100 Books Like A Global History of Indigenous Peoples

As much as the current attacks on DEI may feel new or recent, the use of education and schooling to colonize and assimilate goes all the way back to the founding myths of this country and the aims of stealing land from Indigenous peoples and labor from enslaved Black communities.

This book highlights those histories across time as motivated not by personal malice or differences in cultural beliefs but by settler-colonial economic gain. Those moves were rationalized by the notion of European “civilization” as superior and enforced through violence to erase Native people, cultures, and sovereignty.

The final chapter reminds us that “the past is present” in the fights over who gets to tell the histories and what narratives get valorized or erased; the grab for land, resources, and economic power that underlies the current attacks; and in the ongoing resistance and creativity of Indigenous nations and other minoritized communities… show more.

This wonderful book collects ethnographies about Indigenous peoples in the Gran Chaco. This beautiful region, where I grew up and currently teach about, links Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil and is home to over twenty-five Indigenous nations. 

The Gran Chaco is ecologically important because it is the second-largest biome in Latin America and the site of multiple extractive industries. Ranchers and soy planters are currently deforesting the region at the highest rate in the world and displacing the Indigenous peoples, forcing them into poverty, hunger, and prostitution.  

I loved this book because it provided a geographic perspective that deepened my understanding of how Native people in the Lower Chaco of Paraguay are mobilizing to reclaim their land. Like Indigenous people throughout the world, the transition to ranching pushed these people off their homelands and made them dispensable peons.

Refusing to give up, the Enxet and Sanapaná employed international advocates to pressure neoliberal politicians to return their lands. I was so impressed by Correia’s years of participant observations and the insights he provides into the Native peoples’ changing world.

Sometimes, research turns up unexpected and inconvenient truths. When Paraguayan anthropologist Canova researched Native voting patterns in Western Paraguay during the last several decades of the nation’s democratic opening, she found that Ayoreo women, from the latest Indigenous nation to be forced off their land, commonly exchanged sex for money or material goods with the local Mennonite setters. 

Economic and mission frontiers in the Chaco have changed gender roles, sexual practices, and frontier economies. While I learned about these practices back in 2002 during a trip to the Chaco, this brave exposé of frontier exploitation and changing cultures finally documents and brings to light new understandings of Indigenous agency amidst settler colonialism on internal Latin American frontiers. 

Dictionaries are not usually meant to be fun but this fact-packed book is so well-written that it is a joy to read. Wonder who on earth was Cicero? What the Punic wars were all about? How the Greeks defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis? What was so special about Greek theatre? And why  Rome conquered Britain? You will find all the answers here. Besides military and political events, it covers literature, philosophy, art, religion, sport, and society, all the way from 776BC and the first Olympic Games to the end of the Roman Empire in the west in AD476.

The official title of the book is ‘Encyclopedia Biblica: A Critical Dictionary of the Literary, Political and Religious History, the Archaeology, Geography, and Natural History of the Bible.' This work was produced by various professors of Oxford University and was a continual work from 1899-1903. It seems to be rarely mentioned by historians and Biblical scholars today, and I am recommending this work because there is a considerable wealth of information in it, and any student of history would find it incredibly useful. The Oxford professors critically examined ancient folklore and legends, without being swayed by traditional opinions of the time. For example, the origins of the people of Israel, and Egyptian and Hittite history are thoroughly examined, as is the Biblical literature. Interestingly, in this work, the professors doubted the existence of Nazareth, stating: ‘Was Nazareth originally the name of a town (or village) at all? There… show more.

I came across this book in the early days of writing my own – and it was inspirational.

It’s massive, with 74 chapters, but taken individually these are not in themselves long or difficult reads. We find women of all stations from prostitutes to queens, wet nurses to dancers, and female gladiators introduced, and range in time from the Bronze Age to the Romans.

The authors draw inclusively on multiple approaches and types of evidence, bodies, material culture, iconography, texts, and more. Apart from the vast coverage, the philosophy of the volume as set out by the editors was compelling: to look at ‘real women’ themselves, not mythical women or goddesses, and to emphasize their bodies and names.

It’s a treasure trove for anyone interested in women in the ancient world.

This book appeared just as I was on the point of completing my doctoral thesis. It helped me to understand the importance of examining a queen and/or elite premodern woman’s networks—familial, political, diplomatic, friendship and how these networks underpinned her use of both soft and indeed hard power. When the document trail goes cold in the archives, looking more closely at female networks and how they played out is a great way of overcoming gaps and erasures—both deliberate and accidental. It remains a durable and very influential study and a bonus for non-Ibericists as it is in English.

I first encountered Herodotus—the “Father of History”—when studying Ancient Greek for the UK A-level exams. I read the Greek text laboriously, with help from Aubrey de Selincourt’s translation. My teacher and fellow students could hardly believe that I didn’t find Book Two, which covers the customs of the Egyptians, boring. They were also surprised that I wasn’t contemptuous of Herodotus’s willingness to record what he was told without judgment.

The myth Herodotus created—of a Western world devoted to the rule of law and the freedom of individuals under that law, in opposition to a “despotic” East—has echoed down the years. It has also been accompanied by a skeptical, even cynical, approach to any claims of miracles or almost divine insight. However, what I learned from Herodotus was that the Greeks were conscious of other, older, and sometimes more impressive “barbarian” cultures all around them. I thought… show more.

I have chosen this work for the Egyptology list because Ancient Egypt must be ideally analyzed into a regional context, which overpasses its borders. In this sense, the present work is a magnificent example of how all the cultures of the Near East were integrated within a network of more or less fluid contacts.

Professor Liverani's work shows the mastery of the great scholar who knows all the sources and analyzes them from a new diplomatic, economic, anthropological, and political perspective.