Chapter 1
Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism (1986), provides a classic account of the damage
caused by European pathogens.
Brain Fagan, Chaco Canyon (2005), presents current archaeological understandings on
the Chaco Canyon site.
Mark Kurlansky, Cod (1997), explores the far-reaching historical impact of a
transatlantic fish trade that preceded European colonization.
Kent G. Lightfoot and Otis Parrish, Californian Indians and Their Environment (2009),
synthesizes recent scholarship on the diverse social and ecological world of ancient
California.
Charles C. Mann, 1491 (2006), opens a wide-angle lens on America before Columbus.
Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures (2008), explores the cultural significance
of chocolate and tobacco in the Columbian Exchange.
Michael Oberg, The Head in Edward Nugent’s Hand (2008), reinterprets the course and
significance of the abortive English colony at Roanoke.
Timothy Pauketat, Cahokia (2009), relates the remarkable archaeological rediscovery of
an ancient city along the Mississippi River.
Daniel K. Richter, Before the Revolution (2011), draws powerful parallels between
Europe and North America in the periods prior to their contact.
Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence (1984), considers the significance of early
European colonization in North America in terms of the politics and world views of
indigenous peoples.
Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country (2010), explores the importance of captivity
to the history of Indian politics before the arrival of the Europeans.
Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold (2004), offers a new narrative of the establishment of New
Spain.
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1992),
highlights the active role of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade and in the larger
reshaping of the Americas beginning in the fifteenth century.
Frederick Hadleigh West (ed.), American Beginnings (1996), explores the prehistoric
world of Beringia.
Chapter 2
Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire (2004), highlights the role of domestic
animals in the colonization of the Chesapeake and New England.
Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs (1996), puts gender
relations at the heart of the emergence of Virginia’s tri-racial society.
William Cronon, Changes in the Land (1983), explores the environmental impact of
European land uses in colonial New England.
David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed (1989), traces four distinct colonial settlements in
English North America to four different regions and cultures in England.
Allison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (1999), studies
the records of men and women who left London in 1635 for England’s new overseas
possessions.
Lisa Gordis, Opening Scripture (2003), explores the complex ways in which New
England Puritans interpreted the Bible.
Ramon Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away (1991), shows the
centrality of disputes about marriage, gender, and sexuality to the history of SpanishIndian relations in New Mexico.
David D. Hall, A Reforming People (2011), highlights the political reforms enacted by
New England’s colonial leaders.
Jane Kamensky, Governing the Tongue (1997), illuminates the intense political conflicts
over speech in seventeenth-century New England.
Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987), grounds the history of New
England witchcraft accusations in the social history of gender relations.
Andrew Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (1995), covers the dramatic uprising against
Spanish authority in New Mexico.
Jill Lepore, The Name of War (1998), stresses the role of language and writing in the
cultural history of King Philip’s War.
Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), remains an influential
interpretation of early Virginia society and the origins of Bacon’s Rebellion.
Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption (1998), explores the relationship between
commercial growth and religious values in Puritan New England.
Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (2001), considers what the
establishment of European colonies looked like from the perspective of Native
Americans.
Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (2004), presents the early history of
New Amsterdam.
Chapter 3
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (1998), puts the rise of slavery in
North America in hemispheric context.
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (1998), presents an extensive and highly influential
account of colonial slavery.
T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground” (1980), studies the lives and
prospects of Africans and their descendants in eastern Virginia, before the entrenchment
of chattel slavery in the Chesapeake.
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (2006), synthesizes decades of scholarship on
New World slavery, especially on the evolution of Western attitudes about race and
freedom.
Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks (1998), emphasizes the retention of
particular African religious traditions, languages, and ethnic identities among slaves in
North America.
Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave (1968), reconstructs the life of Ayuba Suleiman
Diallo.
Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery (2004), surveys the history of African Americans
in colonial New York City.
Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black (1968), uncovers deep patterns of anti-African
prejudice in English thought prior to the entrenchment of North American slavery.
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery (1993), provides a comprehensive survey of colonial
and antebellum slavery in the lands that became the United States.
Jill Lepore, New York Burning (2006), explores the alleged slave conspiracy that rocked
New York in 1741.
Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), explains the decline of
indentured servitude and the entrenchment of slavery in the Chesapeake after Bacon’s
Rebellion.
Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint (1998), compares slavery in the Chesapeake and the
Carolina Lowcountry—the two largest slave systems in colonial North America.
William D. Piersen, Black Yankees (1988), examines the history of slaves and free blacks
in colonial New England.
Mark Michael Smith (ed.), Stono (2005), presents documents and essays on the Stono
Rebellion of 1739.
Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together (1987), demonstrates the striking
similarities and convergences of black and white experience, world view, and culture in
eighteenth-century Virginia.
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery (2007), provides a powerful and detailed history
of the Middle Passage.
Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (1997), follows the history of the massive forced
migration of Africans to the Americas as it unfolded on four continents and across the
ocean.
Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial America (2005), summarizes the basic trends and
patterns in American slavery prior to the Revolution.
Peter Wood, Black Majority (1974), charts the formation of colonial South Carolina’s
distinctive slave system.
Chapter 4
Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America (1986), sketches broad patterns in
eighteenth-century immigration to the American colonies.
Marilyn C. Baseler, Asylum for Mankind (1998), surveys the role of refugees in the
settlement and growth of the British colonies.
Kathleen Brown, Foul Bodies (2009), explores changing standards, ideals, and practices
of personal hygiene in early America.
Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America (1992), follows the spreading cultural
ideal of gentility among colonists, expressed in such things as homes, gardens,
educational attainments, and personal conduct.
Jon Butler, Becoming America (2000), surveys the changes in material, spiritual, and
political life that helped form a new American identity in the century before the
American Revolution.
David Conroy, In Public Houses (1992), illuminates the growing popularity and
importance of taverns in the eighteenth century.
James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten (revised ed. 1996), demonstrates how
archaeological discoveries illuminate the study of the material life of early America.
Jack Greene, Pursuits of Happiness (1988), remains an influential interpretation of the
period.
Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul (1998), studies the changing world views reflected
in crime narratives of the colonial era.
David Hancock, Oceans of Wine (2009), traces the networks of consumption and culture
that formed around the commerce in Madeira wine.
Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers (2000),
emphasizes the importance of land to the expectations and experiences of the British
immigrants who came to North America.
Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family (1988), underscores the novel and
influential family values of the Friends in the Middle Colonies.
Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism (2003), defines the core features of evangelical
religious expression and belief in eighteenth-century Britain and its American colonies.
Mary P. Ryan, Mysteries of Sex (2006), includes a survey of changes in gender roles in
colonial farm families.
David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (1997), examines
coffeehouses and other urban institutions where ideas and information circulated among
colonial elites.
Chapter 5
Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War (2000), provides a comprehensive narrative of the
French and Indian War.
Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman (2007), demonstrates the importance
of women to white-Indian diplomacy in the Texas borderlands, a region where natives
were politically dominant.
T. H. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution (2004), illuminates the growth of Britain’s
Empire of Goods in the North American context.
Colin Calloway, The Scratch of the Pen (2006), treats 1763 as a pivotal year in the
history of North America.
Michael Coe, The Line of Forts (2006), surveys archaeological findings on the sites
where British forts stood in western New England during the mid-1700s.
Konstantin Dierks, In My Power (2009), probes the development of correspondence and
communications infrastructure in the eighteenth century.
Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven (2004), maps the fate and significance of
Pontiac’s Rebellion.
John Mack Faragher, A Great and Noble Scheme (2005), details the saga of the Acadian
expulsion and diaspora.
Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (2008), charts the growth of an overlooked
political power in the American Plains and Southwest.
Paul Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire (2011), explores European
perceptions of the western parts of North America.
James Merrell, Into the American Woods (1999), studies the administrators,
entrepreneurs, and converts who negotiated the fragile peace between natives and settlers
in the Pennsylvania frontier.
Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads (2003), connects deteriorating white-Indian relations in
the Middle Colonies to new ideas about race.
Peter Moogk, La Nouvelle France (2000), explores the cultural identity of French
colonists in Canada.
Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country (2001), narrates the European
colonization of North America from a native perspective and presents the French and
Indian War as a turning point in that story.
Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors (2009), shows how fear of Indian attack united a
diverse society of immigrants to the British colonies in the 1750s.
Timothy J. Shannon, Indians and Colonists at the Crossroads of Empire (2000), places
the Albany Plan of Union in the context of imperial politics and disputes some of the
received wisdom regarding its provenance.
Richard White, The Middle Ground (1991), highlights the role of culture in the
diplomatic politics of the Great Lakes region in order to rethink the history of whiteIndian relations in North America before 1815.
Chapter 6
Colin Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995), considers the
revolutionary crisis from a native perspective.
Caroline Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor (2007), highlights the role of social conflict
within George Washington’s army.
Douglas Egerton, Death or Liberty (2009), reconstructs the experiences and dilemmas of
African Americans during the Revolution.
Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana (2001), considers the impact of a smallpox outbreak on
the struggle for independence.
David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom (2005), shows how two key ideas of the
revolutionary cause were represented visually.
Edward Gray and Jane Kamensky (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution
(2013), presents a wide-ranging collection of recent scholarly perspectives on the
experience of the war and the meaning of the struggle for independence.
Woody Holton, Forced Founders (1999), argues that material interests, and not just
abstract ideas, underlay revolutionary sentiment in Virginia.
Edward Larkin, Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (2005), explores the
literary and political innovations of Paine’s writings.
Holly Mayer, Belonging to the Army (1999), reconstructs the world of female “camp
followers” in the war.
Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause (1982), remains an influential comprehensive
narrative of the American Revolution.
Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible (1979), locates revolutionary sentiment within the
context of egalitarian sentiments and struggles in colonial seaports.
Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth (2006), rethinks the significance of the war from the
perspective of African Americans, including those who joined the British side.
Andrew O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided (2000), explains why Britain’s Caribbean
colonies did not join in the revolt against the empire.
Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution (2001), offers a detailed
survey of the crisis and the war, emphasizing the experiences of women, the poor, the
enslaved, and Indians.
William Warner, Protocols of Liberty (2014), analyzes the infrastructure and the shared
ideas about communications that undergirded the movement for independence.
Alfred Young, Masquerade (2004), interprets the broader significance of the life and
celebrity of Deborah Sampson, the cross-dressing soldier.
Chapter 7
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1991), explores the process by which nations
(including the United States) were imagined into being.
Carol Berkin, A Brilliant Solution (2002), narrates the history of the framing and ratification
of the Constitution.
Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary (2003), presents a biographical look at the
unsung founding father, Gouverneur Morris. See also William Howard Adams, Gouverneur
Morris: An Independent Life (2003).
Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power (1991), surveys the diffusion of information in early
America.
Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America (2006), charts the new ways
of writing about space during the colonial and early national periods.
Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word (1986), examines the importance of novels and
novel-reading to the founding of the new nation.
Robin Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (2006), stresses the interrelation
between tax debates and the politics of slavery in the new republic.
Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence (1993), places Thomas Jefferson and the
Declaration of Independence within the context of late-eighteenth-century ideas about speech
and oral performance.
Pauline Maier, American Scripture (1997), demystifies the nation’s founding document and
details the process by which it acquired its current status as sacred text.
Jack Rakove, Original Meanings (1996), provides a thorough study of the constitutional and
legal thought of the framers.
Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art, (2009), explores the broader cultural context for
the ratification debates.
Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media (2004), emphasizes the role of the Post Office in the
creation of a new culture of information exchange and the history of state-sponsored
communication.
David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes (1997), studies the practices and rituals
that created national identity during and after the American Revolution.
Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic (1990), critically dissects the relationship between
print and the public sphere in colonial politics and between personal authorship and political
authority in the Constitution.
Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British (2011), considers the everyday difficulties
faced by the Americans in pursuing cultural independence from Britain.
Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation (1991), offers a literary take on the role of writing in
the early republic.
