Books about one very specific thing throughout history (feel free to leave recs in the comments :) )
created by dinomelonn
last updated August, 2026
Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage
Patrick Elliott
Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything
Lydia Kang
Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
Jennifer Wright
The Manga Bible
Helen McCarthy
The Game Console 2.0: A Photographic History from Atari to Xbox
Evan Amos
The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
Keith Houston
Worn: A People's History of Clothing
Sofi Thanhauser
Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex
Rachel Feltman
Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol
Mallory O'Meara
A History of the Breast
Marilyn Yalom
Radical: The Science, Culture, and History of Breast Cancer in America
Kate Pickert
Butts: A Backstory
Heather Radke
The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History
Katherine Ashenburg
The Brewer's Tale: A History of the World According to Beer
William Bostwick
Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail
Stephen R. Bown
A History of Tea: The Life and Times of the World's Favorite Beverage
Laura C. Martin
Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization
Iain Gately
Coal: A Human History
Barbara Freese
Butter: A Rich History
Elaine Khosrova
Heart
Sandeep Jauhar
Paper: Paging Through History
Mark Kurlansky
Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
Rose George
Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
Katie Goh
Curious Coffins and Riveting Rituals: Death Practices Around the World
YY Liak
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
Walter Scheidel
Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery
Ira Rutkow
Human History on Drugs: An Utterly Scandalous but Entirely Truthful Look at History Under the Influence
Sam Kelly
Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World: A History
William Alexander
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
John Green
Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation
Jen Gunter
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