I'd recommend Anne Curry's Great Battles: Agincourt. While it contains a history of the battle itself, it is primarily a work about how one of England's most famous victories became such a famous victory. Agincourt is, if we're honest, a kind of boring battle that achieved relatively little and should probably be out-shined by other moments during the Hundred Years War. However, it is instead possibly the most famous medieval battle, at least in the English speaking world, and Anne Curry wrote an engaging book on both why that is, and how historians have written about the battle from when it occurred to the modern day. The whole thing is only a little over 200 pages long, and it's a great read both for the battle itself as well as what it shows about the practice of history and how it spreads into the popular imagination.

[Sapiens: A Brief History Of Humankind] (https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari-ebook/dp/B00ICN066A?ie=UTF8&me=&ref_=mt_kindle) by Yuval Noah Harari.

"From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?"

A few books that I have really enjoyed lately (all are popular history, not academic style):

The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenburg. An entertaining read about hygiene throughout the ages in various cultures (especially the Western world). Covers a lot of questions that I see pop up on this sub once in a while.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. This one is very well known but I never had time to pick it up before I finished school. I think this is one that every history buff needs to read at some point! Lots of fascinating ideas.

The Once and Future World by J.B. MacKinnon. An ecological history (historical ecology?) book that will spark the imagination of anyone interested in the pre-Columbian Americas. For that reason it's a great companion to 1491.

Schama, Dead Certainties. It's a weird book, and a full-on immersion into the deep (and some would say obnoxious) end of the postmodernism swimming pool. But it's helped me more than anything else to understand what a huge - and necessary, positive - role storytelling plays in historical writing.

Using a few case studies from American history, Schama demonstrates how the same facts can give us radically different versions of events depending on how we narrativize them, and he shows how much fun this can be; I think about it often when I need to remember what history's really about (turning facts about the past into human-centred stories).