Chapter 8
Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics (2002), describes the role of elite women in building an
informal public sphere during the early years of Washington, D.C.
Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost (1999), follows the spread of market relations in
Kentucky and the transformation of the trans-Appalachian West.
Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent (1989), provides some crucial background for
understanding the significance of the 1811 New York grid.
Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror (2009), emphasizes the role of Federalist
revulsion to the French Revolution in the development of American humanitarianism.
David B. Davis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations
(1990), probes the relationship between the American Revolution and those in France and
Haiti.
Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (2006), reinterprets the role of
slavery in shaping tax politics during the early national era.
Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (1993), surveys the political
history of the new republic.
Simon Finger, The Contagious City (2012), provides a medical history of the
Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic.
David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (1978), offers some historical
perspective on changing attitudes toward old age.
Craig Thompson Friend (ed.), The Buzzel About Kentuck (1996), collects recent
scholarship on life in Kentucky during this era.
David Hamer, New Towns in the New World (1990), compares attitudes and images
toward the urban frontier in North America, Australia, and New Zealand in the nineteenth
century.
Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist (2008), presents the dramatic story of Andrew
Dexter’s Exchange Coffee House in Boston, which brings together the history of city
growth, banking, party politics, land speculation, and the Embargo.
Roger G. Kennedy, Mr. Jefferson’s Lost Cause (2003), reconsiders the Louisiana
Purchase within the context of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about land, slavery, and
freedom.
Sarah Luria, Capital Speculations (2005), interprets the ideas and ideologies behind the
planning of Washington, D.C.
Clare Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble (2006), reconstructs the tolerant and boisterous
sexual culture of Philadelphia in the early national era.
Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom (1988), documents the history of Philadelphia’s free
black community.
Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth (2006), argues that the 1790s presented a real
opportunity to eliminate slavery throughout the United States.
Samuel Otter, Philadelphia Stories (2009), follows the themes of fever and race relations
in Philadelphia’s literature.
Jeffrey Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers (2003), offers a detailed guide to the political
press in the early republic.
Amanda Porterfield, Conceived in Doubt (2012), explores the spread of religious
uncertainty in the early republic and presents the growth of new religious institutions as
an attempt to contain doubt and skepticism.
W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (1979), covers the
boom in whiskey production and consumption during the period.
Jennifer Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (2009), reconstructs
the complex racial hierarchies and sexual politics of the French, Spanish, and American
city.
Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic
(2008), explores the built environment of cities in the early republic, especially in New
Orleans and Philadelphia.
Richard Wade, The Urban Frontier (1959), remains the classic account of the growth of
Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Lexington, and St. Louis.
Ashli White, Encountering Revolution (2010), examines how the Haitian revolution
shaped attitudes toward slavery in the early republic.
James Sterling Young, The Washington Community (1966), explains the origins and early
history of Washington, D.C.
Chapter 9
Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign
Policy (1949), argues that Adams, before he became president, laid the diplomatic
foundation for American national expansion.
James Cusick, The Other War of 1812 (2007), describes the U.S. invasion of Spanish
East Florida and its place in the larger war.
Jay Feldman, When the Mississippi Ran Backwards (2005), uses the story of the New
Madrid earthquakes to weave together several fascinating events and important
developments during the period.
Paul Gutjahr, An American Bible (1999), charts the spread and transformation of printed
bibles in the United States during the nineteenth century.
Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1991), stresses the popular
appeal and democratic character of evangelical Protestantism in the early republic.
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross (1998), locates the origins of the southern
Bible Belt in the activities and accommodations of Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian
evangelicals during the first third of the nineteenth century.
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (2008), provides a thorough survey of the
political history of this period, with an emphasis on religion and communications.
Michael P. Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and his Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary
Quarterly (October 2001), makes the case against the alleged South Carolina slave
conspiracy of 1822.
Jill Lepore, The Name of War (1998), sets the play Metamora in a longer context of
interpretations of King Philip’s War.
Scott Martin (ed.), Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America (2005),
includes several essays relevant to the impact of the spread of market relations during this
period, including one on Choctaw adjustments to the new economic order and another on
Metamora.
William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (1992), details the
tragic story of Cherokee attempts to hold on to their land by embracing American
economic, political, and cultural models.
David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading (2004), considers the role of religious publishers as
pioneers of American mass media.
Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak (2005), describes the rise of women’s political
activism in the debates over Indian Removal.
Karl Raitz and George Thompson (eds.), The National Road (1996), catalogues the first
major federal road-building project and sets it in the context of larger trends in the
celebration of mobility in American culture.
Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things (1999), demonstrates the impact of the new
economic order on the Creek Indians before, during, and after the war.
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment (1998), offers a compelling reading of Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales relevant to the themes of this chapter.
Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812 (2010), proposes an original interpretation of the war
as a conflict among English-speaking residents and immigrants in the eastern Great Lakes
region over their relationship to the British Empire.
Rosemary Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash (2007), explores the declining participation of
women in public discussions of politics during this period.
Chapter 10
Peter Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night (2012), tracks the growth of nightlife in
American cities.
Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure (2001), describes the impact of bankruptcy after
the Panic of 1837 on larger perceptions of success and failure in American economic life.
Richard Franklin Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
(2004), explores the boisterous and often corrupt world of mass voting.
Peter L. Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters (2005), documents the building and
celebration of the Erie Canal.
Stuart Blumin and Glenn Altschuler, The Rude Republic (2000), offers a corrective to the
conventional view that mid-nineteenth-century Americans were all obsessed with
politics.
Scott Casper, Constructing American Lives (1999), looks at the cultural uses of
biography, including biographies of political candidates, during the nineteenth century.
Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett (1998), provides a thorough account of
the intriguing and tragic life of New York’s most famous murder victim.
Amy Greenberg, Cause for Alarm (1998), considers the social composition and cultural
function of America’s volunteer fire companies.
Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, & Society in Industrializing America (1976),
describes the difficult adjustment that traditional craftsmen had to make to new industrial
time rhythms.
Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America (1957), presents a comprehensive
explanation of the workings of the Second Bank of the United States and Andrew
Jackson’s campaign against it.
Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias (1995), tells the remarkable
story of one messianic cult movement in New York.
Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote (2000), analyzes the tangled history of suffrage
extension in the United States.
Roger D. Launius and John E. Hallwas (eds.), Kingdom on the Mississippi Revisited
(1996), offers multiple historical perspectives on the Mormon’s Nauvoo settlement.
Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers (1997), synthesizes a great deal of research on labor
history and labor movements during the era of industrialization.
Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune (2012), traces the shifting meanings of economic risk
and chronicles the emergence of new attempts to manage it during this period.
Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban (1988), puts into historical perspective the
remarkable growth of America’s urban population in the nineteenth century.
Mary Ryan, Civic Wars (1998), describes the vitality of outdoor political life in large
American cities in this period.
Harry N. Schieber, Ohio Canal Era (1969), charts the political origins and economic
impact of canal projects in Ohio.
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News (1981), explains the rise of the penny press in
this period of political democratization.
Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution (1991), explains the political conflicts and
religious developments of the period between 1819 and 1846 as responses to the
incursion of market relations and market values into everyday life.
Andie Tucher, Froth and Scum (1994), makes a case for the importance of early crime
reporting to the formation of modern journalism.
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (2005), offers an account of American
politics that stresses the genuinely democratic impulses reflected in the rise of Andrew
Jackson.
Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy (2006), uses changes in the marketing and
politicization of men’s clothing to chart the relationship between democracy and
capitalism from the early republic to the antebellum era.
Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith (eds.), Capitalism Takes Command (2012), collects
recent scholarly approaches to the growth and development of market society during this
period.
Chapter 11
Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters (1976), considers the life of free people of color in the
antebellum South.
John Blassingame, The Slave Community (1979), illustrates the importance of communal
life and the resilience of African traditions among the enslaved.
Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Nineteenth-Century North
Carolina (1992), describes the shared experiences of non-elite whites in a part of the
antebellum South.
Janet Duitsman Cornelius, “When I Can Read My Title Clear” (1991), emphasizes the
symbolic significance of reading to slaves and considers the dilemmas faced by
Protestant slaveholders over slave literacy.
David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage (2006), places the history of slavery in the
antebellum South in the larger context of the end of slavery in the New World. It also
includes a concise and compelling account of the Amistad crisis.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household (1988), considers the fraught
and complex relations between female slaves and their mistresses.
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, In Search of the Promised Land (2006),
narrates the history of Sally Thomas’s remarkable family as it passed from bondage to
freedom in the antebellum South.
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage (2008), stresses the extent of women’s
power and violence on southern plantations.
Kenneth Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (1996), reinterprets the southern culture of
honor, and presents a case for why slaveholders showed little interest in baseball.
Ariela Gross, Double Character (2000), shows how slaves’ dual status as property and
moral agent complicated everyday legal disputes in the courtrooms of the Deep South.
Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols (1998), provides a comprehensive history of the southern
patrol system.
Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men (1999), examines the history of illicit sexual
relations between white women and black men in the antebellum South.
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul (1999), uncovers the world of the domestic slave trade and
demonstrates how the prospect of sale shaped the meaning of slavery in this period.
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery (1993), offers the most succinct synthesis of several
decades of historical scholarship on slavery in the United States.
Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (1977), recovers and
analyzes the meaning of slaves’ folktales, music, and expressive culture.
Louis Masur, 1831: Year of Eclipse (2002), chronicles a watershed year in the history of
the United States.
Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds (1995), studies yeoman farm families in
South Carolina and considers their ideological relationship to slavery.
Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk (2003), uncovers the role of property
ownership among the enslaved.
Leonard Richards, The Slave Power (2000), shows how the southern defense of slavery
shaped national politics through the workings of the Second Party System.
Adam Rothman, Slave Country (2005), underscores the importance of Louisiana,
Mississippi, and Alabama in the ideological entrenchment of slavery in the American
South.
Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White (1997), updates the longstanding and
contentious scholarly inquiry into the nature and persistence of slaves’ family structures.
Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South (1987), analyzes the ritualized
culture of white slaveholding elites in the antebellum era.
John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House (1993), studies the architecture and material
culture of the plantation.
Deborah Gray White, Arn’t I a Woman? (1985), provides a short history of black
women’s experiences under slavery.
Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’ (1998), explores the importance of clothing,
hairstyle, and public expression to slaves and ex-slaves.
Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (1978), offers quantitative
analysis of the growth of the cotton trade, its role in the economy, and its impact on the
distribution of wealth in the South.
[start here]
Chapter 12
Thomas Augst, The Clerk’s Tale (2003), looks at the struggles of young middle-class
men to establish their character and answer the moral demands associated with whitecollar work.
Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class (1989), traces the development of a
self-conscious American middle class in antebellum cities.
Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters (1993), shows how various antebellum reforms
were linked by a commitment to using intimate relationships as a strategy of discipline.
Stephanie Coontz, Social Origins of Private Life (1988), surveys the socioeconomic
changes that produced the cult of domesticity.
Nancy Cott, Bonds of Womanhood (1977), traces the relationship between the cult of
domesticity and the emergence of feminism.
Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women (2002), emphasizes the importance of
Philadelphia’s reformers’ new ideas about gender.
Lawrence Friedman, Gregarious Saints (1982), explores the culture of radical
abolitionism.
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women (1982), studies the role of
etiquette guides in spreading new standards of middle-class behavior.
Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism (2004), reveals the importance of
addresses to slaves in changing the course of the antislavery movement.
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Attitudes Toward Sex in Antebellum America (2006), surveys
some very different views toward human sexuality during this era.
Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (1998), explicates the ideas
of the women’s rights movement.
Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom (2012), places the struggle for black
citizenship at the center of abolitionism in Massachusetts.
Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (1986), covers the career of the
most famous African American thinker in the nineteenth century.
Henry Mayer, All on Fire (2008), details the life of William Lloyd Garrison.
John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom (2003), treats the conflicts
between Catholics and Protestants in antebellum America as a clash between competing
ideas of freedom.
Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas (1997), offers an interpretation of the rise
of modern American Christmas and the birth of Santa Claus in the nineteenth century.
