Task 17: Read a book about little-known history.

[Krista]

Share and discuss book ideas for
Task 17: Read a book about little-known history.

[Neil]

I have a few options here and will prob end up reading all of them this year

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

[Karen]

My favorite category:

Femina by Janina Ramírez

Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life

Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year by Eleanor Parker

Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain

The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family by Kerri K. Greenidge

Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America by Sylviane A. Diouf

[Dee]

I have these on my TBR: The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women's Movement, Story of a Murder: The Wives, the Mistress, and Dr. Crippen, and Jane Austen's Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector's Quest to Find the Women Writers Who Shaped a Legend

[Denise]

I'm reading
Baseball's Leading Lady: Effa Manley and the Rise and Fall of the Negro Leagues
also possible:
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore
A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

[Rebecca]

I'm not sure what qualifies here. I'm thinking about The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II, or 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

[Bekah™]

I plan on reading Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food but I read The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison this year and it was pretty good.

[Rafael]

I'll be reading The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King by Rich Cohen

[Audra]

I'm reading Stealing Lincoln's Body.

[Carly Really Very Normal]

I'm going to be reading "The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land" by Sally Denton.

[Nayab]

For this I am picking up Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life and The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

[Emily]

I have been meaning to read it anyway, so I'm thinking about doing The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising.

[Elizabeth]

I absolutely love categories like this, and I love seeing all the recommendations for the variety of histories shared here and elsewhere.

I have a book I'm waiting on for a group read, and I was thinking about doing something that would work for this category while I wait for it. I'm leaning towards either A Curious History of Sex by Kate Lister or Black Cowboys of the Old West: True, Sensational, And Little-Known Stories From History, First Edition by Tricia Martineau Wagner.

I would also recommend Harlots, Whores & Hackabouts: A History of Sex for Sale by Kate Lister, The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts by Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martínez, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology by Deirdre Cooper Owens, and Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital by David M. Oshinsky.

[Gail]

Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat ― An American History looks like might be interesting for this challenge, and I'll also recommend a favorite of mine: Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times

[Sarah]

A good one I've read that maybe isn't as well-known is by author Chris Enss (female writer specializing in Western nonfiction):"The Pinks: The First Women Detectives, Operatives, and Spies with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency."
The Pinks includes some Civil War spy stories and even a secret plan to save Lincoln.

[Rhanda]

I read and enjoyed Public Faces, Secret Lives: A Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement which was certainly little-known history to me. This book is written in a semi-academic manner but was accessible enough to not be too challenging.

I also really liked Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction which could also perhaps work for the "Read a book about a piece of media you love (a TV show, a movie, a band, etc)." prompt.

[Tanu]

Does anyone have any recommendations for Oceanian or (East, SE, South) Asian and/or African history? (Please no American slave trade by way of Africa!)

I was thinking of In the Belly of the Congo but not sure if that qualifies.

I'm not sure how little known it is outside Tas, but I highly recommend Truganini for this challenge.

Thanks :)

[Elizabeth]

Elizabeth wrote: "I have a book I'm waiting on for a group read, and I was thinking about doing something that would work for this category while I wait for it. I'm leaning towards either A Curious History of Sex by Kate Lister or Black Cowboys of the Old West: True, Sensational, And Little-Known Stories From History, First Edition by Tricia Martineau Wagner."

I did read A Curious History of Sex, but I feel like it wasn't specific enough for me to count it for this, so I used it for a more general nonfiction task for my personal reading challenge. It's still worth the read, and I wouldn't judge anyone else using it for this, although I think Lister's other book, Harlots, Whores, and Hackabouts, is a better fit for this task.

Very much hoping to do Black Cowboys of the Old West for this task now.

[Teresa]

I read The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. It was eye opening.

