Michael Mezzano
SOCIAL/INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
Reading List for Oral Exams
Prof. O'Toole
G.A.P.E.
Creating “Americans”
Anderson, Margo, The American Census: A Social History (1988)
Archdeacon, Thomas, Becoming American: An Ethnic History (1983)
Croly, Herbert, The Promise of American Life (1914)
Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie
Gerstle, Gary, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century(2001)
Gerstle, Gary, Working Class Americanism (1989)
Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1988)
Hofstatder, Richard, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1959)
Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial AngloSaxonism (1981)
Kennedy, David, Over Here: The First World War in American Society (1980)
Knobel, Dale, “America for the Americans”: The Nativist Movement in the United States
(1996)
McGreevey, John, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the
Twentieth-Century Urban North (1996)
Murray, Robert, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (1964)
Painter, Nell Irvin, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1987)
Takaki, Ronald Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century America (1979)
Nascent Ideologies: Conservatism v. Liberalism
Progressive and Liberal
Colburn, David and George Pozzetta, Reform and Reformers in the Progressive Era
(1983)
Dawley, Alan, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (1991)
Grantham, Dewey Southern Progressivism: the Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition
(1983)
Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political
Thought Since the Revolution (1955)
Kloppenberg, James, The Virtues of Liberalism (1998)
Kloppenberg, James, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in
European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986)
Lipset, Seymour M., It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States
(2000)
Peiss, Kathy, Cheap Amusements: working women and leisure in turn-of-the-century New
York (1986)
Rodgers, Daniel, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998)
Sombart, Werner, Why is there no Socialism in the United States?
Reactive and Conservative
Bennett, David, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in
America (1988)
Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
(1977)
Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: a Re-interpretation of American History,
1900-1916 (1963)
Lears, T. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of
American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981)
Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt
Lewis, Sinclair, Main Street
Sklar, Martin, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: the
Market, the Law, and Politics (1988)
Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History (1976)
Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in American (1985)
Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967)
“Modern” Society
Re-Forging Identity
Social Identities
Brown, Dorothy, The Poor Belong to Us: Catholic Charities and American Welfare
(1997)
Ehrenhalt, Alan The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the
Chicago of the 1950s (1995)
Gailbraith, John K., The Affluent Society (1969)
Gans, Herbert, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a new Suburban
Community (1967)
Katz, Michael B., In the shadow of the poorhouse: a social history of welfare in America
(1996)
Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great
Depression (1990)
McGreevy, John, “Thinking on One’s Own: Catholicism in the American Intellectual
Imagination, 1928-1960” Journal of American History 84, n. 1( 1997)
O’Toole, James, Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O’Connell and Boston
Catholicism, 1859-1944 (1987)
Racial Identities
Formisano, Ronald P. Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s
and 1970s (1991)
Polenberg, Richard, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the U.S. Since
1938 (1980)
Wilson, William J. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American
Institutions (1980)
National Identities
Bender, Thomas, Community and Social change in America (1978)
Hofstatder, Richard, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963)
Keyssar, Alexander, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the
United States (2000)
Limerick, Patricia, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
(1987)
New Struggles Over Ideology: Liberalism and Conservatism
Resurgence of Reaction
Carter, Dan, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in Conservative
Counterrevolution, 1963-1994(1996)
Edsall, Thomas and Mary, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on
American Politics (1991)
Hodgson, Geoffrey, The World Turned Right-Side Up: A History of the Conservative
Ascendancy in America (1996)
Lipset, Seymour and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in
America, 1790-1977 (1978)
Martin, William, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America
(1996)
McGirr, Lisa, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001)
Nash, George, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (1976)
Decline of Liberalism
Brinkley, Alan, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995)
Farber, David, Chicago ’68 (1988)
Gillon, Steven, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism, 1947-1985
(1987)
Lyman, Stanford, Civilization: Contents, Discontents, Malcontents, and other essays in
Social Theory (1990)
Matusow, Alan, Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (1989)
Rae, Nicol, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans: From 1952 to the Present
(1989)