Matthew Osborn, Rum Maniacs (2014), looks at the role of the nascent medical
profession in the pathologizing and treatment of alcoholism during this period.
Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood Lost (2003), connects the temperance movement to
changing ideas about gender and increased women’s participation in public life.
David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (1989), examines the role of
sensationalism in temperance reform.
Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class (1983), documents how transformations in
family life in the Erie Canal region laid the foundation for middle-class values.
Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty (1993), stresses the reformers’ interest in the
body.
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites (1995), demonstrates the centrality of mass
consumption in the formation of the nineteenth-century celebrations of Valentine’s Day,
Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving.
Chapter 13
Bluford Adams, E. Pluribus Barnum (1997), interprets the politics and appeal of
Barnum’s American Museum.
Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires (1994), covers the role of the telegraph in
American journalism.
James Cook, The Arts of Deception (2001), treats Barnum as the central figure in a
popular culture in the antebellum North obsessed with fraudulent or misleading
appearances.
Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts (2008), explains the importance of Indian raids
to the course of Mexican history and the success of the U.S. invasion of Mexico.
John S. D. Eisenhower, So Far from God (1989), presents a thorough account of the
U.S.-Mexican War.
John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979), explores the
experiences and world views of rural white midwesterners who trekked across the
Rockies at mid-century.
Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (2005), shows
the importance of competing ideas of masculinity in the controversies over filibuster
expeditions and nationalist expansion.
Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War (2012), chronicles the political dramas and bitter
controversies surrounding the U.S. invasion of Mexico.
David Henkin, The Postal Age (2006), considers the impact of cheap postage on
American culture and discusses the importance of mail in the California Gold Rush.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny (1981), emphasizes the racial dimensions
of U.S. expansionist ideology in the 1840s.
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (2007), includes an especially strong
account of the politics of the U.S.-Mexican War and the role of information exchange in
that event.
Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (1990), details the impact of
Mexican and American settlements on native life in California.
Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp (2000), studies gender roles in the southern mining
camps of the California Gold Rush.
Eric Lott, Love and Theft (1993), reflects on the meaning of blackface performance,
especially music, in antebellum culture.
Meredith McGill, The Culture of Reprinting (2003), shows the importance of
unauthorized publication in antebellum print culture and explains the political resistance
to international copyright laws.
Brian Roberts, American Alchemy (2000), considers the dilemmas of white, middle-class
men from the Northeast who joined the California Gold Rush.
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (1991), illuminates the
connections between American popular culture and Democratic Party politics.
George Ripley Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger (1992), chronicles the tragic fate of the
Donner Party.
Shelley Streeby, American Sensations (2002), analyzes the images of Mexico, race, and
imperial expansion that suffused popular literature during this period,
Graham White and Shane White, Stylin’ (1998), describes the expressive culture of free
blacks in the North that became the subject of racist ridicule on the blackface stage.
Edward Widmer, Young America (1999), explores the literary nationalism of the
Democratic Review circle.
Chapter 14
Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery (1992), connects the rise of the Know-Nothing
Party to the shifting politics of slavery in the North.
Adam Arenson, The Great Heart of the Republic (2011), highlights the special role of St.
Louis in the sectional conflict of the 1850s.
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis (1991), explains the rise of Chicago.
Don Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness (1962), covers the life and thought of Abraham
Lincoln in the decade before his presidency.
Paul Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with Documents (1997), lays out
the history of the landmark case and reproduces both the judicial opinions and the
political responses to Justice Roger Taney’s decision.
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (1970), offers an influential interpretation of
the ideology of the Republican Party.
John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine (1976), shows how Americans incorporated the
railroad into their vision of the American landscape.
Stephen Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood (1984), covers John Brown’s life and
world view.
Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch (1990), traces shifts in attitudes toward time in
nineteenth-century America.
Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock (1997), challenges the myth that the antebellum
South was a society not yet permeated by modern time-consciousness.
Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns (1998), shows how a single fugitive
slave case precipitated a cultural crisis.
Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (1978), provides a quantitative
analysis of the role of slaves and slavery in the southern economy.
Chapter 15
Stephen Ash, When the Yankees Came (1995), recovers the experiences and horrors of
life in the occupied South during the Civil War.
Ira Berlin, Barbara Fields, et al., Slaves No More (1992), draws on the massive
documentary study of emancipation to offer an account of the end of slavery told in part
from the perspective of the enslaved.
Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines (2006), studies the evolution and impact of masscirculation pictorial newspapers.
Alice Fahs, Imagined Civil War (2003), focuses on the war as reflected in the popular
culture of the period, especially in fiction.
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering (2008), treats the Civil War as a major
event in the history of American attitudes toward death.
Michael Fellman, Inside War (1989), tells the story of guerrilla warfare in Missouri and
its impact on ordinary people.
George Frederickson, Inner Civil War (1965), explores the response of northern
intellectuals and literary artists to the war.
Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood (2000), shows the importance of the U.S.
Sanitary Commission to the longer story of women’s activism in the nineteenth century.
David Goldfield, America Aflame (2011), revives the once-popular view that the Civil
War could have been avoided.
Gerald Linderman, Embattled Courage (1987), provides the classic study of the
soldiering experience.
Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over (2007), examines soldiers’
correspondence to explore their views toward slavery, secession, and the meaning of the
conflict.
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom(1988), remains the most influential and
comprehensive narrative of the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War.
Mark E. Neely Jr., The Fate of Liberty (1992), narrates Lincoln’s momentous wartime
decision to suspend the writ of habeus corpus.
Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sheriff, A People at War (2007), stresses the complex
reactions of ordinary Americans, both soldiers and civilians, to the events of the Civil
War.
James Oakes, Freedom National (2012), argues that ending slavery had been a major
Republican objective from early in the war.
Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth (1997), traces the role of the
wartime Congress in transforming the role of the federal government and shaping the
postwar nation.
Charles Royster, The Destructive War (1991), emphasizes the chaos and carnage of the
Civil War.
Barnet Schechter, The Devil’s Own Work (2007), narrates the 1863 draft riots in New
York.
Lonnie Speer, Portals to Hell (2005), examines Civil War military prisons.
Daniel Sutherland, A Savage Conflict (2009), argues for the importance of guerrilla
fighting to the experience and course of the Civil War.
Yael Sternhell, Routes of War (2012), places the dramatic movements of soldiers,
deserters, refugees, and escaped slaves at the center of the wartime experience of the
South.
T. J. Stiles, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War (2002), presents the life of the
famous Missouri bandit in the context of local guerrilla fighting and the Confederate
cause.
Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs (1989), interprets the classic
photographs published and exhibited by Mathew Brady.
Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), treats Lincoln’s speech as a foundational
moment in the remaking of America.
Chapter 16
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (2001),
illuminates the multiple and conflicting meanings of the Civil War and the route by
which white Americans came to accept white southerners’ view of the conflict.
Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United
States (2006), explores newer themes in Reconstruction history, particularly the North
and West during the era of Reconstruction and the global implications of the South’s
racially inclusive democracy.
Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom (2012), documents the devastating impact of war and
emancipation on the health of freed slaves.
Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion (1997), examines the impact of
Reconstruction on private life and gender roles in a North Carolina county.
Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground (1985), charts the
passage from slavery to emancipation in the important border state of Maryland and
the apprenticeship system that thwarted freedpeople’s aspirations for freedom.
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988), remains the
most systematic and detailed treatment of Southern Reconstruction.
Stephen Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural
South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003), provides a wide-ranging study of
rural blacks’ fight for political and economic power.
Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979),
considers the early phase of Reconstruction and the responses of freedpeople and exslaveholders to emancipation.
Elaine Franz Parsons, “Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the
Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of American History (2005), examines
the Klan’s use of popular cultural forms to communicate the goals of white
supremacy.
Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age
of Emancipation (2002), traces freedpeople’s efforts to recreate family relationships
and establish legal families and households.
Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America
After the Civil War (2007), makes the case that Southern Reconstruction was part of a
larger project of national reconstruction that unfolded in the North and West as well.
James D. Schmidt, Free to Work: Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction,
1815–1880 (1999), studies federal efforts to establish a free labor economy in the
South, with particular emphasis on the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Freedom: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the
Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (1998), explores the centrality of contract to
debates over freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century America.
Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from
Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (1998), shows how African American traditions of
style and self-presentation became a resource for surviving slavery, defining freedom,
and enduring the collapse of Reconstruction.
Deborah Beckel, Radical Reform: Interracial Politics in Post-Emancipation North
Carolina (2011), recounts the history of the interracial Republican Party and its role in the
brief but important overthrow of North Carolina’s white supremacist Democrats in the
1890s.
David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (2001),
illuminates the process by which white Americans came to accept white southerners’
view of the conflict.
Thomas J. Brown, ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United
States (2006), explores recent themes in the study of Reconstruction.
Gregory P. Downs, Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular
Politics in the South, 1861 (2011), traces the impact of an American patronalism on
southern post–Civil War politics and government.
Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom (2012), documents the devastating impact of war and
emancipation on the health of freed slaves.
Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black
Suffrage in Reconstruction America (2011), recounts how Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
other white suffragists came to break with abolitionists and oppose the Fifteenth
Amendment.
Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion (1997), examines the impact of
Reconstruction on private life and gender roles in a North Carolina county.
Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground (1985), charts the passage
from slavery to emancipation in the important border state of Maryland.
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988), remains the most
systematic and detailed treatment of southern Reconstruction.
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation
Household (2008), compares the lives and aspirations of enslaved and slaveholding
women, and their changing relationships to consumption, labor, and homemaking
following emancipation.
Stephen Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South
from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003), provides a wide-ranging study of rural
blacks’ fight for political and economic power.
Tera M. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After
the Civil War (1998), explores the work, lives, cultural production, and political activism
of the thousands of black women who entered low-wage work in southern cities during
Reconstruction.
Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979), considers
the early phase of Reconstruction and the responses of freedpeople and ex-slaveholders to
emancipation.
Elaine Franz Parsons, “Midnight Rangers: Costume and Performance in the
Reconstruction-Era Ku Klux Klan,” Journal of American History (2005), examines the
Klan’s use of popular cultural forms to communicate the goals of white supremacy.
Elizabeth Regosin, Freedom’s Promise: Ex-Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of
Emancipation (2002), traces freedpeople’s efforts to re-create family relationships and
establish legal families and households.
Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After
the Civil War (2007), argues that southern Reconstruction was part of a larger project of
national reconstruction that unfolded in the North and West as well.
Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the
Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (2008), argues that ideologies of gender
and sexuality—and the terrifying acts of violence these often engendered—played an
important role in defining the meanings of freedom and citizenship in the post-war South.
Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper
Midwest (2009), assesses the impact of southern Reconstruction in the Midwest by
tracing the life experiences of the thousands of ex-slaves who migrated to Iowa,
Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Freedom: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in
the Age of Slave Emancipation (1998), explores the centrality of contract to debates over
freedom and slavery in nineteenth-century America.
Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (1993), argues that the uptick in
controversy concerning political corruption during Reconstruction was more
consequential for American political culture than corruption itself.
Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its
Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (1998), shows how African American traditions of style and
self-presentation became a resource for surviving slavery and defining freedom.
Chapter 17
Kevin Adams, Class and Race in the Frontier Army: Military Life in the West, 1870–
1890 (2009), explores relations among white and African American enlisted men and
between officers and troops in the final phase of western conquest.
Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the
Arizona Borderlands (2009), traces the formation of new racial boundaries and national
identities in one of America’s most diverse yet understudied regions.
Peter Boag, Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past (2011), explores changing attitudes
toward the once commonplace phenomenon of cross-dressing in frontier towns.
Cathleen Cahill, Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States
Indian Service, 1869–1933 (2011), offers a detailed social history of the Indian Service.
Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910
(1987), traces Chinese immigrants’ role in the development of California agriculture.
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), analyzes the
ecological and economic impact of the city and its railroad, construction, retail, finance,
and food industries on the surrounding landscape.
