I think you are misunderstanding what a history book is. Any work of literature (and history is a work of literature) is necessarily a product of the context of its time and place of production.

That means any book reflects the opinions (I don't like the word bias for this kind of conversation) of the author, not what the people we want to study wanted or thought. That is always true, and there's no way to moderate for that.

What you can do, and what we do, is read not only many scholarly opinions, but also the primary sources, and try to navigate between the differing opinions based on what we see in the primary sources.

Are some books better for this than others? Yes. A book published by an academic press is going to be better than a book published by a (cough ^mike ^duncan cough) podcaster, because the academic book will go through the peer review process, so you know other scholars will have looked at that book and said it's fine, even if they disagree with it. That process doesn't mean the book is free of opinions though, and in a lot of ways seeing how different historians view the past and interpret the primary sources is really the most exciting and most important part of what we do.

Recovering the past in the way Ranke meant when he said "Wie es eigentlich gewesen” - or "as it really was" - is something we haven't believed possible since... the 60s? What we have is a constant cycle of interpretation and reinterpretation, and all of that is fundamentally political - which is something Aristotle knew, for a matter of fact. Humans are political animals, and the acts of documenting human events have political agendas.

I believe what good historians do is try to understand what someone wrote, to whom, and why, and that applies as much to reading a modern history as it does to ancient history.

My favorite example of this is Syme's Roman Revolution, which is a classic still, published in 1939. His book examines the supposed collapse of the Roman Republic and the rise of Augustus, and paints Augustus as a military dictator.

Syme was writing in Britain in 1939. What could possibly be happening in his own life that made him think of dictators? Do you see my point? I'm not saying he is wrong, but he's responding to his own lived experience as well as to the sources he's reading. That's what you need to sort out when you pick up a history book.

A good place to start when considering the material is the press. University presses peer review their material, which means that other experts in a specific field (the 'peers') have reviewed it and given their approval of the content. In this way, academic presses can (not always, see below) express a sort of academic consensus on a topic, or at least confirm the assertions of a text as valid.

You should also look into the author themselves. Everybody has biases, and one could argue that any sort of thesis in itself biases a text by providing a targeted lens through which to analyze events. However, some folks - even academics - can give deeply skewed information. It's for this reason, too, that checking the press will help. For your topics, for instance, you could expect a book published by a conservative Christian university press to have a strong anti-revolutionary, pro-establishment slant. If an author's social media or other public presence seems to indicate a strong bias one way or another on a topic, expect it to come through in their writing on said topic.

Finally, consider when the author wrote a text, especially if they have a large body of work in that field. One of my favorite historians in my corner of learning, Karl Arndt, develops a stronger and stronger anti-communist tone throughout his career; but his career lasts almost the entire Cold War, so. Also, the context of a piece is just generally useful for knowing how to interpret its present value.

Books from non-academic presses are generally considered "popular" histories, are not peer reviewed, and consequently much more prone to error or extreme bias. There's some good popular history, but it's best to be careful if you're looking for objectivity.

Sources: General best practices, I suppose? Not sure if I need mega credentials or citations to answer this one.

I direct you to the links collected in response to As historians, how do you find sources and put them into context when writing a book? with special attention to the answers by /u/sunagainstgold, /u/caffarelli, and /u/cordis_melum.

(see below)