Kate Carpenter: Welcome back to Drafting the Past and to the final episode of 2025.

This is a podcast about the craft of writing history, and I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, but this episode is all about you.

I asked listeners to call in and share the best history books they read this year, and they delivered.

We've got history books covering a huge range of subjects.

Some were published recently, some as long as 90 years ago.

Some are about huge subjects.

Others about tiny places.

We even let one historical novel sneak into the mix.

It's all a reminder that the Drafting the Past community is awesome, full of thoughtful, smart listeners who love talking about great history writing just as much as I do.

In this episode, you'll hear from some of those listeners, and if you're anything like me, you'll add a bunch of new books to your reading list.

Let's get to it, starting with a call from a listener named Jay.

Jay: The book of history that made the biggest effect or impact on me this year was Wright Thompson's The Barn, an account of Emmett Till's murder in 1955 Mississippi.

I was stunned, frankly, to discover that the barn is only about eight miles from where I lived in Mississippi in the 1990s and I had no idea I was living that close to that place, but I know the town, I know the people, I know that area, and every word of The Barn sticks with me still.

It's an incredibly powerful book, and one that I'm going to reread, although it's not one I look forward to re reading.

Jenny Shaw: Hi Kate.

This is Jenny Shaw.

My favorite read is one that I'm sure a lot of people have been writing to you about.

It is Sara Johnson's Encyclopedie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Mery's Intellectual World.

This book is so creative.

It is audacious, it is intellectually challenging.

It is also beautifully written, and it is a work that challenges our conventions about how to approach archives and sources and the so called great men of history.

One of the most fabulous things about this book is the way that Johnson approaches her subject, she writes a collective biography about the people around Moreau, the enslaved women, men and children, and the free people of color whose labor provided him the opportunity to have the kind of life of the mind he craved, and whose knowledge among that of many others he colonized.

To shed in their lives.

Johnson plays with content and form the literal fonts and typeface of the book change.

She collaborates with artist Lou Sandoval to create new ways of seeing the people around Moreau as well as the man himself.

And she also invites us to consider the daily violence experienced by enslaved people by reformulating how we encounter the brands that they would have had on their bodies, or the sounds they would have heard coming from their enslaver's mouth.

We leave the book with a new knowledge and a new appreciation for the people around Moreau, he is so decentred in this book, the people that he worked so hard to erase are instead center stage.

Johnson's book would be important for the ways that it asks us to rethink the history of Saint Domingue, for the questions it poses about what constitutes intellectual history, or indeed an intellectual project for what it reveals about the deeply embedded relationship between slavery and enlightenment era thinking.

But that's not the reason that I love this book so much, although I do love it for those reasons too.

I love it because Johnson forces us to reckon with how we understand the practice of history, every chapter, every illustration, every methodological turn, is a revelation.

I've read this book, I think, at least three times this year, and every time I walk away with something different, she challenges me to think differently about how to do history.

I think you'd have to go a really long way to find a book as thought provoking and generative and inspiring as this one.

So if you have not go and read it immediately, I promise you you will not regret it.

Steven Lubar: Hi.

This is Steven Lubar, a fan of Drafting the Past.

I've started to work on a book of local history, and so I've been reading lots of local history.

My favorite and my favorite book of the year, favorite history book of the

year is Celestine: Voices from a French village, written by Gillian Tindall and published in 1995.

Tindall was a novelist and a writer of popular histories of cities and towns.

Died just a few months ago.

Celestine is about the small French town, small town in France that she lived in in her summer house she found in that house five letters to Celestine, mostly proposals of marriage.

Celestine had once lived in that house letters from the 1860s.

From them and from archives, and especially from talking to elders in the village, she pieces together a story that's personal about Celestine, but it also just beautifully explores changes in the French countryside, how rural France became modern.

It's beautifully written.

And while I'm not a historian of France, or that time in France, I found it just fascinating.

Highly recommended.

Oksana Nesterenko: Hello.

My name is Oksana Nesterenko.

I teach music history, and my favorite history book this year

was Bangkok After Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies, by Benjamin Tausig.

It's a biography of an American jazz pianist, Maurice Rocco, who spent the last 12 years of his life in Thailand, which coincided with the end of the Vietnam War.

Tausig engages many disciplines and paints a fascinating story, but what I liked the most is that this book is almost like a guide to piecing together a story when pieces are scattered in obvious and unlikely places around the world.