William A. Dobak and Thomas D. Phillips, The Black Regulars, 1866–1898 (2001),
explores race relations in the American West and the African American experience of the
Plains Wars.
Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and
the Dawes Act (2002), considers Native Americans’ experience of and responses to
allotment.
Frederick Hoxie, Parading Through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America
1805–1935 (1999), traces the emergence of the modern Crow nation to the Crows’
response to conquest and displacement after 1805.
David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West,
1850–1920 (2005), shows how the two German immigrants acquired the lion’s share of
California’s land and water rights, industrialized agriculture, and dominated the West’s
beef markets.
David Igler, “The Industrial Far West: Region and Nation in the Late Nineteenth
Century”, Pacific Historical Review (2002), studies the West’s economic development
and its place in American industrialism.
Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and
the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940
(2009), compares the role played by white women in implementing child-removal
policies in Australia and the western states.
Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1880 (1998),
describes women’s frontier experiences and their efforts to bring domesticity and
“civilization” to the West.
Marilyn S. Johnson, Violence in the West: The Johnson County Range War and Ludlow
Massacre: A Brief History with Documents (2009), offers diverse first-hand views and
accounts of the Johnson County War.
Wendy Rouse Jorae, “The Children of Chinatown: Growing Up Chinese American in San
Francisco, 1850–1920” (2009), explores the impact of immigration restriction on child
immigrants.
Joy S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History
(2001), analyzes the role of memory and celebrity in constructing popular representations
of the West.
Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest
of Native America, 1890–1990 (1997), tracks American intellectuals’ changing
understanding of the Europeans’ conquest of Native America.
Frieda Knobloch, The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the
American West (1996), argues that the livestock, plants, weeds, farming methods, and
agricultural ideology that settlers brought to the West after 1862 played a critical role in
the conquest and colonization of the region.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, A Legacy of Conquest (1987), considers conquest as the
predominant feature that ties together the region’s various territories and inhabitants.
Bradford Luckingham, Phoenix: The History of a Southwestern Metropolis (1995), traces
the rise and transformation of the desert city, from agricultural oasis to industrial center.
Henry D. and Frances T. McCallum, The Wires That Fenced the West (1965), traces the
introduction and impact of barbed wire on the Plains.
David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987),
explores the complex interplay of law, property, and violence in Anglo-Mexican relations
in the Texas borderlands.
Jacqueline M. Moore, Cow Boys and Cattle Men: Class and Masculinities on the Texas
Frontier, 1865–1900 (2010), explores the ideologies of manhood at work in the Texas
cattle industry.
L. G. Moses, Wild West Shows and the Images of American Indians, 1883–1933 (1996),
describes the Indian experience of Wild West shows.
Jeffrey Ostler, The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground (2010),
examines the Lakotas’ and the U.S. government’s competing claims over the Black Hills.
Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded
Knee (2004), chronicles the Sioux’s response to U.S. expansionism.
Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the
American West, 1874–1939 (1990), chronicles the establishment of missionary rescue
homes in the West, and the complex relationships that evolved among female reformers,
their male opponents, and the women who entered the rescue homes.
William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American
West (1994), challenges the myth of rugged frontier individualism and instead proposes
capitalism as the main agent of transformation in the American West.
Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in
California (1971), examines the origins of anti-Chinese sentiment in California and the
role that labor organizations played in Chinese exclusion.
Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of
Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1998), explores the transformation of the heroic
frontiersman of popular mythology from lone Indian hunter to captain of industry.
Helen Huntington Smith, The War on Powder River (1966), describes the growth of
cattle ranching in Wyoming and the outbreak of the Johnson County War.
Gregory Ellis Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American
Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (2008), analyzes the ghost dance in the
context of Shoshone and Bannock efforts to forge new and empowering social identities
under conditions of declining independence.
Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (1986), shows how ideas,
perceptions, and myths shaped California.
Richard A. Walker, The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California
(2004), explores the development and social costs of the world’s most productive agroindustrial system.
Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (2005),
offers a comprehensive biography of William F. Cody along with a history of nineteenthcentury American entertainment.
Elliot West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado
(1998), examines the Colorado gold rush’s impact on the Plains Indians and highlights
the role of environment in the ensuing conflicts.
Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the
American West (1991), synthesizes the work of a generation of historians to reinterpret
the West as an ecologically diverse, multiethnic, multiracial set of regions in which
successive waves of settlers transformed the landscape with little regard for present
inhabitants.
Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.
(2011), traces the rise of transcontinental railroads and the transformative effect they had
on the political, economic, social, and physical landscapes.
Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West
(1985), examines the role water rights played in California’s social, political, and
economic development.
Chapter 18
Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
(1999), provides a detailed exploration of New York in the age of industrialization.
Tim Cresswell, The Tramp in America (2001), describes the changing fortunes and social
status of migrant laborers and the poor.
Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: American in the Gilded Age (2005), delivers a thorough
treatment of Gilded Age economics, culture, and politics.
Scott E. Giltner, Hunting and Fishing in the New South: Black Labor and White Leisure
After the Civil (2008), traces southern elites’ intensifying effort to limit African
American and poor white folks’ access to the wilderness following the Civil War.
Richard J. Hooker, Food and Drink in America: A History (1981), charts the changing
foodways of Americans.
Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table (1981), examines the rise of the
meat industry.
Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden
History of Conservation (2001), chronicles the impact of the national park movement on
poor, rural people and established practices of hunting, foraging, fishing, and gathering.
Dorothy M. Johnson, “To the Centennial with Papa,” Montana: The Magazine of
Western History (1961), recounts James Sanders’s journey across the country to the
Centennial Exhibition, 1876.
Andrew P. Haley, Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle
Class, 1880–1920 (2011), traces the emergence of a distinctive middle-class culture that
defined itself in part by rejecting the Second Empire cuisine of wealthy elites and
developing a distinctive and quite adventurous culinary culture of its own.
Christina Kotchemidova, “From Good Cheer to Drive-By Smiling: A Social History of
Cheerfulness,” Journal of Social History (2005), examines the rise of cheerfulness in
American culture.
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American
Culture (1994), traces the rise of the department store and the birth of consumer culture.
Justin Martin, Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, Abolitionist,
Conservationist, and Designer of Central Park (2012), explains Olmsted’s vision of
public space as a vital place of play, meditation, and revitalization for the urban masses.
Alexis McCrossen, Making Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other
Timekeepers in American Life (2013), analyzes Americans’ preoccupation with time.
Wayne M. O'Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries: The Rise and Fall of a Native Industry, 1830–
1890 (1996), offers a case study of marine depletion.
Michael O'Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (1990), traces
American timekeeping practices and attitudes toward time.
Kathy Piess, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century
New York (1986), explores working-class leisure in late-nineteenth-century New York.
Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial
City, 1870–1920 (1985), argues for the importance of new recreational spaces, including
saloons, parks and playgrounds, and movie houses, to the formation of working-class
culture and politics.
Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central
Park (1998), offers a fine-grained social history of the park and those who imagined,
planned, protested, enjoyed, or were displaced by it.
Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (1990),
analyzes the manifold and often surprising ways in which women participated in—and
helped redefine—the public sphere.
Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–1874 (1995),
recounts the intense social conflicts over how and by whom Chicago’s political and civic
order should be rebuilt.
Jeffrey Sklansky, Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought,
1820–1920 (2001), illuminates the long-term shift in social thought from a conception of
freedom as a function of independent proprietorship to the idea that psychic selfexpression is the basis of freedom.
Andrea L. Smalley, "'Our Lady Sportsmen': Gender Class, and Conservation in Sport
Hunting Magazines, 1873–1920," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2005),
traces wealthy hunters’ exclusion of subsistent hunters and elite women’s entry to the
sport.
Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the
Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (1995), explores the meanings of the
Chicago fire and Americans’ anxieties about their rapidly changing world.
Mark David Spense, Dispossessing the Wilderness (2000), discusses the complex origins
of the national parks and late-nineteenth-century attitudes toward wilderness.
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
(1982), offers an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which the idea and institution of
the corporation has influenced American culture.
Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America
(1981), undertakes a wide-ranging exploration of changes in the styling and design of
homes and their role in realizing—and sometimes thwarting—Americans’ aspirations.
Chapter 19
Shawn Leigh Alexander, An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the
NAACP (2012), chronicles black Americans’ struggle for civil rights from the end of
Reconstruction to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People in 1909.
Omar H. Ali, In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900 (2010),
explores the wide-ranging efforts of African American workers, farmers, and
sharecroppers to challenge the South’s industrial and agricultural elites.
Peter H. Argersinger, "All Politics Are Local: Another Look at the 1890s," Journal of the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2009), traces the gerrymandering conflicts of the 1880s
and 1890s.
Lucy G. Barber, Marching on Washington, The Forging of an American Political
Tradition (2002), narrates the history of marching on the capital as a form of political
protest.
Kevin Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of News: A History (2001), describes the
role of the newspaper in American commerce and culture from 1750 to 2000. Part II
focuses particularly on the political newspapers of the Gilded Age and the movement
away from the partisan press.
Maurine H. Beasley and Sheila J. Gibbons, Taking Their Place: A Documentary History
of Women and Journalism, 2nd ed. (1993), offers thorough historical treatment of female
journalists, as well as supporting primary documents, including articles and speeches.
Charles W. Calhoun, From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of
Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age (2010), explains how economic policy
replaced sectionalism to become voters’ uppermost concern by the 1890s.
Charles W. Calhoun, Minority Victory: Gilded Age Politics and the Front Porch
Campaign of 1888 (2008), contextualizes the rise of modern campaigning in the late
nineteenth century by arguing that Benjamin Harrison’s 1888 campaign against Grover
Cleveland set crucial political precedents for the shifting culture of the presidential
election.
Theresa A. Case, The Great Southwest Railroad Strike and Free Labor (2010), excavates
the cultural and multiethnic roots of the 1886 strike.
Robert W. Cherny, American Politics in the Gilded Age: 1868–1900 (1997), traces shifts
in voting behavior, voting practices, and public policy.
James J. Connolly, An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in
Industrializing America (2010), analyzes political bosses’ defense and adaptation of
machine politics in the face of mounting criticism.
Tom Culbertson, "The Golden Age of American Political Cartoons," Journal of the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2008), provides capsule histories of critical periodicals
of the day, including Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and brief biographies of
preeminent cartoonists.
Rosanne Currarino, The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded
Age (2011), shows how reformers attempted to reconcile the forces of industrialism with
democratic ideals and institutions.
Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age (2007), argues that the
Gilded Age was a threshold to modernity in part because of the period’s increasing racial,
ethnic, intellectual, and political diversity, which gave rise to the eruptive conflicts that
drove profound social change.
Alice Fahs, Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public
Space (2011) traces women’s participation in—and growing influence over—print
culture.
Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation
of Morality, 1865–1920 (2007), chronicles the little-known history of the combined
Christian lobby that secured the passage of federal obscenity, sexuality, divorce,
gambling, prizefighting, and anti-polygamy laws.
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in
America (1978), argues that the movement’s elite leadership failed to allow for the
democratic organization and administration that would have built a sustainable
“movement culture.”
James Green, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement,
and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America (2006), sets the Haymarket Riot in
the larger context of the Gilded Age’s social, political, and economic confrontation and
contest.
R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson, The Price of Progress: Public Services, Taxation, and the
American Corporate State, 1877 to 1929 (2003), posits that the national infrastructural
and institutional improvements of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era had as their cost
the growth of centralized governmental authority.
Charles Hoffman, The Depression of the Nineties: An Economic History (1970),
furnishes an economic history of the causes and effects of the Panic of 1893.
Kathryn Allamong Jacob, King of the Lobby: The Life and Times of Sam Ward, ManAbout-Washington in the Gilded Age (2010), sympathetically situates Ward’s work in
the context of the new breed of lobbying that came to dominate Gilded Age politics.
Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (1977),
offers a foundational history of public life after the Civil War, tracing the era’s complex
relationship to centralization, reform, and active national government.
