I've been trying to find history books that are old or in danger of being banned. One I liked, "Six Months in Kansas," by Hannah Anderson Ropes (1856). Pre-civil war in a frontier area. First an arduous journey from Boston, then primitive housing, then a bitter winter, then cholera and pneumonia, then things go bad.

And a promising one I just started, "The Thirteenth Tribe," by Arthur Koestler (1976), the history of the Khazars. So far it's more the history of the region, describing the power structures of Byzantium, Rome, the first big push of the Islamic movement, all of which ran up against the various nomads like the Huns, Magyars, Bulgars and Khazars. Khazar comes from a root word for nomads. This is another view of a brutal world that was mostly illiterate (the nomads) and therefore what was written is fragmentary and biased. Later he gets more into the Ashkenazi but just this first part is quite interesting.