Comprehensive Examination Reading List
U.S. History
(Revised May 2015)
Historiography (Recommended)
Banner, James M. (ed.). A Century of American Historiography. New York: Bedford St.
Martins, 2009.
Foner, Eric and McGirr, Lisa (eds.). American History Now (Critical Perspectives on the Past).
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.
Colonial Period to the American Revolution
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Enlarged ed.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1992.
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.
20th anniversary ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.
Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South,
1670-1717. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.
Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American
Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1999.
Kulikoff, Allan. From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC
Press, 2000.
Nash, Gary. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of
the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of
American Society. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women,
1750-1800. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1980.
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992.
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The Early Republic to the Civil War
Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003.
Cott, Nancy. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. 2nd
ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New
York: Vintage, 2009.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the
Old South. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1988.
McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988.
Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon,
1974.
Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Norton, 1983.
Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
McCoy, Drew R. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. Reprint
ed. Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1996.
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working
Class, 1788-1850. 20th anniversary ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Reconstruction to the Great Depression
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper
Collins, 1988.
Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from
Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1951.
Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010.
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Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton
& Co., 1992.
McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in
America, 1870-1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Williams, William A. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 50th Anniversary Edition. New
York: W.W. Norton, 2009.
Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of
Anticolonial Nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of
Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
The New Deal to the Present
Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in
Twentieth-Century America. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2005.
Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Reynolds, David. From Munich to Pearl Harbor: Roosevelt's America and the Origins of the
Second World War. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001.
Sparrow, James T. Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Cohen, Lizabeth. Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
New York: Vintage Books, 2003.
McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2001.
Logevall, Fredrick. Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in
Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999
Leffler Melvyn P. For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold
War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007.
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Payne, Charles M. I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi
Freedom Struggle. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Kruse, Kevin. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007.
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