Suzanne Lebsock, “Women and American Politics, 1880–1920,” in Louise A. Tilly and
Patricia Gurin, eds., Women, Politics, and Change (1992), briefly surveys women’s
political participation before the Progressive Era, arguing that the years before 1900 were
instrumental to women’s struggle for gender equality.
Michael McGerr, Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (1988),
offers a sophisticated account of nineteenth-century partisan campaign culture.
Robert Worth Miller, "The Lost World of Gilded Age Politics," Journal of the Gilded
Age and Progressive Era (2002), argues for the success of Gilded Age politicians in
engaging the American public even through a party system widely imagined as deeply
corrupt.
Robert Worth Miller, Populist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the Third Party
Movement in the 1890s (2011), explores the role of cartoons in Populist efforts to
mobilize voters.
H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896 (1969),
holds that the invention of national politics lay in the Republican Party’s elevation of
national, not local, political issues, addressed to a national audience.
Michael O'Malley, Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Money and Race in America
(2012), recounts the contested history of money with particular emphasis on debates over
the gold standard and the introduction of greenbacks.
Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in
America (2010), traces the origins, spread, and demise of miscegenation laws in the
United States.
Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (2007), recounts the Farmers’ Alliance’s drive for
rural modernization and the fruition of Populism.
Madelon Powers, Faces Along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman's Saloon,
1870–1920 (1998), provides a textured analysis that recreates barroom life while
establishing its social and political importance.
Robert Vincent Remini, The House: The History of the House of Representatives (2006),
offers a brief but comprehensive history of the House of Representatives and its gradual
professionalization.
Troy Rondino, “Guarding the Switch: Cultivating Nationalism During the Pullman
Strike,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2009), explores the role of
newspapers in imagining the Pullman Strike as the responsibility of rebellious immigrant
anarchists.
Joel Silbey, American Political Nation 1838–1893 (1994), proffers a rich history of the
raucous partisan culture of the Second Party System.
Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the
Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (1995), illuminates the meanings of
the Haymarket Affair and Americans’ anxieties about their rapidly changing world.
Mark Wahlgren Summers, Party Games: Getting, Keeping, and Using Power in Gilded
Age Politics (2004), explains vote-buying and other electoral tactics of the Gilded Age.
Lara Vapnek, Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920
(2009), demonstrates that, long before the Progressive Era, wage-earning women were
demanding political and economic rights as worker-citizens.
Mark Voss-Hubbard, "The Third Party Tradition Reconsidered: Parties and American
Public Life, 1830–1900," The Journal of American History (1999), asks whether
insurgent parties of the 1870s and 1880s might be considered most usefully as part of a
third-party system rather than merely an insurgency within the two-party system.
Robert E. Weir, Beyond Labor's Veil: The Culture of the Knights of Labor (1996),
explores the cultural, religious, musical, literary, and artistic history of the Knights of
Labor.
Jonathan Daniel Wells, Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South
(2011), recovers and analyzes the long-forgotten published work of black women and
white women south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Chapter 20
Kevin C. Armitage, The Nature Study Movement: The Forgotten Popularizer of
America’s Conservation Ethic (2009), explores the growing popularity of nature study in
early-twentieth-century America, and how it helped to popularize conservationism.
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880–1917 (1996), traces the shifting meanings of “manhood” and
“civilization” and their central place in discourses of gender and race.
Edward J. Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007), explores the religious and
spiritual content of Du Bois’s work.
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (1978), places
Progressive Era urban reform in the context of long-term struggles to impose order in the
city.
John Milton Cooper, Jr., Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900–1920 (1990),
synthesizes the economic and political history of the era.
Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century (2000), explores the impact of consumer culture
on personal and public identities and the struggles to define and confine consumerism.
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American
Catholicism in the Progressive Era (2009), recounts the story of Catholic women’s
promotion of the ideal of “True Womanhood,” and their growing influence in the church.
Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (1998), places
the experiences of workers, women, African Americans, and immigrants at the center of
this wide-ranging history.
Cyrstal N. Feimster, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching,
traces discourses of lynching and the conflicting efforts of one African American woman
(Ida B. Wells) and one white woman (Rebecca Latimer Felton) to protect the women of
their respective communities from sexual violence.
Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the
Twentieth Century (1996), traces the emergence of a middle-class ideology of racial
uplift among black elites of the early twentieth century.
Glenda E. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy
in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1995), shows how African American women, on the heels
of racial disenfranchisement, became activists, advocates, and emissaries whose work
anticipated and inspired the freedom movement of the mid-twentieth century.
Eliot Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (2002), recounts the
life and times of one of the nation’s most famous labor activists.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South,
1880–1940 (1998), explains how people of European descent came to imagine
themselves as white and how people of color were marginalized in the process.
Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive
Conservation Movement (1999), describes the origins of conservationism and the
tensions inherent within it.
Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance (1992), shows how Jewish immigrants
assimilated into American culture through a fusion of consumption with social and
religious traditions.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the
Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993), explains how black women played a pivotal
role in making the church a cornerstone of African American life.
Robin E. Jensen, Dirty Words: The Rhetoric of Public Sex Education, 1870–1924 (2010),
offers a wide-ranging discussion of the print and visual media through which urban
Americans gained knowledge of sexual activities before the era of formal public sex
education.
Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of
Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (2003), explores the role of Portland’s
small business people in that city’s progressive movement.
John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man”: The White Male Body and the
Challenge of Modernity in America (2001), shows how public presentations of the white
male body reinforced the claim of white men’s superiority.
Blair L. M. Kelley, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship
in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (2011), recounts African Americans’ early struggles
against the segregation of public transportation.
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (1983), argues that turn-ofthe-century changes in technology, art, philosophy, the social sciences, and politics
permanently altered the experience of time and space.
William Kostlevy, Holy Jumpers: Evangelicals and Radicals in Progressive Era America
(2010), recounts the history of the Metropolitan Church Association, which was both
socially conservative and politically radical in its critique of modern capitalist culture.
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American
Culture (1994), explains the role of advertisers, entrepreneurs, window dressers, and
other department store technicians in shaping America’s consumer culture.
Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (2009),
shows how a fervent desire for moral regeneration animated progressivism.
David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (1993),
traces the early life, thought, and career of one of America’s leading intellectuals.
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in
America, 1870–1920 (2003), emphasizes the diverse sensibilities and commitments that
characterized the progressives.
Rebecca M. McLennan, The Crisis of Imprisonment: Protest, Politics, and the Making of
the American Penal State, 1776–1941 (2008), explores the turbulent history of criminal
incarceration and its impact on the prison reform movement of the Progressive Era.
Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (1995),
argues that attitudes toward public spaces, most especially streets, had to change before
the automobile could become popular.
Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage-Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930
(1988), examines the image and reality of single women's lives and the networks they
forged as a means of coping with the challenges of city life.
Susan L. Mizruchi, The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture,
1865–1915 (2008), charts Americans’ growing self-awareness of themselves as a
culturally and economically diverse people.
Khalil Muhammad Gibran, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the
Making of Modern Urban America analyzes expert and popular discourses of crime and
punishment that obscured the structural roots of poverty and crime and justified the urban
North’s racially discriminatory system of criminal justice.
David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993), while
theaters and other public amusements welcomed immigrants, men and women, and the
poor, African Americans were the excluded objects of ridicule—which in turn bound
white people together.
Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem,
1880–1950 (1988), explores the experience of lived religion in the everyday lives of
Italian immigrants.
David M. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow
Justice (1997), chronicles the rise and fall of convict leasing in Mississippi and the brutal
farm labor system that replaced it.
Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era
(2008), offers a view of the Progressive Era from working people’s perspective.
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Pleasure in Turn-of-the-Century
New York (1986), traces women’s roles as workers, consumers, and makers of mass
culture.
Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings (2000), charts the trans-Atlantic networks of experts
and reformers and explicates European influences on American progressives.
Donald W. Rogers, Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in
America, 1880–1940 (2009), traces changes in workplace safety rules with particular
emphasis on Progressive Era Wisconsin.
James D. Schmidt, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (2010),
explores the conflict between southern laboring families and middle-class progressive
reformers over whether and under what circumstances children should work.
Karen Sotiropoulis, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America
(2006), examines black performers’ use of comedy to cross the color line while
challenging white racism and black middle-class notions of respectability.
Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New
Century (2000), examines the flourishing experimentalism of Greenwich Village writers,
libertines, and activists and their impact on American culture.
Lisa Szefele, The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse
and Values (2011), explains how Americans used poetry to make sense of the changes
brought by industrialization, immigration, urbanization, and corporate capitalism.
Ronald C. White, Jr., Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel,
1877–1925 (1990), shows how liberal Christians strove for racial equality even as
southern states enacted Jim Crow laws.
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (1966), remains the classic study of
progressive reform as a direct response to the disorienting impact of modernization.
Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (2003),
chronicles the rise of sociological explanations for crime and the transformation of the
Chicago Municipal Court into a vehicle for both progressive reform and social control.
Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History (2011), explores the government’s response
to the great smallpox epidemic of the early 1900s.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), recounts the origins of Jim
Crow laws in both the North and the South.
Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate (1990), traces the influence of the corporation
on attitudes, work, and culture.
Chapter 21
Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America's
Civilizing Mission (2009), traces the American “civilizing” mission—particularly, the
long-standing belief that the United States has a right to remake foreign peoples—from
the colonies’ conquest of Indians through the overseas expansionism of the 1890s and
1900s to the twenty-first century’s War on Terror.
Gary J. Bass, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (2008), traces
the roots of humanitarian intervention and thought in Europe and the United States
through the “long nineteenth century.”
Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (1956),
explores Roosevelt’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine and his promotion of American
power elsewhere in the world.
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in
the United States, 1880–1917 (1995), shows how and why elite Americans of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries paradoxically admired “primitive” men of color
while proclaiming the superiority of “civilized” white men.
Mark Benbow, Leading Them to the Promised Land: Woodrow Wilson, Covenant
Theology, and the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1915 (2009), argues that Wilson's religious
convictions shaped his foreign policy, particularly in regard to the Mexican Revolution.
Vincent J. Cirillo, Bullets and Bacilli: The Spanish-American War and Military Medicine
(2004), illustrates how the war ultimately advanced tropical medicine, surgery, and
sanitation.
Warren I. Cohen, America's Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations
(2000), argues that China and the United States developed a mutually beneficial
relationship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the
Romance of Russian Development (2004), shows how key American thinkers and policymakers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries justified the tremendous
human costs of Russian economic development by appealing to cultural stereotypes of
Russians as parochial, backward, and fatalistic.
Susan Harris, God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902 (2011),
elucidates the religious and racial rhetoric in the debates surrounding the annexation of
the Philippines.
Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked
the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1998), assesses late-nineteenthcentury conceptions of gender and their impact on the decision to go to war.
Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire: America's Wars in Asia from the
Philippines to Vietnam (2012), analyzes the Philippine-American War as the first of four
wars in Asia aimed at securing U.S. dominance of the region.
Edward S. Kaplan, U.S. Imperialism in Latin America (1997), traces William Jennings
Bryan's attitudes toward Latin America before, during, and after his tenure as secretary of
state.
Pagan Kennedy, Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century
Congo (2002), chronicles the life and work of William Henry Sheppard.
Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the
Philippines (2006), analyzes the emergence of new racial ideologies during the
Philippine-American War and explains how empire building subsequently transformed
ideas of race and nation.
Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898
(1998), explores the economic motivations behind U.S. foreign policy.
Lester D. Langley and Thomas Schoonover, The Banana Men: American Mercenaries
and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880–1930 (1995), offers a comprehensive
account of the growth of U.S. involvement in Central America.
Xi Lian, The Conversion of Missionaries: Liberalism in American Protestant Missions in
China, 1907–1932 (1997), traces the lives of three American missionaries whose
experiences in China led them to reject evangelicalism and embrace theological and
cultural liberalism.
