Reading List - US General

I. Surveys and Historiography

Appleby, Joyce. Telling the Truth about History. 1996.

Bender, Thomas. A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It. New York: Knopf, 1948.

Michael Hunt, American Ascendancy

Eric Foner, ed., The New American History

Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity” Question and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

II. Pre-Colonial North America and European Contact

Brooks, James. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport: Greenwood Pub. Co., 1972.

______. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900.

Dowd, Gregory. A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815. Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1992.

Hamalainen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empire, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

III. Colonial America and the Atlantic World

Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction. New York: Knopf, 1986. (E188.B34 1986)

Bushman, Richard. From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765. Harvard, 1980. (F97.B89)

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. 1975.

Morgan, Philip. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis in 1692. New York: Random House, 2003.

Ulrich, Laurel. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Alan Taylor, American Colonies

Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible

IV. The Revolutionary Era and Independence

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967.

Breen, T. H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. New York: Norton, 1972.

_______. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1991.

V. The Early Republic

Freeman, Joanne. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Harper, John. American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Cambridge, 2007.

McCoy, Drew. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Silverstone, Scott. Divided Union: The Politics of War in the Early American Republic.

Sharp, James Roger. American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Onuf, Peter. Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2001.

VI. Antebellum America

Altschuler, Glenn C. and Stuart M. Blumin. Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.

Blumin, Stuart M. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900. New York: Cambridge, 1989.

Bushman, Richard. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Holt, Michael F. Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Montgomery, David. Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Ryan, Mary. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1760-1896. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. (HD8085.N53 W54 1984)

Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: Norton, 2005.

VII. Antebellum Slavery

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1998.

Fogel, Robert and Stanely Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. New York: Norton, 1995.

Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

Holt, Michael F. The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005.

Newman, Richard. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Wright, Gavin. Slavery and American Economic Development. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

VIII. Civil War

Ash, Stephen. A Year in the South: Four Lives in 1865. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Ayers, Edward L. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863.

Beringer, Richard. Why the South Lost the Civil War. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. (E487.W48 1986)

Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Random House, 2008.

Gallagher, Gary. The Confederate War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

______. This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

IX. America Reconstructed

Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2001.

Hahn, Stephen. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2003.

Richardson, Heather Cox. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.

Eric Foner, Reconstruction

X. Immigration and Industrialization

Bensel, Richard Franklin. The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Harvard, 2001.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race.

Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

XI. Expansion and American Imperialism

Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991.

Isenberg, Andrew. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Jacobson, Matthew. Barbarian Virtues: THe United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Limerick, Patricia. Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.

XII. Age of Reform

Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Knopf, 2006.

McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America. 2003.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era. New York: Norton, 2008.

Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. New York: Macmillan, 1967.

Willrich, Michael. City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

XIII. Society and the First World War

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford, 1975.

Hawley, Ellis. The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order. New York: St. Martin, 1979.

Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: Dell Publishing, 1962.

XIV. The Jazz Age: Culture and Consumerism

Enstad, Nan. Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

XV. Depression, New Deal, and World War II

Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Fraser, Steve and Gary Gerstle. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Kennedy, David. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Stock, Catherine. Main Street in Crisis: The Great Depression and the Old Middle Class on the Northern Plains. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

XVI. The Homefront Mid-Century

Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf, 2003. (HC110.C6 C537 2003)

Glickman, Lawrence. A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Jacobs, Meg. Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Kerber, Linda. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.

Sullivan, Patricia. Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

XVII. The Cold War: Truman to LBJ

Borstelmann, Thomas. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena. Cambridge: Harvard, 2001.

Chen, Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Dudziak, Mary. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. New York: Columbia University Press, 1972.

Gaddis, John Lewis. The Cold War: A New History. Penguin, 2006.

Leffler, Melvyn P. For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. New York: Macmillan, 2007.

May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Weiss, Jessica. To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom, and Social Change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times.

Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990

XVIII. Black Freedom and Beyond

Austin, Curtis. Up Against the Wall: Violence in the Making and Unmaking of the Black Panther Party. University of Arkansas Press, 2008.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Chappell, David. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. (E185.61 .C5435 2004)

Cobble, Dorothy Sue. The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. (E185.61 .C5435 2004)

Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Gilmore, Glenda. Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. New York: Norton, 2008.

Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1987.

Jackson, Thomas F. From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

McLean, Nancy. Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Payne, Charles. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Self, Robert. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Tyson, Timothy. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Sara Evans, Tidal Wave

XIX. Kennedy, Johnson, and American Liberalism

Boyle, Kevin. The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1960. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Flamm, Michael. Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s. Columbia University Press, 2007.

Hacker, Jacob. The Divided Welfare State: The Battle Over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Isserman, Maurice and Michael Kazin. America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Jackson, Kenneth. The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Mackenzie, Calvin and Robert Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s. Penguin, 2008.

Schulman, Bruce. The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics. Da Capo Press, 2002.

Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

XX. The Long Conservative Movement

Andrew, John. The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics. Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Carter, Daniel T. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

Kruse, Kevin. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton, 2005.

Lassiter, Matthew. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Nash, George H. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945. New York: Basic Books, 1976.

Perlstein, Rick. Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986.

________. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. New York: Scribner, 2008.

Schulman, Bruce and Julian Zelizer. Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2008.

Wilentz, Sean. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008. New York: Harper, 2008.

XXI. America in Recent Times

Armstrong, Karin. The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. New York: Ballantine Book, 2000.

Bacevich, Andrew. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Gelvin, James. Modern Middle East: A History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Kapuscinski, Ryszard. Shah of Shahs. New York: Vintage International, 1992.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 2006.