My favorite book of 2016 is definitely Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory by Karin Zipf, which analyzes the use of forced sterilization to deal with women showing socially undesirable qualities in early 20th century North Carolina. This book won LSU's award for best work of Southern history in 2016.

Also, I'm credited in the book, as I worked as the author's research assistant for a portion of the book's construction.

I really enjoyed Jared Hardesty's Unfreedom which looks at the social lives of African slaves in 18th century Boston. All too often northern slavery is considered as a sort of "slavery-lite" that wasn't as horrible or inhumane as the South, and Hardesty does a great job of refuting this. The last decade has seen an explosion of work on northern slavery, and it only promises to get better.

Also highly suggest Understanding and Teaching American Slavery edited by Jay and Lyerly. While the target is educators, it is very relevant and accessible for anyone interested in the current approaches to studying and engaging slavery.

I am not a historian and this book technically did not come out in 2016 (came out December 2015), but Roger Crowley's Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire was excellent, as his books tend to be. Pretty fantastic narrative of the expeditions of Portugal around the horn of African and on in to India and Southeast Asia.

Heather Ann Thompson's Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy was an incredible and gripping work of legal history, on a subject that has not gained very much attention over the years. She was able to accidentally get her hands on a lot of documents that brought to light serious misconduct on the part of New York state authorities, from the NY State Police to the Atty General to Rockefeller himself. It was shortlisted for the National Book Award and was one of the best things I've read all year.

I'm working on a project on prohibition, and Lisa McGirr's The War On Alcohol was a fascinating and comprehensive analysis of the causes, enforcement and effects of prohibition.

She builds on the narrative that prohibition was an attempt by middle and upper class protestant reformers to control and modify worker leisure behavior and culture. She also makes a credible case that the federal efforts at the enforcement of national prohibition is one of the biggest expansions of federal authority created in a single amendment.

Really interesting stuff, would highly recommend.

I have enjoyed Hero of the Empire. While it mainly focuses on Churchill's exploits in the Boer War and his escape as a prisoner of war, it also gives a basic overview of the Boer War.

I'm not a historian (bioarchaeologist by training), but I'm currently enjoying the Nobel prize-winning historian Svetlana Alexievich's Second-Hand Time (trans. into English by Bela Shayevich) on the fall of the USSR and the rise of capitalism in Russia/former USSR in the 1990's. Alexievich takes a unique approach to her research and presentation by documenting each interview she undertakes to present a kaleidoscopic viewpoint from a population. Family memories of the Soviet years are recalled by so many individual voices in the book that it gives you the reader a wider feeling of what it must have been like to live there, the impact of glasnost and perestroika. If you are interested in Soviet/Russian history at all I'd recommend it.

It is my first time reading Alexievich and I've read that this book is the fifth in a cycle of 5 books. Zinky Boys, her history on the Soviet war in Afghanistan, is due to be published in English next year and I'm keen to read that.

Edit: removed apostrophe.