John Lindsay-Poland, Emperors in the Jungle: The Hidden History of the U.S. in Panama
(2003), shows how American ideas about Panama’s jungle environment fused with
commercial and military considerations to influence U.S. relations with Panama.
Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and
the Rise of the Surveillance State (2009), traces the use of new surveillance techniques
against the Filipino insurgency.
Christopher McKnight Nichols, Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age
(2011), excavates, via the works of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jane Addams, and other key
commentators, the roots of the recurring tension between isolationism and the
internationalist impulse to spread democracy abroad.
Resil B. Mojares, The War Against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in
Cebu, 1899–1906 (1999), describes the Philippine-American War from the perspective of
the Philippines’ Cebu people.Frank Ninkovich, Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundations
of American Internationalism, 1865–1890 (2009), argues that late-nineteenth-century
liberals envisioned, articulated, and anticipated the internationalist vision of foreign
policy that the United States eventually pursued in the late twentieth century.
Louis A. Perez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and
Historiography (1998), explores the war and its representation in the U.S. press, political
discourse, and historical scholarship.
Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World (1999), argues that the United
States used “dollar diplomacy”—private bank loans and financial advice—to win
influence over foreign governments.
Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation
of the Tropical World (2000), explores the ecological impact of American expansion in
the tropics and the ways in which investors and landowners sought to legitimate their
actions.
Ian Tyrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America's Moral Empire (2010), traces
the growth of American reform and missionary networks during the late nineteenth
century and reformers’ subsequent impact on U.S. foreign policy.
Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire,
and the Globalization of the New South (2010), recounts the Tuskegee Institute’s 1901
economic mission to the Germany colony of Togo.
Chapter 22
Katherine H. Adams and Michael L. Keene, Alice Paul and the American Suffrage
Campaign (2008), shows how Alice Paul expertly used modern publicity techniques to
shame Woodrow Wilson and build popular support for women’s suffrage.
Nancy K. Bristow, The American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza
Epidemic (2012), charts the course of the world’s deadliest pandemic and explains how
the memory of the crisis was all but erased by the early 1920s.
Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the
Modern American Citizen (2008), traces the role of local authorities—from librarians to
postmasters—in the drive to suppress dissent and activate citizens as volunteers in
surveillance efforts.
John Milton Cooper, Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (2009), furnishes a comprehensive
treatment of Wilson’s life, political career, progressive vision, and segregationist politics.
Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution
(2005), explores progressives’ messianic mission to bring peace and security to the world
and the differences among them.
Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded. The Story of America in Its First Age of
Terrorism (2009), recounts the deadly Wall Street explosion of 1919, which occurred in
the context of escalating class conflict, censorship, and official repression.
Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for Modern Order (1997), remains the
seminal study of progressives’ use and understanding of World War I.
John Keegan, The First World War (2000), provides a gripping analysis of the major
battles of World War I and the devastating ineptitude of Europe’s generals.
Jennifer Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (2001), traces
the draftees’ experience of war, from conscription through deployment and combat to
demobilization and the campaign for veterans’ benefits.
David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1982),
explores several key themes, including the war’s impact on the economy, the raising of
an army, and the collapse of progressivism.
Ross A. Kennedy, The Will to Believe: Woodrow Wilson, World War I, and America's
Strategy for Peace and Security (2009), details the rival visions of pacifism, Rooseveltian
conservatism, and Wilsonian progressivism.
Theodore Kornweibel, Jr.,“Seeing Red”: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy,
1919–1925 (1998), establishes that the federal government responded to the
reinvigoration of the freedom movement after World War I by seeking to monitor,
control, and dissipate black protest.
Susan E. Lederer, Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in 20th
Century America (2008), analyzes the relationship between commerce and medicine’s
demand for organs and tissues.
Adriane Lentz-Smith, Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (2009),
explains how black soldiers’ experiences of French life and encounters with colonial
African troops led them to reinvigorate the civil rights movement at home, reimagine
their identities as African diaspora, and fight their own “war for democracy.”
Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (2011), elucidates the
early efforts to rehabilitate injured servicemen, which culminated in the founding of the
Veterans Administration.
Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2003), traces the
negotiations and backroom horse-trading behind the Treaty of Versailles that ultimately
thwarted most of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points.
Malcolm D. Magee, What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a
Faith-Based Foreign Policy (2008), explores Wilson’s religious convictions in relation to
his crusade for peace and democracy.
Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins
of Anticolonial Nationalism (2008), examines the colonized world’s enthusiastic
response to Wilson’s call for self-determination and subsequent disappointment.
Frank Ninkovich, Wilsonian Century: U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1900 (1999), argues
that, far from being idealistic, Wilson’s foreign policy was practical, reactive, and
founded on fear.
David S. Patterson, The Search for Negotiated Peace: Women's Activism and Citizen
Diplomacy in World War I (2009), traces the founding of the modern American peace
movement and the critical role that suffragists played.
Stephen Ponder, Managing the Press: Origins of the Media Presidency, 1897–1933, posts
that, like presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, Wilson grasped the political importance of
shaping public opinion, but that his administration also went one step further, attempting
to control all news regarding government.
David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (2004), shows
how European empires hoped to consolidate power domestically and internationally by
going to war but, ironically, were destabilized or destroyed in the process.
Elaine F. Weiss, Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army of America in the Great
War (2008), chronicles the wartime movement of urban women into agriculture, with
emphasis on New York and California.
Robert H. Zieger, America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience
(2000), synthesizes the histories of the experiences of women, progressives, and African
Americans during the war.
Chapter 23
Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (1992), analyzes
women’s contradictory role in the Klan.
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (1990),
explores workers' consumption of mass culture and their response to welfare capitalism.
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay
Male World, 1890-1940 (1995), documents the relatively visible gay male culture that
flourished in New York in the early twentieth century.
Clare Corbould, Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919–1939
(2009), explores the growing black public sphere of the interwar years, arguing that the
upsurge of plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and visual arts engendered a
new awareness of black Americans’ African past and created the nation’s first modern,
“hyphenated” identity.
Pete Daniel, Deep'n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood (1996), examines the
social, cultural, and political effects of the flood.
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1996), explores the
broader cultural impact of New York City on American art, literature, and music.
Kathleen Drowne and Partrick Huber, The 1920s (2004), chronicles popular culture in a
detailed examination of each of its major forms.
Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (1978), traces
the ways in which college students rebelled against Victorian mores.
Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro
(2003), traces the roots of the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance as a
whole to the upwelling of black and leftist radicalism in 1919.
Mark M. Foster, Castles in the Sand: The Life and Times of Carl Graham Fisher (2000),
places Fisher’s life and work in historical context and examines his influence on the
emerging leisure and tourism industries.
Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (2008),
recovers the history of the diverse movements and individuals that fought for racial
equality in the three decades prior to the era of Brown v. Board of Education.
Nicholas R. Grossman, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It
Changed America (1991), portrays African Americans’ varied experience of pulling up
roots, resettling in Chicago, and the challenges and triumphs of making a new life.
Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940
(2009), charts the transformation of “slumming” from the moralistic voyeurism of the
1880s to the boundary-busting cultural experimentation of the interwar years.
Nathan Irving Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (1971), explores the work of leading figures
and their impact on American culture at large.
Kenneth Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (1992), shows that the Klan
grew most dramatically in the newer cities of the Midwest and West.
Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early
Twentieth-Century America (1998), examines the lives and political thought of the first
generation of Caribbean radicals to immigrate to the United States.
David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920–1940 (2002), explores the ways in
which people adopted and adapted automobiles, radio, and other new technologies in
everyday life.
Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (2009), chronicles the
city’s experience with Prohibition and the bitter culture war—between immigrant and
native-born; Catholic, Jew, and Protestant; libertine and social reformer—that ensued.
William Leuchtenberg, Perils of Prosperity (1993), explains how the transition from
agrarian to modern consumer society concentrated enormous power in the hands of big
business and created a culture in which money was a dominant value.
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981), shows how a complex
convergence of people, ideas, politics, and art made Harlem the site of America’s most
vital cultural movement of the interwar years.
Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
(1995), assesses the economic, gender, and racial anxieties that afflicted many family
men of the lower middle class, and their role in the making of the Klan.
M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (1998), excavates
the forgotten stories of Aunt Jemima’s minstrel origins and subsequent trajectory, and the
ideological uses to which performers and advertisers put this figure.
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–
1940 (1985), explores how advertisers drew on mass media and photography and other
art forms to shape and promote the consumption ethic.
Nathan Miller, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America
(2003), offers a sweeping yet richly detailed popular history that traces the final collapse
of Victorian morality and emergence of today’s major cultural forms to the 1920s.
Mae M. Ngai, "The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law: A
Reexamination of the Immigration Act of 1924," Journal of American History (1999),
traces the emergence of the category “illegal alien.”
Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors' Democracy
(2011), illuminates the early-twentieth-century efforts of the federal government,
corporations, and banks to open stock and bond markets to small investors.
Micheal E. Parrish, Anxious Decades: American in Prosperity and Depression, 1920–
1941 (1992), treats the social and cultural conflicts of the interwar years.
Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (1999), traces the
careers of the women who built the beauty industry, and shows how female consumers’
own aspirations contributed to its success.
Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North
American West (2012), illuminates the diverse intimate relations that unfolded between
South Asians and other migrants in British Columbia, Washington, and California in the
early twentieth century.
Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian
America (2009), shows how McPherson’s blending of politics, faith, and Hollywood
spectacle made Pentecostalism mainstream and enduringly shaped religious
conservatism.
Jules Tygiel, Baseball as History (1996), includes an essay that explores the sport’s
relation to the advent of radio and its impact on the way Americans experienced the
world.
Chapter 24
Anthony Badger, The First Hundred Days (2008), examines the vital early days of
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency.
Francisco Balderrama, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (2006),
traces the rise of nativism and Mexican repatriation.
Allen Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the
Product That Defined America (2007), explores the rise and fall of the cigarette as an
icon of American identity.
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression
(1982), assesses conservative challenges to the New Deal.
Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (2011), details the
life, career, and legacy of the twentieth century’s most important publisher.
Richard Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California
(1996), illuminates California’s interwar bohemian culture and its impact on American
art and thought after World War II.
David Cieply, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (2007), argues that
intellectuals and elites responded to the rise of foreign totalitarianism by withdrawing
support for strong central government and embracing a liberal-corporatist vision in which
free enterprise and civil liberties were paramount.
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939,
analyzes workers’ influence on the New Deal.
Blanch Wiesen Cooke, Eleanor Roosevelt (Volume 2): The Defining Years, 1933–1938
(2001), maps the first lady’s influence on housing, racial, and women's issues.
Gabrielle Esperdy, Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the
New Deal, shows how the little-known Modernization Credit Plan, through credit and
other programs aimed at small business people, forever changed the design and look of
urban commercial districts.
Frank Friedel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, A Rendezvous with Destiny (1990), examines
FDR’s life and work.
James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (1995), explores the Scottsboro trials from
multiple perspectives.
Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lang: A Life Beyond Limits (2002), examines the photographer
and her life, work, and legacy.
James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in
California (1991), tells the story of the million Oklahomans, Arkansans, Texans, and
Missourians who migrated to California in the 1930s and 1940s.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great
Depression (1990), analyzes the efforts of communists and workers to secure racial,
economic, and political reforms.
David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War,
1929–45 (1999), offers a sweeping narrative of the Great Depression and New Deal.Alice
Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equality: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic
Citizenship in the Twentieth Century (2001), explores the connections between economic
and civil rights for women.
Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s
Public-Private Welfare State (2006), argues that Americans’ reliance on employment
benefits may be traced to the political trade-offs of the New Deal era.
Bruce Lenthal, Radio's America: The Great Depression and the Rise of Modern Mass
Culture (2007), charts the immense impact radio had on the lives on Americans and mass
culture.
William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963), remains the
classic political history of reform.
Richard Lowitt, The New Deal and the West (1993), illuminates the government’s
response to drought, irrigation, and related environmental challenges in the West.
Neil M. Maher, Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of
the American Environmental Movement (2007), tracks the government response to a
variety of environmental disasters.
