The 100 best easy history books

The Prince is required reading in political science, philosophy, history, and humanities curricula worldwide and is among the most widely assigned non-fiction texts in higher education. It appears on every syllabus for political philosophy and political theory, from introductory undergraduate courses to graduate seminars. Few texts of any era command this breadth of curricular presence.

A foundation text of Western thought, assigned across classics, history, political science and international relations, and a fixture of Great Books programs. The U.S. Naval War College has built its strategy teaching around it since the 1970s.

Published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, it has stayed in print ever since and is a set text in courses on historiography, the Enlightenment and English prose. It appears on every major list of essential works of history in English.

Niccolò Machiavelli spent the last decade of his life under house arrest, banned from Florence's political world, and wrote the Discourses on Livy as a systematic attempt to teach what he could no longer practice. Working through Titus Livy's history of Rome book by book, Machiavelli extracts from each episode a principle of republican governance — how to found a city, sustain a republic, manage armies, treat conquered peoples, handle conspiracies, and survive the inevitable corruption of institutions. The argument runs to 142 chapters across three books, each one a small essay: he states a thesis, marshals Roman examples, and delivers a verdict. Machiavelli's Rome is not an idealized past but a working laboratory. When he recommends that a new republic must sometimes execute its founding families, or that a prince should appear virtuous rather than be virtuous, he is not being provocative — he is being precise. The Discourses is the longer and more theoretically ambitious of his two major works, and the one where his commitment to republican liberty is explicit rather than implied. Readers accustomed to political philosophy as abstract theory will find this text unusual: it thinks in cases, in generals, in the specific behavior of specific tribunes during specific sieges. The Victorian translation adds a layer of archaic syntax to the Renaissance argument. What emerges is a political science conducted before the term existed — unsentimental, empirical, and still asking questions no subsequent political thinker has fully answered.

The Constitution is the founding document of the United States and is taught at every level of American education, in history, civics, law and political theory. It is among the most widely taught texts in the world, though this particular free edition is just one copy of it.

Maus is widely taught in schools and universities as a central Holocaust text and as the key work of the graphic novel, and it won a Pulitzer Prize special award in 1992 for the combined work. It is now standard in comics studies and memory studies.

Parallel Lives is among the most foundational texts of Western classical education, central to curricula in classics, ancient history, philosophy, and political thought for over two millennia. Shakespeare drew directly on it for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens; Montaigne read it constantly; Rousseau credited it with forming his character. Wikipedia articles exist in 37 languages, reflecting its global recognition as a canonical text of antiquity.

Hemingway reduced fiction to one old man, one marlin, and the Gulf Stream, and proved that a story stripped to its barest elements could carry the weight of a parable about endurance, craft, and the dignity of losing. The novella's final image — the skeleton of the great fish picked clean at the dock — is among the most perfectly earned symbols in American literature.

One of the most assigned art history textbooks globally, continuously in print since 1950 and translated into more than 30 languages. A fixture in introductory art history courses at universities worldwide, it has sold millions of copies and remains the default entry point for the discipline.

Required reading in virtually every art history curriculum worldwide, from introductory surveys to graduate seminars. Vasari's Lives appears on syllabi for Renaissance studies, Western civilization, and art historiography courses across Europe and North America. It is the foundational text of the discipline — no course on Italian Renaissance art omits it.