Great Readings
A curated collection of field-defining monographs, landmark journal papers, and foundational texts in Modern History that have established new paradigms, challenged dogmas, and reshaped how historians interpret the modern world.
Historiographical & Methodological Breakthroughs
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller | Carlo Ginzburg |
| History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée | Fernand Braudel |
| Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis | Joan Wallach Scott |
| Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time | Reinhart Koselleck |
| Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History | Michel-Rolph Trouillot |
| What Is History? | E. H. Carr |
Capitalism, Labor, and Global Political Economy
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time | Karl Polanyi |
| Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism | E. P. Thompson |
| The Making of the English Working Class | E. P. Thompson |
| Capitalism and Slavery | Eric Williams |
| Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History | Sidney W. Mintz |
| The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy | Kenneth Pomeranz |
| Empire of Cotton: A Global History | Sven Beckert |
Empire, Race, and Subaltern Epistemologies
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution | C. L. R. James |
| Discourse on Colonialism | Aimé Césaire |
| The Wretched of the Earth | Frantz Fanon |
| Orientalism | Edward W. Said |
| Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference | Dipesh Chakrabarty |
| Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism | Benedict Anderson |
| Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 | W. E. B. Du Bois |
| The Souls of Black Folk | W. E. B. Du Bois |
Totalitarianism, Ideology, and Mass Violence
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| The Origins of Totalitarianism | Hannah Arendt |
| Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil | Hannah Arendt |
| The Drowned and the Saved | Primo Levi |
| Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland | Christopher R. Browning |
| Modernity and the Holocaust | Zygmunt Bauman |
| Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin | Timothy Snyder |
Power, Institutions, and Environmental Modernity
| Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|
| Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison | Michel Foucault |
| Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed | James C. Scott |
| Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 | Alfred W. Crosby |
| Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World | J. R. McNeill |
| All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity | Marshall Berman |