Patricia L. Sullivan, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (1996),
examines the response of southern liberals, black activists, labor organizers, and
Communist Party workers to the Depression and New Deal.
Guido van Rijn, Roosevelt's Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR
(1997), analyzes the contents of the most important source of African Americans’
experience of the Great Depression and New Deal.
Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (2007),
tracks the changing meaning of pools and their importance in local battles over
segregation.
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (2004), documents the
region’s ecological, political, and cultural history.
Chapter 25
Luis Alvarez, The Power of the Zoot (2009), explores the way Mexican American youth
used popular culture to challenge conformity during World War II.
Allan Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire (1990), traces the lives and careers of the
thousands of gay men and women who served in the armed forces during and
immediately after World War II.
Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights
(2007), argues that U.S. postwar planners successfully globalized the human rights
principles embedded in the Atlantic Charter through Bretton Woods, the United Nations,
and the Nuremberg trials.
Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1996),
explains how New Deal liberalism ceased to focus on restructuring government and
diluting concentrated economic power and came to emphasize consumption.
Steven Casey, Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and
the War Against Nazi Germany (2004), tracks FDR’s efforts to persuade Americans of
the Nazi threat and the constraints imposed on him by public opinion.
Thomas Doherty, Projections of War (1999), depicts Hollywood’s role in promoting
patriotism and support for the war.
John Dower, War Without Mercy (1986), reveals the influence of intensely racist
sentiments on American and Japanese war tactics and relations.
Erasmo Gamboa, Mexican Labor and World War II (2000), illuminates the social and
economic conditions of Mexican guest workers in the Pacific Northwest.
Brian Masaru Hayashi, Democratizing the Enemy (2004), examines Japanese internment
by analyzing the perspectives of internees, social scientists, and internment camp
administrators.
John W. Jeffries, Wartime America (1996), discusses the social, cultural, and political
changes brought about by war and sets it in contrast to the continued racial tension that
permeated American society.
John Keegan, The Second World War (2005), provides a comprehensive military history
of the war on all fronts, including America’s involvement.
David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear (2000), chronicles America at war within the context
of its immediate past, the Great Depression.
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits
and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (1990), elucidates the cooperative but
sometimes tense relationship between Hollywood and the government during the war.
Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal (2000), addresses the effects of the federal government’s
wartime labor and military policies on African American workers and soldiers.
Gerald Linderman, The World Within War (1997), investigates the transformative power
of combat, arguing that soldiers experienced the war in vastly different ways than did
other Americans.
Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (1997), explains the crucial role production played
in the Allied victory.
S. M. Plokhy, Yalta: The Price of Peace (2010), draws on recently declassified Soviet
archives to argue that Yalta went reasonably well for the United States.
Margaret Regis, When Our Mothers Went to War (2008), provides a broad survey of the
many ways women were involved with and experienced World War II.
George Roeder, Jr., The Censored War: American Visual Experience During World War
Two (1995), explores the government’s control and use of visual images during the war.
Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon
(1987), recounts the history of American strategic bombing.
Ronald Takaki, Double Victory (2000), highlights the contradictions inherent in
America’s fight for democracy abroad within the context of racial tensions at home.
K. Scott Wong, Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War (2008),
discusses Chinese Americans’ outsized service in the military and war industries and
their efforts to become the “model minority.”
Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation (2001), illuminates the role of comic books in
shaping modern youth culture, including during the war.
Thomas W. Zeiler, Unconditional Defeat (2004), assesses the last two years of war
between the United States and Japan with a focus on combat.
Chapter 26
Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart Blumin, The GI Bill: A New Deal for Veterans (2009),
explores the origins of the GI Bill and its transformative effect on universities, cities,
suburbs, employment, and family life.
Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United States and the African American
Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (2003), explains why the NAACP abandoned its
wartime emphasis on social justice and human rights in favor of a narrower civil rights
agenda.
Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened
(2001), analyzes suburbanization from the perspective of the first wave of suburban
residents.
Amy Bentley, “Booming Baby Food: Infant Food and the Feeding in Post–World War II
America,” Michigan Historical Review (2006), shows how and why mothers substituted
infant formula and baby food for breast milk after the war.
Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968 (1998),
explores the United Autoworkers’ impact on politics and policies, and how leader Walter
Reuther responded to McCarthyism and African American demands for equality.
Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (2010), presents a
detailed account of Luce’s life, career, and legacy.
Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century
America (2008), shows that the state’s highly publicized efforts in the postwar era to
repress homosexuality were not incited by the heightened visibility of gay people but
resulted from a confluence of big government (especially the warfare and welfare states)
and longstanding anti-vice and anti-poverty programs that policed homosexuality
indirectly.
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (2003), shows how mass consumption empowered many consumers but also
deepened racial and class inequalities.
Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War (1980), explores the origins of the first
armed conflict of the Cold War.
Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004), shows how, in the
war and postwar years, cinema’s popular new genre registered and fueled the anxieties
that accompanied the decline of the city and the ascent of the suburb.
Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American
Culture (2005), argues that television companies, while maintaining blacklists of
suspected subversives, also undermined McCarthy and his paranoid, intolerant view of
the world.
John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2006), argues that nuclear arms
programs profoundly influenced the course of the Cold War.
Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Sex the Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey
(2000), chronicles the life and work of the nation’s most influential—and controversial—
sexologist.
Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (1995), shows how
Truman worked his way up the political ladder and embarked on the Cold War.
Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle
against Communism in the Early Cold War (2011), examines the religious lens through
which American leaders viewed the Soviet Union and the religious institutions they
conscripted in the war effort.
Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan (1987), assesses the importance of the Marshall Plan
to the strategy of containment in Europe.
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians
in the Federal Government (2006), recounts the story of the homosexual purges that
ended the careers, and sometimes the lives, of thousands of civil servants after World
War II.
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial
Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (2006), argues that entitlement programs
associated with the Fair Deal were a form of affirmative action for white Americans.
Victor S. Navasky, Naming Names (2003), portrays the moral dilemmas and political
pressure confronting Hollywood actors and directors called to testify before the House
Un-American Activities Committee.
David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joseph McCarthy (1983),
takes an in-depth look at McCarthy’s worldview and political ambitions.
Richard Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the
1940s and 1950s (1985), explores the fate of liberal thought in the era of McCarthyism.
Rebecca Jo Plant, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (2008),
traces the cultural reconstruction of motherhood, from the prewar assault on the
longstanding ideology of mothers as the nation’s moral educators to the postwar rise of
the “mom” whose authority was thought to be private, limited, and in need of expert
psycho-medical guidance.
Miriam G. Reumann, American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in
the Kinsey Reports (2005), examines the popular and expert reception of Kinsey’s
controversial sex studies and their role in the construction of a distinctive American
sexuality in the postwar era.
Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2003),
traces the rise of suburbia, the decline of the city, and the impact of federal programs on
African Americans.
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar
Detroit (1996), shows how the United States’ once-prosperous “arsenal of democracy”
became one of the most impoverished, crime-ridden, and divided cities in the nation.
Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (1997),
explores the lives of Jackie Robinson and other African American ballplayers and their
desegregation of major league baseball.
Michael Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great
American Communist Hunt (2004), analyzes the life and work of a lesser-known but
highly influential anti-communist congressman.
Chapter 27
Thomas Borstelmann, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the
Global Arena (2001), examines U.S. race relations within the broader context of post–
World War II global decolonization.
Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (2003),
recovers, through dozens of oral histories, the story of the visible, vibrant, and often
politically engaged gay and lesbian cultures that thrived in and before the 1950s.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (1988),
chronicles the civil rights movement with particular attention to King’s leadership.
Lee Canipe, “Under God and Anti-Communist: How the Pledge of Allegiance Got
Religion in Cold War America,” Journal of Church and State (Spring 2003), discusses
the reintroduction and influence of civil religion during heightened Cold War patriotism.
Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
(1992), questions myths and uncovers the reality of family life in America.
Jennifer A. Delton, Rethinking the 1950s: How Anticommunism and the Cold War Made
America Liberal (2013), challenges the popular perception of the decade as a uniformly
conservative era by showing that McCarthyism ironically sparked a resurgence of
political liberalism in which Republican and Democratic leaders alike supported high
taxes, economic regulation, job creation, and civil rights.
Richard J. Ellis, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance (2005),
traces the transformation of the Pledge and the controversies surrounding it.
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America's Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the
1950s (1986), focuses on how changing social mores and concerns over national security
redefined delinquency and contributed to an urgent sense that delinquency was a threat to
national security.
Jonathan P. Herzog, The Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America's Religious Battle
against Communism in the Early Cold War (2011), reveals the interconnectedness of
religion and politics in the early Cold War era.
Michael Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle
for Racial Equality (2004), sets the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case within the
broader context of race-based Supreme Court cases.
David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (2011), explores the
1957 intersection and subsequent legacy of the lives of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel
Bryan, teenagers on opposite sides of the segregation line at Central High School.
Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s
(1994), highlights the significance of television to the expanding American consumer
culture.
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988),
explains that the Cold War influenced even Americans’ private lives.
Anna McCarthy, The Citizen Machine: Governing by Television in 1950s America
(2010), analyzes how television corporations sought to produce shows that not only
entertained but also helped viewers become “good citizens.”
Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
(2004), chronicles the experiences of transsexual people and how a host of experts,
beginning in the 1950s, ceased to think of sex as a self-evident biological truth and came
to view it as changeable and complex.
Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (1997), traces the post–World War II
transformation of adolescence as a distinct life-stage and analyzes the significant role
teenagers have played as consumers.
Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the
New Deal to Reagan (2009), examines the cultural, economic, and political factors that
contributed to the formation of the modern conservation movement.
John L. Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American
Science Education (2002), details efforts by the federal government and top scientists to
reform science education in America in order to compete with the Soviets.
Kevin M. Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to
Its Protestant Promise (2011), traces the popularization of the idea that the United States
is a tri-faith nation and explores the debates over religious pluralism.
Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights
(2006), considers the civil rights era from the perspective of white southerners who
navigated change and confusion as the world in which they grew up was transformed.
James Sullivan, Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon (2006), chronicles the
career of mass-produced blue jeans, from nineteenth-century work wear to twenty-firstcentury fashion “must have.”
Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
(2004), investigates the Cold War practice of sending jazz musicians to other countries as
cultural emissaries.
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of
Our Times (2007), probes how the U.S. and Soviet ideological struggle engulfed parts of
Asia, Africa, and Latin America, exacerbating tensions within those countries.
William H. Young and Nancy K. Young, American Popular Culture Through History:
The 1950s (2004), examines popular culture within the context of significant political and
economic developments of the postwar era.
Chapter 28
Michael Allen, “‘I Just Want to Be a Cosmic Cowboy’: Hippies, Cowboy Code, and the
Culture of a Counterculture,” The Western Historical Quarterly (August 2005), explores
1960s and 1970s popular media depictions of cowboys and hippies, revealing a
continuity in counterculture.
John A. Andrew III, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the
Rise of Conservative Politics (1997), inserts the often-neglected student Right movement
into the 1960s narrative and argues that the Right’s aspirations and methods, like those of
the Left, called for radical change.
Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (2002), argues, through a detailed cultural analysis of
Lawrence, Kansas, that the “sexual revolution” neither originated solely in the bohemian
urban enclaves of San Francisco and New York, nor suddenly erupted in the late 1960s,
but gradually emerged in multiple locales in the decades following World War II.
Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines, eds., “Takin’ It to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader
(2010), highlights influential and expressive documents, speeches, and articles that
convey the tenor of 1960s activism.
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics
of the Black Panther Party (2013), gives a comprehensive history of the Panthers’ ideas,
personnel, and programs.
Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (2001),
demonstrates the infusion of counterculture into mainstream entertainment through the
medium of television.
Mary C. Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP
(1995), explores the growth and strengthening of conservatism within the 1960s
Republican Party.