He is an ethnomusicologist who lives in New York, and he talks to veterans of the Vietnam War in bars, in Queens, travels to state archives in Thailand, only to find out that white termites ate a lot of documentary evidence.

Also, there is a lot of email correspondence and public and private archives in the US and interviews with musicians who played with Rocco, one of whom is over 100 years old.

Drew Seitz: Hello.

My name is Drew Seitz from Salt Lake City, Utah.

And the best book I read this year was Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.

Really fascinating blend of a whole bunch of pulling together of threads from across western history and capitalism.

Hilarious voice of the author.

And yeah, just a really great book.

Tom Eblen: My name is Tom Eblen.

I'm a retired journalist in Lexington, Kentucky who is now focused on writing history.

The best history book I read this year was The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.

It is a brilliant history of the Great Migration, told through the intimate stories of three people who lived it in different eras.

I mostly read history books, and this is one of the best written books I've ever read.

Keep up the good work.

I love your podcast.

Thanks so much.

Joanna: Hello.

My name is Joanna.

I'm an historian, and I wanted to recommend three really excellent history books that I read this year.

The first one I wanted to mention isn't really a history book.

It is a memoir by Erin Zimmerman called Unrooted: Botany, Motherhood, and the Fight to Save an Old Science.

This is a book that revolves around Zimmerman's experience having gone into award winning scholarship on botany in a Canadian university, and discovering both the history of botany and how it has shaped the science in its modern era, and also the way that botany is being undervalued and under researched in the 21st Century.

I think this is a really engaging book because it tells you a story about Zimmerman's life and her growing dissatisfaction with the hell that is academia, but also by explaining the history of how botany has been undervalued as being viewed, in part as women's work.

So I think it is an excellent book, and I would recommend it to somebody who has an interest in the history of science but is a bit intimidated by the idea of reading a hardcore history of science.

The second book that I wanted to recommend is called Alice + Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis, which is by Alexis Coe.

Now this is actually billed as a young adult history book--it's non fiction--and I think that can leave people with the impression that it might not be as academically rigorous as it could be.

But what this is is a book looking at the murder of ah Freda by Alice.

They are two young women who were definitely in a romantic relationship, and probably in a sexual relationship in the post Civil War era in the United States.

And the reason why we know anything about their relationship is because Alice murdered Freda.

And then died in an insane asylum, and I think that it can be really good again, aimed at people who are a bit intimidated by history books, because it talks so much about how the sources limit what we are able to learn about the past, and the ways that we can really struggle to find evidence of people in what we would now call homosexual relationships in the past.

The other book I also wanted to mention about the history of science is Dr Space Junk vs The Universe, by Alice Gorman.

It is another science memoir, but the thing that I was most excited about reading it is the look at the history of space exploration from Australian point of view, and the way that she examines artifacts as a way of understanding the past as like understanding the way that we interact with and engage with the history of space travel.

It is an excellent book, and it kind of has a sad ending, because she points out where things are going terribly wrong, about dead satellites in eternal orbit, and how we could end up alone just because we cannot get away from the satellites that keep us trapped on Earth.

Anyway, enjoy your day.

Keith Borman: Hey, Kate.

It's Keith Borman.

I wanted to say that I read a I don't know if it's officially a history book per se, but it's certainly an interesting one.

The title is An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, and it's a historical mystery.

And it's set in the year 1663, in London and Oxford, and it's absolutely mesmerizing.

I think everyone would enjoy it.

Charlie: My name is Charlie.

The best history book I read this year was 1934's The First Year of the American Revolution, by a guy named Allen French.

Wikipedia tells me he was born in 1870 and mostly wrote kids books.

Of his few non fiction titles, most of them are about the American Revolution, but this one was his life's work, masterpiece.

The citations are in line, so you can glance down anytime and see that he's read every letter, journal, primary source you can plus all those multi volume 18th century histories, and this is his definitive edition.

He's boiled it down to this.

You know, it doesn't read as old or slow.

The writing is sly.

It's lively, like it's it's a fun read, despite the fact that it's 90 years old and 715 pages.

That was the best history book I read this year.

Thanks.

Tyler Peterson: Hello.

My name is Dr.

Tyler Peterson.

I am a PhD historian who is now teaching as an adjunct history professor at Georgia Gwinnett College.

