September 2004

COMPREHENSIVE READING LIST FOR

M.A. STUDENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

General Overviews:

Norton, Mary Beth, et. al., A People and a Nation (2004)

Tindall, George B. and David Shi, America: a Narrative History (2004)

General Historiography:

Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (1994)

Foner, Eric, ed., The New American History: Critical Perspectives on the Past (1997)

Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American

Historical Profession (1988)

Colonial Period to the American Revolution:

Appleby, Joyce, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (1992)

Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)

Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New

England (1983)

Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early

New England (1990)

Isaac, Rhys, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1982)

Lepore, Jill, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity

(1999)

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

Virginia (1975)

Norton, Mary Beth, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American

Women (1996)

Royster, Charles R., A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and

American Character, 1775-1783(1979)

Wood, Gordon, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969)

The Early Republic to the Civil War:

Beard, Charles A., An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States

(1913)

Benedict, Michael Les, The Blessings of Liberty: A Concise History of the United States

Constitution (1996)

Berlin, Ira, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003)

Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth Fox, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White

Women of the Old South (1988)

Gallagher, Gary, The Confederate War (1997)

Genovese, Eugene D., Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974)

Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (1991)

Holt, Michael F., The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1983)

McCoy, Drew R., The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America

(1980)

Royster, Charles, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson

and the Americans (1991)

Tucker, Robert W. and David C. Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of

Thomas Jefferson (1992)

Watson, Harry, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (1990)

Wilentz, Sean, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American

Working Class, 1788-1850 (1986)

Reconstruction to the First World War:

Blight, David W., Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2002)

Bodnar, John, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (1985)

Chandler, Alfred D., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American

Business (1980)

Cronon, William, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1992)

Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988)

Goodwyn, Lawrence, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in

America (1978)

Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (1955)

Hoganson, Kristin, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the

Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1998)

Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in America

(1983)

Knock, Thomas J., To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World

Order (1992)

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American

West (1988)

McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement

in America, 1870-1920 (2004)

Montgomery, David, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and

American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (1989)

Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy

in the United States (1994)

Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National

Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982)

Williams, William Appleman, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959)

Woodward, C. Vann, The Origins of the New South, 1877-1913

___________, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1957)

The Interwar Years and World War II:

Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1996)

Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1991)

Dower, John W., War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1987)

Jonas, Manfred, Isolationism in America, 1935-1941 (1989)

Leuchtenberg, William, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963)

Patterson, James T., America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 1900-1980 (1981)

Walker, J. Samuel, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of the Atomic

Bomb Against Japan (1997)

Post 1945 America:

Berkeley, Kathleen C., The Women’s Liberation Movement in America (1999)

Carson, Clayborne, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)

Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1998)

Issmerman, Maurice and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s

(2000)

Jackson, Kenneth T., Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States

(1987)

Kluger, Richard, Simple Justice (1977)

Leffler, Melvyn P., A Preponderance of Power: National Security, The Truman

Administration, and the Cold War (1992)

May, Elaine Tyler, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1990)

McGirr, Lisa, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2002)

Schulzinger, Robert D., A Time For War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975

(1997)

Sitkoff, Harvard, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (1993)

Sugrue, Thomas J., The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar

Detroit (1998)