History M.A. Examination Recommended Reading: Early America

Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial

            North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York:

            Hill and Wang, 1996.

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in

            North America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Bonomi, Patricia U. Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion and Politics in

            Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender,

            Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North

            Carolina Press, 1996.

Bushman, Richard L. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities.

            New York: Random House, 1993.

Galenson, David. White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis.

            New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Greene, Jack P., and J.R. Pole, editors. British Colonial America: Essays

            in the New History of the Early Modern Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

            University Press, 1984.

 Greven, Philip J., Jr. Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in

            Colonial Andover, Massachusetts. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

            Press, 1970.

Hall, David. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religion in

            Early New England.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Hoffer, Peter Charles. Law and People in Colonial America. Rev. ed.  Baltimore:

            Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro,

            1550-1812.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press

            for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1968.

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in

            Colonial New England. New York: Random House, 1989, (orig. 1987).

Lockridge, Kenneth A. A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham,

            Massachusetts, 1636-1736.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1970.

McCusker, John J., and Russell Menard. The Economy of British Colonial

            America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Merrell, James. The Indians' New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from

            European Contact through the Era of Removal.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.

Merrell, James. Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania

            Frontier. New York: Norton, 1999).

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

            Virginia.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1975.

Murrin, John M. "Political Development." In Jack P. Greene and J.R. Pole,

            eds. Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early

            Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

Nash, Gary B. "The Social Development of Colonial America." In Jack P.

            Greene and J.R. Pole, eds. Colonial British America: Essays in the New

            History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

            Press, 1984).

Norton, Mary Beth. "The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early

            America." American Historical Review 89 (1984): 593-619.

Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of

            Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Rutman, Darrett B. and Anita H. A Place in Time: Middlesex County,

            Virginia, 1650-1750. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984.

Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Blacks and Whites in

            Eighteenth-Century Virginia . Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University

            Press, 1987.

Vaughan, Alden T. "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in 17th Century

            Virginia." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography  97: 3

            (July 1989): 311-54.

Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670

            Through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

 

Reading List for Revolutionary and Early National Periods

Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and a New Social Order. New York: New York

            University Press, 1984.

Bailyn, Bernard.  Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.

            Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Beeman, Richard, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds. Beyond

            Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity.

            Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Ben-Atar, Doron, and Barbara B. Oberg, eds. Federalists Reconsidered.

            Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998.

Berkin, Carol. Revolutionary Mothers. New York: Knopf, 2005.

Calloway, Colin. American Revolution in Indian Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Cornell, Saul. The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting

            Tradition in America, 1788-1828. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

            Press, 1999.

Countryman, Edward. A People in Revolution.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.

Elkins, Stanley, and Eric L. McKittrick. The Age of Federalism.  New York:

            Oxford, 1993.

Frey, Sylvia. Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age.

            Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Greene, Jack P. Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the

            Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788

            Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Greene, Jack P. “‘A Posture of Hostility': A Reconsideration of Some

            Aspects of the Origins of the American Revolution." American Antiquarian

            Society Proceedings, 87, Part I (1977): 27-68.

Greene, Jack P. "An Uneasy Connection, an Analysis of the Preconditions of

            the American Revolution." In Stephen Kurtz and James Hutson, eds. Essays

            on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

            Press, 1973), 32-80.

Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven, Conn.:

            Yale University Press, 1989.

Hoxie, Frederick E., Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds. Native

            Americans and the Early Republic. Charlottesville: University Press of

            Virginia, 1999.

Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America.  New York: W.W. Norton, 1986.

Kurtz, Stephen, and James Hutson, eds. Essays on the American

            Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973.

May, Henry. The Enlightenment in America.  New York: Oxford University

            Press, 1976.

McCoy, Drew. The Elusive Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Meinig, D.W. The Shaping of America. Volume I: 1492-1800  New Haven: Yale

            University Press, 1986.

Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness,

            and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University

            Press, 1978.

Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961.

Raboteau, Albert. Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Rakove, Jack. Original Meanings. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Taylor, Alan. William Cooper’s Town. New York: Vintage, 1996.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard.  New York: Vintage, 1990.

Waldstreicher, David. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Wood, Gordon S. Creation of the American Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.

---. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1992.

Young, Alfred E., ed. The American Revolution: Explorations in the

            History of American Radicalism. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University

            Press, 1976.

Zilversmit, Arthur. The First Emancipation.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

 

The 1820s to the 1870s

Baker, Paula. “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920.” American Historical Review 89:3 (1984): 620-47.

 

Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

 

Boylan, Anne. The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

 

D’Emilio, John, and Estelle Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in     America. Rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

 

Diner, Hasia. Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

 

Flexner, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: the Woman’s Rights Movement in the United

            States. Enl.ed., with an introduction by Ellen Fitzpatrick. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

 

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

 

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

 

Ginzberg, Lori D. Women in Antebellum Reform. Wheeling, Ill,: Harlan Davidson, 2000.

 

Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

 

Hershberger, Mary. “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s.” Journal of American History 86:1 (1999): 15-40.

 

Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

 

Horton, James O., and Lois Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

 

Johnson, Paul. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

 

Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

 

Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

 

Kolchin, Peter.  American Slavery, 1619-1877. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

 

Lebsock, Suzanne. Free Women of Petersburg. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984.

 

McCurry, Stephanie. Masters of Small Worlds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

 

McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

 

Newman, Richard. The Transformation of American Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of  North Carolina Press, 2002.

 

Rock, Howard, Paul Gilje, and Robert Asher, eds. American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

 

Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991.

 

Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. New York: Knopf, 1986.

 

Stewart, James Brewer. Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

 

Thomas, Emory M. The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865. New York: Harper and Row, 1979.

 

Walters, Ronald G. American Reformers, 1815-1860. Rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang,

 

Watson, Harry L. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990.

