🐯 Princeton History unofficial reading list 2026

Sophomore level

The Byzantine Empire HIS 205 (fa26)

✔️ Byzantium: A Very Short Intro. by Peter Sarris
The Social History of Byzantium by John Haldon
A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales & Surprising Facts from History’s Most Orthodox Empire by Anthony Kaldellis
Secret History by Procopius
Alexiad by Anna Komnene
Three Byzantine Military Treatises by George T. Dennis
Accounts of Medieval Constantinople: The Patria by Albrecht Berger
Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions by Elizabeth Jeffreys

Europe from Antiquity to 1700 HIS 211 (fa26)

Hellenism: The 1st 3000 Years HIS 222 (fa26)

The World of the Cairo Geniza HIS 251 (fa26)

In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale by Amitav Ghosh
Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Hoffman & Cole
Trade & Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants & their Business World by Jessica L. Goldberg
Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt: A History by Craig Perry

Intro. to African American History to 1863 HIS 266 (fa26)

Intro. to African American History Since Emancipation HIS 268 (fa26)

Let Nobody Turn Us Around: An African American Anthology by Marable & Mullings
I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror & Survival in the War against Reconstruction by Kidada E. Williams
Home to Harlem by Claude McKay
Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s by Hampton & Fayer
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

The Modern Black Freedom Movement: From Civil Rights to Black Power HIS 269 (fa26)

The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom & the Forgotten History of Civil Rights by William P. Jones
Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Gore et al.
Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights & Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt by Hasan Kwame Jeffries

Colonial Latin America to 1810 HIS 303 (fa26)

20th-Century Japan HIS 322 (fa26)

Peasants, Rebels, Women & Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan by Mikiso Hane
Japan at War: An Oral History by Cook & Cook
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower
Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life by Sheldon Garon
A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present by Andrew Gordon
Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki

Everyday Writing in the Roman World HIS 326 (fa26)

The Heike as History & Art HIS 339 (fa26)

American Origins: The Colonization of North America HIS 371 (fa26)

The Jesuit Relations: Natives & Missionaries in 17th-Century North America by Allan Greer
The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca
✔️ The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (my highlights)
The Sovereignty & Goodness of God: w/ Related Documents
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

A More Perfect Union: The United States, 1920-1974 HIS 383 (fa26)

The Rise of Conservatism in America, 1945-2000 by Story & Laurie
Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism by Bruce Schulman
My Soul is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South by Howell Raines
The Age of McCarthyism by Schrecker & Deery
The Era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-1945 by Richard Polenberg
Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen

World After Empire HIS 411 (fa26)

✔️ The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise & Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew
Return to the Source: Selected Texts of Amilcar Cabral
Gandhi: ‘Hind Swaraj’ and Other Writings
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire
The Colonizer and the Colonized by Albert Memmi
✔️ Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W.E.B. Du Bois (my highlights)

Memory, History & the Archive HIS 426 (fa26)

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
Black History Is for Everyone by Brian Jones
Silencing the Past: Power & the Production of History by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
A More Beautiful & Terrible History: The Uses & Misuses of Civil Rights History by Jeanne Theoharis
Scattered & Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives & Remade History by Laura Helton
When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness & Belonging in the World by Leigh Raiford
South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women & Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman

The Age of Democratic Revolutions HIS 487 (fa26)

The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein
✔️ The Birth of the Republic, 1763–89 by Edmund S. Morgan (my highlights)
The Freedoms We Lost: Consent & Resistance in Revolutionary America by Barbara Clark Smith
The Radicalism of the American Revolution by Gordon S. Wood
The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature & the French Revolution by Dan Edelstein
When the King Took Flight by Timothy Tackett
A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution by Jeremy D. Popkin
The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Comparative Slavery HIS 516 (fa26)

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson
The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds Of The Slave Trade by Robert Harms
The Reaper’s Garden: Death & Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery by Vincent Brown
Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South by Stephanie M.H. Camp

Pre-Kantian Rationalism: The Ethics & the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus HIS 591 (fa26)