Howard Cruse, Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), is a graphic novel that explores a confluence
of 1960s issues through the life and experience of fictional character Toland Polk, a
young, white, gay, working-class southern man who comes to terms with his own
sexuality in an environment of racism, homophobia, and activism.
Alice Echols, Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, is an incisive
cultural history of Joplin’s career and of the tumultuous era that made and unmade her.
David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (1994), provides an
overview of changes and events in the 1960s, explaining that many significant trends and
notions were grounded in earlier decades.
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of
Hip Consumerism (1997), challenges the notion that consumerism and conformity are
inseparably linked by exploring how creative revolt against conformity also fueled
consumption.
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1993), evaluates the rise and fall
of the student New Left through the lens of the author’s experience with Students for a
Democratic Society.
Michael Herr, Dispatches (1977), relates a firsthand account of the horrors and hardships
of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a frontline journalist.
George Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975
(2001), integrates the economic, military, and political history of the Vietnam War.
Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s
(2008), explores tensions inherent in oppositional political, cultural, and social
movements of the 1960s.
Stephanie Koontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at
the Dawn of the 1960s (2012), explains how Betty Friedan’s best-selling book changed
the way many women thought about their assigned roles as mothers and housewives in
the early 1960s and emboldened them to enter higher education and pursue a career.
Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America
(2007), posits that welfare rights activism went beyond seeking economic equality in an
effort to more fully extend the benefits and entitlements of American citizenship.
Lisa Law, Flashing On the Sixties (2000), visually chronicles the art, music, and fashion
of the 1960s.
Mitchell B. Lerner, ed., Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light
(2005), seeks to illuminate and further explore the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson
through a collection of essays based on newly available primary sources.
Peter B. Levy, ed., America in the Sixties—Right, Left, and Center: A Documentary
History (1998), represents the 1960s through the perspectives of both liberals and
conservatives, as well as New Left and Right student groups.
Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the
United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (1998), is a transnational representation of cultural
upheaval and change in Western nations throughout the years encapsulated within the
period of the “long Sixties.”
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001),
discusses the suburban, grassroots origins of the conservative New Right.
Jim Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago
(1994), traces the role Students for a Democratic Society played in radicalizing rights and
promoting change.
Heather Murray, Not in This Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North
America (2010), is an intimate look at family dynamics and relations against the
backdrop of nonconformist sexuality in the postwar period.
William L. O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of the Sixties (1971),
retrospectively examines the dismantling of the 1950s political and social agenda.
Robert Pardun, Prairie Radical: A Journey Through the Sixties (2001), recounts the
personal experiences of the author as he participated in the civil rights and New Left
movements.
Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the
Mississippi Freedom Struggle (2007), challenges the standard narrative that places men
and the church at the center of the civil rights movement through a focus on oral histories
from Greenwood, Mississippi.
Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American
Consensus (2001), finds longer-term victory for conservatives in the lessons learned
through Barry Goldwater’s failed presidential bid.
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
(2005), critically examines the freedom movement, demonstrating continuity in the
movement through the works and actions of men like W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther
King, Jr., and Malcolm X.
Chapter 29
Daniel Carter, The Politics of Rage (1995), explores the broader significance and impact
of George Wallace’s campaigns for the presidency.
Stanley Corkin, Starring New York (2011), studies the representation of New York in
popular films of the 1970s.
Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive (2010), documents the emergence of Nixon’s blue-collar
strategy and puts labor and class relations at the center of 1970s political history.
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad (1989), charts the rise and splintering of radical
feminism.
Alice Echols, Hot Stuff (2010), celebrates the role of disco music in integrating American
nightlife and transforming gay culture.
Niall Ferguson et al. (eds.), The Shock of the Global (2010), puts the American
experience of the 1970s in international context.
Ronald Formisano, Boston Against Busing (1991), follows the rise of a white workingclass backlash against school desegregation in Boston.
David Frum, How We Got Here (2000), surveys the cultural trends of the 1970s and
laments their consequences.
Miriam Greenberg, Branding New York (2008), follows the process and consequences of
New York’s remarkable transformation from a symbol of decline and crisis to a highly
marketable brand name.
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too (2006), examines the white ethnic revival of the
1970s.
Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart (2009), illuminates the connections
between consumer culture and conservative ideology in the 1970s through a story about a
regional chain store that became the world’s largest private company.
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia (2010), locates the intellectual origins of the modern
human rights movement in the 1970s.
Heather Murray, Not in This Family (2010), treats the coming-out dramas of gay and
lesbian Americans and their straight families as part of a new ethic of sexual revelation in
this period.
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland (2008), interprets changing U.S. politics between the mid1960s and the mid-1970s through the career and character of Richard Nixon.
Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed (2014), recasts the history of American
foreign policy in the 1970s against the backdrop of global changes in energy politics,
finance, and human rights ideology.
Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer. Rightward Bound (2008), collects recent scholarship
on the conservative revival of the 1970s.
Robert Self, All in the Family (2012), highlights the role of debates about family life in
the conservative backlash of the 1970s.
Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest (2003), provides a new interpretation of détente and
Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy.
Chapter 30
William C. Berman, America’s Right Turn: From Nixon to Bush (1994), explains how
social conservatives became allied with economic conservatives, to devastating effect for
American liberal politics.
Michael A. Bernstein and David E. Adler, Understanding American Economic Decline
(1994), explores various aspects of the changing American economy during the Reagan
era.
Jennifer Brier, Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis (2009),
shows how a diverse range of actors, both in the United States and abroad, reframed
public awareness of the epidemic as both a public health crisis and a political and
economic problem in urgent need of governmental action.
W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds., The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic
Conservatism and Its Legacies (2003), presents a wide range of views on Reagan’s
legacies.
Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (2003), chronicles the development of
modern computing through the boom in personal computing in the 1980s to the spread of
the Internet in the 1990s and early twenty-first century.
Jeff Chang, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2005), traces
hip-hop from its Jamaican roots and Bronx birthplace to the American mainstream.
Robert M. Collins, Transforming America: Politics and Culture During the Reagan
Years (2009), shows how Reagan’s combination of conservative ideology and political
pragmatism enabled him to implement his policies.
David T. Courtwright, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (2010),
argues that, in the last three decades of the twentieth century, the most powerful influence
over mainstream American culture was not the forces of moral conservatism but the
economic and cultural libertarianism that emerged from the 1960s.
Jim Cullen, Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (1998),
shows how Springsteen fits squarely in the American tradition of social chronicler.
John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History (2008),
argues that Reagan was a far more active and complex president than is typically
acknowledged and that he remained committed to a libertarian view of government
throughout his presidency.
Michael Eric Dyson, Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture
(1996), explores black politics and expressive culture, from the impact of the church to
the popularity of hip-hop.
Thomas Byrne Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality (1989), tracks the impact of lower
taxes and social spending cuts.
John Ehrman, The Eighties: America in the Age of Reagan (2005), explores the
technological, social, economic, cultural, and political changes that transformed the
United States in this decade.
John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications,
Reconsiderations, Provocations (1994), analyzes Reagan’s approach to foreign policy
and the sudden end of the Cold War.
Charles R. Geist, Wall Street (1997), provides a sweeping history and probes Wall
Street’s role in the “great expansion” of the 1980s and 1990s.
Nelson George, Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic
1980s, as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Black and Before
That, Negroes) (2004), explores the challenges and triumphs of African American life in
the 1980s.
Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the
New Imperialism (2006), argues, with particular reference to Reagan’s policies, that El
Salvador and its neighbors were the testing ground for a distinctive form of “New Right”
imperialism in which the government used military force to create free markets.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), traces the origins of the idea and
the consequences of the policies it inspired.
Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties
America (2006), tracks the explosion, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, of various
cultural panics over drugs, serial killers, school busing, child abuse, and pornography,
arguing that they revived popular belief in evil, catalyzed new coalitions on the right, and
fueled the conservative shift in American politics.
E. Anne Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and
Consumer Culture (1987), explains MTV’s tremendous appeal in the 1980s and its
relation to global youth culture.
Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare
(1992), traces the origins and impact of Reagan-era welfare policy.
Bradford Martin, The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan
(2011), explores the dissent and oppositional movements that flourished in the 1980s.
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2002),
examines the social roots and fruition of the conservative populism that helped elect
Reagan and transformed American politics.
Richard Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (2005), vividly
describes the inner workings of the Reagan administration.
Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the
1960s (2012), shows how civil rights victories and the emergence of nontraditional
families in the 1960s and 1970s provoked a conservative cultural backlash and, in the
1980s, gave rise to the new and uneasy political coalition between fiscal and cultural
conservatives.
Michael Shaller, Reckoning with Reagan: America and Its President in the 1980s (1994),
comprehensively analyzes both Reagan’s immense popularity and his impact on foreign,
social, and economic policy.
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (1987),
discusses the early impact of AIDS.
David Sirota, Back to Our Future (2011), offers an entertaining yet insightful exploration
of the 1980s’ popular culture and its long-term effects on American politics and society.
Phil Tiemeyer, Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight
Attendants (2013), recounts the history of what was once the most gay-identified
occupation, including flight attendants’ groundbreaking legal battle to win working rights
for people with AIDS.
Gil Troy, Morning in America: How President Reagan Invented the 1980s (2005), argues
that Reagan pursued his conservative agenda but also pragmatically responded to
countervailing trends and proved to be not just a “Great Communicator” but a “Great
Reconciler,” too.
Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008 (2008), explains why Reagan’s
presidency should be seen as one of the greatest and most consequential in American
history.
Chapter 31
Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (2000), traces the development of the Internet, from
the Department of Defense’s internal communication system (ARPNET) of the 1960s to
the mass marketplace of the World Wide Web in the 1990s.
Thomas Banchoff, Embryo Politics: Ethics and Policy in Atlantic Democracies (2011),
explores the history of political debate over embryo research in the United States and
Western Europe since the 1960s.
William C. Berman, From the Center to the Edge: The Politics and Policies of the
Clinton Presidency (2001), explains how and why Clinton’s policies came to consolidate
Reagan’s.
Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars (2011), explores the diverse wars that followed in the wake
of al-Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (2000),
shows how the gay liberation movement of the late twentieth century lost its broader
vision of social justice as it became focused on narrower legal and political battles and as
middle-class gays and lesbians were incorporated into the consumer market.
James W. Cortada, The Digital Flood: The Diffusion of Information Technology Across
the U.S., Europe, and Asia (2012), traces the spread of computing and information across
much of the world.
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of
Hip Consumerism (1998), explores the business revolution of the late twentieth century
and how business learned to absorb, profit from, and even commandeer the onceoppositional ethos of “cool.”
Colin Harrison, American Culture in the 1990s (2010), analyzes key cultural and political
events of that decade and their legacies.
James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political
Tradition (2011), explores Obama’s commitment to freedom, equality, and deliberative
politics.
Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2011), argues that programming
decisions made at the beginning of the digital revolution have fundamentally transformed
our culture, and not necessarily for the better.
James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the
End of the 20th Century (2010), argues that, since the 1960s, the Left has won almost
every battle of the culture wars and that, contrary to conventional wisdom, it has been
surprisingly successful in defending big government, as well.
Jeffrey Melnick, 9/11 Culture (2009), analyzes cultural responses to the attacks of
September 11.
Williamson Murray and Robert H. Scales, The Iraq War: A Military History (2005),
analyzes the aims, strategy, tactics, and battlefield experiences of both sides in the war.
Steven E. Schier, ed., The Postmodern Presidency: Bill Clinton’s Legacy in U.S. Politics
(2000), traces Clinton’s courtship of public opinion and explains the significance of his
celebrity status.
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in
Disaster (2009), recounts how new communities and ideals emerged out of natural and
human-made disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth
Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2008), explains how, in the 1970s,
countercultural figures such as Stewart Brand recognized digital technology’s potential as
a tool for creating virtual, utopian community; made the Internet what it is today; and
became highly successful “tech” entrepreneurs along the way.
Julian E. Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment
(2010), collects historians’ contextualization of various aspects of Bush’s administration,
from the corporate bailouts to compassionate conservatism and the war on terror.