The best history book I read this year is called Gender and the Race for Space by one of my friends, Erinn McComb.

She advances an argument in her book that was definitely novel to me and novel to readers of all space flight history, I think, in that her book examines the image of American astronauts, both men and women, from a standpoint of masculinity, and she couches her argument in the overall masculinity crisis that the United States went through during the era following the end of World War Two.

In other words, she takes space flight history out of isolation and integrates it into overall American history in a way that will appeal to scholars of 20th century America in general, and not only people like myself who study space flight history particularly.

And so I definitely want to promote that book as best I can, and I'm glad to do so here.

Thank you.

Georgina Laragy: My name is Georgina Laragy.

I work at the history department in Trinity College in Dublin, and the best history book I read this year is a short book called Finding

Mary: The Untold Story of an Inishowen Murder 1844 by Angela Byrne, and it's published by Four Courts press.

It's a really short book and a really excellent series of local history, and that's been running in Ireland for many, many years, but it's a really excellent piece of micro history.

Love your podcast, and really enjoy listening to how other people write their history.

Thank you.

Marcia Ford: This is Marcia Ford from Poor Richard's Book Club.

My favorite book this year was one of the Washington Prize finalists, Penman of the Founding: A Biography of John Dickinson by Jane Calvert.

I thought this book really, she expressed some of the politics, the nuances of the politics of the time that I hadn't read elsewhere.

She gave added dimension to some of the influential personalities.

It especially broadened my understanding of the tension between reconciliation and revolution.

I thought it was interesting that Ken Burns' Revolution did not include the olive branch petition.

I thought that that was crucial to understanding how the war started and how it evolved.

Thank you.

Kate Carpenter: We also got calls from a few past guests on the show.

Catherine McNeur, episode 36, Zachary Schrag, way back from episode four, and Tracy Slater from Episode 70, let us know about some of the books that have been inspiring them lately.

Zachary Schrag: Hi Kate, it's Zachary Schrag from George Mason University, and I want to put in a plug for Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work by Jason Resnikoff.

This book was published in early 2022, several months before the release of ChatGPT, but it has helped me understand the current debates over artificial intelligence in the workplace.

Resnikoff argues that what we call automation is not so much a specific technology as an excuse that employers use to lay off some workers while speeding up work and reducing pay for those who remain.

His writing ranges from philosophical debates about the nature of freedom to vivid stories about the exhaustion imposed by new, machine oriented paces of work.

It's not a pretty story, but it is one that we need to hear.

Catherine McNeur: Hi.

This is Catherine McNeur.

I'm the author of Mischievous Creatures and Taming Manhattan.

The best history book I read this year was Theresa McCulla's Insatiable

City: Food and Race in New Orleans that was published with the University of Chicago Press.

The writing alone is amazing and worth picking this book up for, but McCulla's range of sources and how she creatively mines them takes it to the next level.

I assigned it in a class this year, and my students, a few of whom even admitted to having never read a full book before, they all adored it.

Many told me that they were planning on gifting this book to friends and family.

And if that's not an endorsement, I'm not sure what is.

Also, this is McCulla's first book.

She has hit the ground running.

Tracy Slater: Hi Kate.

It's Tracy Slater.

I've got three books I wanted to mention.

The first is the Dragon From

Chicago: The Untold Story of an American Reporter in Nazi Germany, by Pamela D.

Toler.

The next one is Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War Two, by Becky Aikman.

And the third is The Art Spy: The Extraordinary, Untold Tale of World War Two Resistance Hero Rose Valland, is, I think that's how you say her name, Valland, by Michelle Young.

Thanks.

Kate Carpenter: And to close with something fun for me, here is a recommendation from a listener about a book she first heard about right here.

Kate Davis: Hi, Kate.

This is Kate Davis.

The best history book that I read this year was actually Together in Manzanar by Tracy Slater.

I bought it through your site after hearing your interview with her.

I learned so much from it, and love how readable it is.

That was the best history book that I've read this year.

Thanks.

Kate Carpenter: Thanks to everyone who called in, to everyone who listens to the show and tells their friends, colleagues, and students about it, and to everyone who cares about the craft of writing history.

There is lots of fun stuff coming in 2026 and I can't wait to share it all with you.

Be sure to subscribe to the show so you get the latest episodes, subscribe to the newsletter for even more fun, and subscribe to the idea that friends don't let friends write boring history.