Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in History (all time)

All Time Past 6 Months

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

James M. McPherson

4.7 on Amazon

10 HN comments

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela

Nelson Mandela, Michael Boatman, et al.

4.8 on Amazon

10 HN comments

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

Nancy MacLean

4.7 on Amazon

9 HN comments

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

David Fromkin

4.6 on Amazon

9 HN comments

The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church

R. Albert Mohler Jr.

4.8 on Amazon

9 HN comments

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Mary Beard

4.4 on Amazon

9 HN comments

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?

Graham Allison

4.6 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

S. C. Gwynne, David Drummond, et al.

4.8 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Reza Aslan and Random House Audio

4.4 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel's Targeted Assassinations

Ronen Bergman, Rob Shapiro, et al.

4.7 on Amazon

8 HN comments

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

Timothy Snyder, Ralph Cosham, et al.

4.6 on Amazon

7 HN comments

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

Daniel Immerwahr

4.7 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Laura Hillenbrand, Edward Herrmann, et al.

4.8 on Amazon

7 HN comments

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World

Vincent Bevins, Tim Paige, et al.

4.8 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

4.1 on Amazon

7 HN comments

Prev Page 3/8 Next

Sorted by relevance

freed5666onMar 9, 2021

It is indeed an empire. Two good books:

[1] How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr
https://www.amazon.com/How-Hide-Empire-History-Greater/dp/03...

[2] Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky
https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Power-Indispensible-Cho...

hhsonApr 12, 2019

OP here. Please note that this piece is a review of Daniel Immerwahr's book, "How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States".

JadeNBonJan 14, 2020

There's a great book by Daniel Immerwahr on the subject: How to Hide an Empire (https://www.amazon.com/How-Hide-Empire-History-Greater/dp/03...).

throwaway1090onApr 24, 2021

Many of these are addressed in the book 'Understanding Power' by Noam Chomsky. It's very readable. It's got hefty footnotes that are available as pdf [1].

Another book is 'How to Hide an Empire' by Daniel Immerwahr.

[1] http://understandingpower.org/

TaylorAlexanderonJuly 25, 2021

Yes even going back to Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt rewrote his drafts of his speech to obscure the fact that the Philippines, a major site of the attack, was also a US colony.

"How to Hide an Empire", Daniel Immerwahr

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaKOOqXDnqA

gxqozonMay 4, 2020

I felt that Greg Grandin's Myth of the Frontier was actually the second-best counter-narrative to the standard accounts of American relations with its neighbors published in 2019. The most interesting was How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to-hide-...

One of the more interesting sections for the Hacker News crowd is how technological advancements in World War II like artificial rubber and international standards allowed the US to cede the huge amount of land it directly controlled after the war (which is not to say that US influence completely disappeared in these places).

wglbonSep 23, 2020

Yes, generally that is true. There are a few words, at least out west, that stand out: "About" "Schedule" "America".

The last one is in jest. The word is pronounced the same--in the US, often the US is called America, seemingly excluding Canada, Central America, South America.

And a fact that I didn't know until recently was that the Philippines prior to WW II was part of the United States. See "How to hide an empire" by Daniel Immerwahr: https://www.amazon.com/How-Hide-Empire-History-Greater/dp/03...

Hacker News Books