It looked at neighborhoods across the nation, however, it opened with my childhood neighborhood, Rollingwood, California. The WWII effort expanded the population of Richmond and the Bay Area, California, USA from 20,000 to 100,000 people, working in the shipyard, oil refinery, factories, etc. In 1943, Rollingwood was planned and built to expand suburban housing for whites only. Each house had to have a bedroom with a separate entrance, so the white family could rent a room to a white worker. That was my bedroom.

I never knew why my bedroom had an exterior door. It was scary, me being younger than 10 years old. I won't discuss this with my family of origin because they are all still overtly racist and our opinions would clash. This book has shed new light on my childhood. I read it through the library and I might buy it.

[Yrinsyde]

I think I will read Australian Gypsies - their Secret History. I had no idea there were Romani in Australia!

[Robin]

I'll be reading Give Her Credit: The Untold Account of a Women's Bank That Empowered a Generation

[Elizabeth]

Elizabeth wrote: "Elizabeth wrote: "Very much hoping to do Black Cowboys of the Old West for this task now."

I'm still very much planning on reading this book in the coming weeks (copy ready to go and all), but I ended up going for something else in the immediate.

I read The Puerto Rican War by John Vasquez Mejias. It's a graphic history. The art and text are done entirely in woodcut. It's about armed insurrections in Puerto Rico and an attempted assassination against US president Truman all in an effort to gain independence for Puerto Rico. It's worth the read. Especially for the art.

[Teresa]

Other books I might get to this year are The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power and The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis.

[Katie]

I feel like there are so many good titles to choose for this one, I haven't settled on any yet.

[Betty]

I’m planning on reading The Burning: Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

I just read Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson and when the Tulsa Race Massacre was mentioned in it, I realized how little I knew about it.

[GailW]

I read Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook. A graphic novel, it is the true story of when the author went to college in 1983 during a time of "political division, fear-mongering, anti-intellectualism, the death of democratic institutions, and the relentless rebellion of reading." This was of particular interest to me because my Dad was actually a Marine stationed in South Korea during the Korean war. The book was written in 2020 and seems all to timely to me right now.

[Krista]

Ooooooh, I think I found a good one. Now I just have to wait my turn from the library:

The Northwomen: Untold Stories From the Other Half of the Viking World

[Jennifer]

The Parted Earth by Anjail Enjeti is about the partition of India in 1947. When I read this with my book club, we all agreed it was interesting to learn more about this time period.

[Nancy]

Rebecca wrote: "I'm not sure what qualifies here. I'm thinking about The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, [book:A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Sp..."

I loved A Woman of No Importance, it was such an engaging read!

[Erin]

I'm thinking about reading The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle for this prompt!

[Teemah :)]

I have read HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRCA.
I relly felt touched by this since i am an african and the contienent
is going through a lot.
The book talks about slave trade ad the results from this in the morden day.

[Teemah :)]

Irecently finished by
TODD G.BUCHHOLZ

[Judith]

If anyone hasn't read it, I cannot recommend The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich highly enough.

I may go with another of her books, or with David Olusoga's World's War

[Sherri]

I read The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, from the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement. 5 stars. The author narrated the book & she did a great job.

[Rebecca]

Nancy wrote: "Rebecca wrote: "I'm not sure what qualifies here. I'm thinking about The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, [book:A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of..."

I loved it! Virginia Hall was ahead of her time.

[Jill]

I read Come Fly the World.

[Bill]

I read Intellivision: How a Videogame System Battled Atari and Almost Bankrupted Barbie®, which feels kind of like cheating because I was reading it to write a book review (for ALA Choice magazine.) It was a great and thorough book on the systems history -- there's SO much focus on Atari and the NES in other histories that some of the advances, innovations, and trends (good and bad) in the game industry that started with other companies aren't given enough attention. This helped fill in some gaps in video game history for me!

[Kathy]

I read Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky - 4/23/25. Really interesting to hear ALL the history of this hospital.

[Acidic Quagga]

I've decided to read The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn. It's a work of fiction based on a true story about a deadly woman sniper during WWII.

[Denise]

I read The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore