What are your favorite non-fiction books, that are in the following genres?

Hey folks 🙂 I am looking to find non-fiction book recommendations that live in any of the following categories.

The more specific/ niche, the better. e.g. Kenyan books on architecture. Portuguese fashion history. Byzantine illuminated manuscripts. Iranian textiles. Madeira woodworking. Tapirs. The history of tape measures.

Please include whatever books you recommend, AND each genre from my list, that they're attached to.

Thank you in advance!

HISTORY

Ancient

• Ancient Greek civilization and daily life
• Daily life in classical societies
• Global lost civilizations and archaeology
• Decipherment of ancient scripts
• Linguistic archaeology
• Mesoamerican, Minoan, Mycenean civilizations and archaeology

Canada

• World War I and time period-relevant history
• Indigenous reconciliation and legal history
• True crime and murder history
• 19th-century Ontario, French Canadian, and New Brunswick genealogy and archival research
• Environmental disasters
• Environmental history of the Great Lakes
• Rail transport history
• Immigrants from Portugal who landed in rural Ontario, Canada in the mid 1950s

US

• Mennonites from Switzerland, who moved to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania

UK

• Anglo-Saxon early medieval English history
• Scottish whisky distillation and cultural history
• English Catholic resistance and Tudor religious persecution
• Victorian true crime and serial murder history
• 17th-century English diary and social history
• Women codebreakers of Bletchley Park in World War II
• Anglo-Saxon women rulership and biography
• English etymology and word origins
• History and linguistics of swearing and profanity
• History of postal systems and communication
• 17th-century English disasters
• Early modern English country house and estate life
• British architectural history and building identification
• Victorian true crime and serial murder history

Ireland

• Independence and the 1916 Easter Rising history
• Scholarship and early medieval intellectual history
• Celtic art, history, and visual culture

Global (can be anywhere, bonus if it's less typical or more obscure)

• Viking military campaigns and early medieval warfare
• Viking daily life and society
• World War II cryptography and codebreaking
• Atypical holocaust historical testimony
• Ornamental hermitism
• Gothic architecture history
• Early 20th-century aviation memoirs
• Women in espionage in World War II
• Women in court life in early modern period France
• Medieval English social history and daily life
• Social history of clothing and textiles
• Socio-economic and cultural history of textiles
• Architectural design inspiration
• Medieval illuminated manuscripts in Ireland, the UK, also Byzantine and Jewish

General

• Genealogy
• Ancient craft-work, e.g. Dutch lace of the 1600s, Macedonian pottery

Spiritualities

• Indigenous healing practices and ethnobotany
• Elements of nature in folklore and mythological traditions

Transportation

• Global transportation systems and technological reference
• Historical travel guides (rail, by horse, by carriage)
• History of early communication technologies and the telegraph

Social and Gender Studies

• Medieval women’s sexuality and social history
• Global history of sexuality
• Inclusive coming-of-age stories for nonconforming boys

SCIENCE

Prepping, Survival, and Risk

• Practical survival and emergency preparedness guides
• Crisis survival and disaster response manuals
• Wilderness survival manuals and bushcraft
• Existential risk and human extinction studies
• Zombie survival and preparedness

General

• Physicist reflections on curiosity and scientific thinking

Industrial

• Occupational health and safety history of poisoning of workers (radium, coal miners, asbestos, arsenic)
• American labor and deindustrialization
• Ironworking
• Blacksmithing
• Chainmaille

Nuclear

• Cold War cultural diplomacy
• Chernobyl first-hand experiences
• Japan, Fukishima first-hand experiences
• History of global nuclear disasters

Medical

• American biomedical research
• Popular science of human cadavers and death practices globally
• Early forensic toxicology and poison science history
• ADHD and neurodivergent relationships and lived experience
• Neurodiversity theory and critiques of capitalism

Animals

• General zoology and animal references
• Marine biology and deep-sea ecosystems narrative nonfiction

Plants

• Bryology and intimate ecological nature writing
• Psychedelic mushrooms
• Ethnobotany
• History of LSD usage in therapy

Geography

• Volcanic disasters
• Earthquakes
• Geological history
• Ecology and conservation biology