 

 

The 1870s to the 1920s

 

        OVERVIEWS

Ayers, Edward. Southern Crossing: A History of the American South 1877-1906. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Trachtenburg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

 

        RACE AND ETHNICITY

 

Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955.

Hunter, Tera. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Kraut, Alan M. The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921.

            Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1985.

Lewis, David Levering. W.E.B. DuBois: The Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. New York: Henry Holt, 1993.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.

Weeks, Philip. Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States, 1829-1890. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1990.

 

        WOMEN/GENDER

Gilmore, Glenda. Gender and Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Muncy, Robyn. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Sklar, Kathryn Kish. Florence Kelly and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900.  New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995.

 

        URBANIZATION/INDUSTRIALIZATION/LABOR

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

Dubofsky, Melvin.  Industrialism and the American Worker. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1996.

Mohl, Raymond. The New City: Urban America in the Industrial Age, 1860-1920. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1985.

Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Porter, Glenn. The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1920. 2nd ed. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992.

Voss, Kim. The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

 

 

        POPULISM/PROGRESSIVISM 

Chambers, John W. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Gilmore, Glenda. Who Were the Progressives? Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2002.

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

Link, Arthur, and Richard McCormick, eds. Progressivism. Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1983.

McMath, Robert C., Jr. American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

 

        FOREIGN POLICY

LaFeber, Walter. The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913. Vol. II of The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, edited by Warren I Cohen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Beisner, Robert. From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865-1900. 2nd ed.Wheeling, Ill,: Harlan Davidson, 1986.

 

Graduate Reading List: World War I-World War II

(Choose 2-3 books for each Topic)

 

World War I

 

D. Clayton James and Ann Sharp Wells, America and the Great War, 1914-1920

Dawley, Alan. Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution.

David Kennedy, Over Here

Ronald Schaeffer, America in the Great War

Robert Zieger, America’s Great War

 

1920s

 

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday

Kathleen Blee, Women of the Klan

Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice

Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper

David J. Goldberg, Discontented America

Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order

Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods

Jules Tygiel, The Great Los Angeles Swindle

 

1920s and 1930s

(May be substituted in either of these categories.)

Lizbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal

Colin Gordon, New Deals

Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream

Douglas Monroy, Rebirth

 

Great Depression and New Deal

 

        New Deal

        (Must read at least one)

Anthony Badger, The New Deal

Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform
David Kennedy, The American People in the Great Depression
William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal
Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression

        Other Great Depression

Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest

Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and America’s Foreign Policy, 1932-45

James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro
James Gregory, American Exodus

Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White

Suzanne Mettler, Dividing Citizens

Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks

 

World War II

 

John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory

Michael C.C. Adams, The Best War Ever

John Dower, War Without Mercy

John Jefferies, Wartime America

David Kennedy, The American People in World War II

Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor's War At Home

Studs Terkel, The Good War

 

 

Graduate Reading List: The U.S. Since 1945

General Works

 Michael Hunt, The World Transformed, 1945 to the Present

James Patterson, Grand Expectations, The US, 1945-1974

James Patterson, Restless Giant, The US from Watergate to 9/11

William Leuchtenberg, In the Shadow of FDR, 3rd edition

Robert Griffith & Paula Baker, Major Problems in US History since 1945

 

Foreign Policy

 Walter Lafeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 9th edition

John Gaddis, We Now Know

Robert Schulzinger, A Time for War

Andrew Bacevich, American Empire

Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire

 

Society, Culture, Politics

William Issel, Social Change in the United States

Kenneth Fox, Metropolitan America

Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion

Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open

Stephen Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War

Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor

Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity

Mary Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties

Lucas Powe, Jr., The Warren Court and American Politics

James Davidson Hunter, Culture Wars

John Kenneth White, The Values Divide

David Hollinger, Beyond Multiculturalism, 2nd edition

Alonzo Hamby, Liberalism and its Challengers, 2nd edition

William Chafe, The Achievements of American Liberalism

Jeffrey Berry, The New Liberalism

Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution

Gregory Schneider, Conservatism in America Since 1930

Gary Dorrien, Imperial Design: NeoConservatism and the New Pax America

 

READING LIST IN HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN WEST

Jack Adams, Damming the Colorado

Jack August Jr., Vision in the Desert

Paul Carlson, The Plains Indians

Peter Carrels, Uphill Against Water: The Great Dakota Water War

Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil

Richard Etulain & Ferenc Szasz, The American West in 2000

Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden

Norris Hundley Jr., The Great Thirst

Albert Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender and Culture in Old California

David Igler, Industrial Cowboys

Elizabeth Jameson, All That Glitters

Elizabeth Jameson & Susan Armitage, Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West

William Kahrl, Water and Power

Patricia Nelson Limerick, Desert Passages: Encounter with the American Desert

Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest

Patricia Nelson Limerick, Trails: Toward a New Western History

Valerie Matsumoto, Farming The Home Place

Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field

Char Miller, Fluid Arguments

Char Miller, On The Border: An Environmental History of San Antonio

Gerald Nash, Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890-1990

Gerald Nash, The American West in the Twentieth Century: A Short History of an Urban Oasis

Donald Pisani, From Family Farm to Agribusiness

Forrest Robinson, The New Western History: The Territory Ahead

William G. Robbins, Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1800-1940

Elmer Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California

Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy

Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides

Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams

Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian

Wallace Stegner, The Gathering of Zion

Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History

Richard Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West

Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains

David Weber, Myth and the History of the Hispanic Southwest

Elliott West, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers and the Rush to Colorado

Richard White, The Middle Ground

Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire

Donald Worster, Under Western Skies

Mark Wyman, Hard Rock Epic

Judy Yung, Unbound Feet