The Smithsonian Magazine's Picks for Ten Best History Books of 2023

Both tell the tale of a once-infamous, now more obscure chapter in history, resurrected through meticulous research and a gift for immensely readable prose. Just as the Reign of Terror, a string of murders that struck the Osage Nation in the early 20th century, was more widespread than an FBI investigation suggested, the circumstances surrounding the 1741 wreck of the HMS Wager were more mysterious than survivors initially claimed.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Jennifer Wright was putting the finishing touches on her latest book, Madame Restell, a biography of the woman she deems “a businesswoman, a scofflaw, an immigrant and an abortionist [who] made men really, really mad.”

Tracy Borman is a prolific chronicler of Tudor England, with each of her books offering a novel take on the world’s most-discussed dynasty...Now, Borman—an author who serves as joint chief curator of England’s Historic Royal Palaces—has turned her attention to the relationship between Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I, a mother and daughter who she says “changed the course of British history.”

In his biography of civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., Jonathan Eig follows the winning formula laid out in his 2017 book, Ali: A Life, using an impressively researched deep dive to present a more nuanced portrait.

The Sisterhood offers a comprehensive exploration of a similarly understudied topic: women at the CIA. Though women have worked at the agency since its founding in 1947, Mundy, a journalist and former Washington Post staffer, argues that their contributions have long been overlooked, in part due to the secretive nature of the job but also because of sexism.

The story of Ellen and William Craft, a couple who escaped slavery in 1848 by disguising themselves as an ailing white planter and his enslaved attendant, has received renewed attention in recent years, inspiring a short film, a children’s book and several academic studies. But it’s Ilyon Woo’s biography of the Crafts, Master Slave Husband Wife, that’s poised to become the authoritative account of their journey to freedom.

Reconstruction, the government-sanctioned push to reunite the nation in the aftermath of the Civil War, is often deemed a failure by historians...historian Kidada E. Williams believes that classifying Reconstruction as a failure is an oversimplification. “Black Reconstruction didn’t ‘fail,’ as so many are taught,” she writes in I Saw Death Coming. “White Southerners overthrew it, and the rest of the nation let them.”

From the Egyptian king Khufu and his mother to the “conquering family” of Genghis Khan, the Habsburg and Romanov dynasties, and the Roosevelts, Montefiore’s sweeping history traces the trajectory of the world through the relatives who ruled over it. Some of his subjects are household names, but many others are lesser known to many readers in the U.S., among them Jacques I of Haiti, the Mughal Emperor Babur and Chinese Empress Wu.

Books about the Age of Exploration tend to focus on the Europeans who journeyed to the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries. Historian Caroline Dodds Pennock opted for a different approach, reversing focus to discuss the tens of thousands of Indigenous Americans who traveled to Europe between 1492, when Christopher Columbus supposedly “discovered” the New World, and 1607, when the colony of Jamestown was founded.

Classicist Mary Beard follows up her epic 2015 history of ancient Rome, SPQR, with a more intimate discussion of the empire’s rulers...In addition to addressing “power, corruption and conspiracy,” the book asks what these individuals’ everyday lives were like, from what and where they ate to whom they slept with and how they traveled.