Top History Books

The top 50 books in this category, curated and ranked.

Updated April 1, 2026
All Books fantasyscience fictionmysterythrillerhorrorromancehistorical fictionmemoirbiographyhistoryphilosophysciencepoetryyoung adultchildren'sliterary fictionself-helpcrime fiction
Rank Book
#1 The Declaration of Independence
by Thomas Jefferson
#2 The Art of War
by Sun Tzu
#3 The Diary of Anne Frank
by Anne Frank
#4 The Federalist Papers
by Alexander Hamilton
#5 Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
by Yuval Noah Harari
#6 Roots: The Saga of an American Family
by Alex Haley
#7 The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
by Benjamin Franklin
#8 The Gulag Archipelago
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#9 Das Kapital, Volume I
by Karl Marx
#10 A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
#11 The Travels of Marco Polo
by Rustichello da Pisa
#12 Letter from Birmingham Jail
by Martin Luther King Jr.
#13 The Long Walk to Freedom
by Nelson Mandela
#14 Truman
by David McCullough
#15 1776
by David McCullough
#16 The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass
by Frederick Douglass
#17 Homage to Catalonia
by George Orwell
#18 A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
by Martin Luther King Jr.
#19 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
#20 The Innocents Abroad
by Mark Twain
#21 Twelve Years a Slave
by David Wilson
#22 Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
by Walter Isaacson
#23 Roughing It
by Mark Twain
#24 The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote
by Elaine Weiss
#25 The Story of My Experiments with Truth
by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
#26 Why We Can't Wait
by Martin Luther King Jr.
#27 Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
#28 Call the Midwife
by Jennifer Worth
#29 The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois
#30 The Persian Expedition
by Xenophon
#31 Life on the Mississippi
by Mark Twain
#32 I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
by Malala Yousafzai
#33 The World Crisis
by Winston S. Churchill
#34 A Little History of the World
by Ernst Gombrich
#35 The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi
by Mahatma Gandhi
#36 The Second World War
by Winston S. Churchill
#37 A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
#38 The Prince
by Niccolò Machiavelli
#39 Mein Kampf
by Adolf Hitler
#40 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
by Charles Darwin
#41 The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity
by Steven Pinker
#42 Gandhi An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
by Mahatma Gandhi
#43 The Library Book
by Susan Orlean
#44 The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
by Edward Gibbon
#45 The American Crisis
by Thomas Paine
#46 The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
by William L. Shirer
#47 Profiles in Courage
by John F. Kennedy
#48 The Travels of Marco Polo
by Marco Polo
#49 Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
by Ulysses S. Grant
#50 Band of Brothers
by Stephen E. Ambrose