Suggested Readings

Mathura
Niagara
Amiens
Moriah

Agarwal, Ashvini. Rise and Fall of the Imperial Guptas. Delhi:Motilal Banarsidass, 1989. A good survey of the later Guptas.

Avari, Burjor. India. The Ancient Past. A History of the Indian Subcontinent from 7000 BCE to AD 1200. London: Routledge, 2007. Standard, textbook-style discussion of the subcontinent’s ancient history.

Bowersock, G.W., et. al. eds, Interpreting Late Antiquity. Essays on the Postclassical World (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2001), 219-37. Accompanies the Encyclopedia of Late Antiquity, with essays by leading scholars in the field.

Brown, Peter. The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1971. A trend-setting reinterpretation of the end of the “classical” world.

—. The Rise of Western Christendom. Triumph and Diversity, 200-1000 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, Inc. 2003. A comprehensive account of the first millennium of Christianity in western Eurasia.

Fowden, Garth. Empire to Commonwealth. Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996. A compelling discussion of monotheism’s impact on Rome and Sassanid Persia, and what Fowden calls the “First Byzantine Commonwealth,” in the Fertile Crescent.

Green, Peter. Alexander to Actium. The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1990. An excellent, comprehensive analysis of Hellenistic history, with a good chapter on the Bactrian Greeks.

Hourani, George F. Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Modern times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. The only major discussion of seafaring and premodern trade routes between the Red Sea and the Indian littoral.

Mann, Richard D. The Rise of Mahasena. The Transformation of Skanda-Karttikeya in North India from the Kusana to the Gupta Empires. Leiden: Brill, 2011. A relevant discussion of Mahasena, a Hindu deity, and its spread from Kusana to the northern subcontinent.

Mookerji, Radhakumud. The Gupta Empire. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007. A survey of the Gupta Empire as a whole.

Olivelle, Patrick, ed. Between the Empires. Society in India, 300 BCE to 400 CE. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. A study of the inter-imperial period in northern Indian history, ending with the Gupta empire.

Parker, Grant. The Making of Roman India. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011 [reissue]. An important study of the Roman conception of India, and the sources of Roman knowledge of the East.

Quintanilla, Sonya Rhie. History of Early Stone Sculpture at Mathura, ca. 150 BCE-100 CE. Leiden: Brill, 2007. An art historian’s discussion of the earliest statuary at Mathura.

Rapson, E.J. Ancient India. From the Earliest Times to the First Century A.D. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. Another, recent survey of earliest Indian history.

Srinivasan, Doris Meth. Mathura. The Cultural Heritage. [n.p.]: South India Books, 1989.

Tarn, William Woodthorpe. The Greeks in Bactria and India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [reissue]. A classic of twentieth-century historiography, Tarn’s work surveys the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms and their interactions with the subcontinent’s kingdoms.

Thapar, Romila. A History of India. Volume I. London: Penguin, 1990. A good, concise account of pre-Mughal India.

Whittow, Mark. The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1996. Whittow’s book analyzes major trends and historiographical problems in Byzantine history, arguing for the reign of Heraclius, not that of Justinian, as the major break with the ancient Roman Empire.

Blackhawk, Ned. Violence Over the Land. Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. An important study of Indian-colonist warfare.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. [n.p.]: Hill & Wang, 2003 [revised ed.]. Cronon’s study is one of the most important works in environmental history, as well as a major contribution to our understanding of the New England environment’s role in Indian-colonial wars.

Dowd, Gregory Evans. War Under Heaven. Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. The best recent account of Pontiac’s Rebellion.

Griffin, Patrick. American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier. [n.p.]: Hill & Wang, 2008. This fascinating book examines the American Revolution on the northwest frontier, and the messy realities of a war waged among natives, Americans, and the British.

Jaenen, Cornelius. Friend and Foe. Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976.

Jennings, Francis. The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984. Explores some of the basic historiographical issues in the history of the Iroquois.

Hamalainen, Pekka. Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. A major, current study of the Comanche, exploring the American settlement of western North American from the natives’ point of view.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in American, 1580-1640. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1980.

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War. King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Merrell, James H. Into the American Woods. Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier. New York: W.W. Norton & company, 2000. Applies recent borderlands and identity theory to the history of the Old Northwest.

Marshall, P.J. The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume II: the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Richter, Daniel K., and James H. Merrell, eds. Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and their neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987.

Richter, Daniel K. The Ordeal of the People of the Longhouse: The peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992. One of the most important monographs published on the Iroquois in English.

—. Looking East from Indian Country. A Native History of Early America. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Reconfigures early American history, viewing colonial expansion from the natives’ perspective.

Tanner, Helen Hornbeck, ed. Atlas of Great Lakes Indian history. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. The best encyclopedic reference for Great Lakes-area native history.

Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. The Settling of North America. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Trigger, Bruce. The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1972. The only comprehensive English-language history of the Huron.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. A groundbreaking study of Indian-colonist relations, reconfiguring the traditional narrative to address the complex interactions between the two sides from first contacts to the War of 1812.

Witgen, Michael. An Infinity of Nations. How the Native New World Shaped Early North America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. A new [2012] discussion of early American settlement from the point of view of the Ojibwa nation.

Brittain, Vera. Testament of Youth. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. A searing account of the war; Brittain served as nurse in London, on Malta, and on the Western Front.

Ferguson, Niall. The Pity of War. Explaining World War I. New York: Basic Books, 2000. A perverse, highly polemical (the war dragged on because British soldiers enjoyed combat?) account of the war, excoriating most established orthodoxies about the conflict.

Graves, Robert. Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. New York: Anchor, 1958. A classic memoir, savaging England and its ruling classes’ behavior during the war.

Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. [n.p.]: Mariner Books, 2012. A recent, unorthodox study of the war, focusing on pacificists and opposition to the war, particularly in England.

Jünger, Ernst. Storm of Steel. New York: Penguin Classics, 2004. Trans. Michael Hoffmann. One of the most important, disturbing accounts of the war, based on the trench diaries of the author.

Keegan, John. The Face of Battle. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. A classic account of the experience of battle, with a study of the Battle of the Somme.

—. The First World War. Toronto: Key Port Books, 1998. A comprehensive, readable one-volume survey of the conflict, with extensive coverage of the closing months of 2006.

Meyer, G.J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 1918. [n.p.]: Delacorte, 2006. A readable study of the war written for a mass audience, with nuanced portrayals of specific aspects of the conflict.

Neiburg, Michael S., ed. The World War I Reader. New York: NYU Press, 2006. An excellent collection of primary documents and secondary scholarship covering every aspect of the war.

Tuchman, Barbara. The Proud Tower. New York: Ballantine Books, 1996 [rep. ed]. A classic portrait of the world before the war, with an excellent discussion of the English ruling class, “the patricians.”

—. The Guns of August. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, Inc., 1994. A detailed study of the lead-up to the war and its first month.

Winter, Jay and Blaine Baggett. The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin Studio Books, 1996. A companion to the PBS documentary series, with hundreds of photographs and a narrative history of the war.