlansky
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World – Mark Kurlansky
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – Thomas Kuhn
The Wretched of the Earth – Frantz Fanon
Orientalism – Edward Said
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern – Stephen Greenblatt
The Diary of a Young Girl – Anne Frank
Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
The Gulag Archipelago – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – Frederick Douglass
Personal Memoirs – Ulysses S. Grant
If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz) – Primo Levi
The Travels of Marco Polo – Marco Polo
The Year of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
Ten Days That Shook the World – John Reed
The Search for Modern China – Jonathan Spence
The Great Boer War – Arthur Conan Doyle
India After Gandhi – Ramachandra Guha
Open Veins of Latin America – Eduardo Galeano
King Leopold's Ghost – Adam Hochschild
A History of the Arab Peoples – Albert Hourani
The Fate of Africa – Martin Meredith
Red Star Over China – Edgar Snow
The Reformation: A History – Diarmaid MacCulloch
The Ottoman Centuries – Lord Kinross
Hiroshima – John Hersey
The Fatal Shore – Robert Hughes (Australia)
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader – Bradley K. Martin (North Korea)
The Anarchy – William Dalrymple (The East India Company)
The Border – Erika Fatland