HISTORY 6020
SELECTED TOPICS IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
Field List, 2013-2014
The list below contains 71 books and 22 articles organized into chronological and
thematic subfields. Items in brackets appear elsewhere in the list. Ph.D. students doing a first
or second field in U.S. history are expected to be familiar with all the works listed.
Following the reading list are brief profiles of the faculty teaching History 6020.
Native/European Encounters
Colin Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West Before Lewis and Clark
(2003).
David S. Jones, “Virgin Soils Revisited,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 4 (Oct. 2003): 703742.
Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip=s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998).
James Merrell, The Indians= New World: Catawbas and their Neighbors from European
Contact Through the Era of Removal (1989).
Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era
of European Colonization (1992).
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650-1815 (1991).
Colonization and Colonial Societies
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998).
Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and
Power in Colonial Virginia (1996).
Perry Miller, "Errand into the Wilderness," in Errand into the Wilderness (1956), Chapter 1.
Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(1975).
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife=s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary,
1785-1812 (1990).
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American Revolution and the Constitution
Jon Butler, “Enthusiasm Described and Decried: the Great Awakening as Interpretive Fiction,”
Journal of American History, 69 (Sept. 1982): 305-35.
Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in America,
1788-1828 (1999).
Edward Countryman, The American Revolution, revised edition (2003).
Linda Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Female Political Imagination in the Early Republic,” in
Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980).
Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (1958).
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969).
Alfred F. Young, AGeorge Robert Twelves Hewes (1742-1840): A Boston Shoemaker and the
Memory of the American Revolution,@ William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 38 (1981): 561623.
[Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(1998).]
[Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife=s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary,
1785-1812 (1990).]
Jefferson and Jackson
Paul Finkelman, "Jefferson and Slavery: 'Treason Against the Hopes of the World,'" in
Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (1993), pp. 181-221.
Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 18001860 (2011).
Daniel Walker Howe,What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
(2007).
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005).
Class, Race, and Gender in Antebellum Period
Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-
3
1920," American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620-647.
Lori D. Ginzberg, Untidy Origins: A Story of Woman's Rights in Antebellum New York (2005).
Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985).
Nell Painter, ARepresenting Truth: Sojourner Truth=s Knowing and Becoming Known,@ Journal
of American History 81 (1994): 461-492.
Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (1998).
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (1991).
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in
Nineteenth-Century America," Signs 1 (Autumn 1975): 1-29.
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1982).
Deborah Gray White, Ar=n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985).
[Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990).]
[Reginald Horseman, Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
(1981).]
[Daniel Walker Howe,What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
(2007).]
[Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 18001860 (2011).]
[Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005).]
Antebellum Slavery and the Old South
Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, APrologue: Slavery and the Cliometric Revolution,@ in
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974).
Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of
the Slave South (1965).
Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974).
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999).
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[Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(1998).]
[Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
(1975).]
[Nell Painter, ARepresenting Truth: Sojourner Truth=s Knowing and Becoming Known,@ Journal
of American History 81 (1994): 461-492.]
[Deborah Gray White, Ar=n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985).]
Civil War
Barbara J. Fields, AIdeology and Race in American History,@ in Region, Race, and
Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James
McPherson (1982), 143-177.
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the
Civil War (1970).
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988).
[Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of
the Slave South (1965).]
[Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005).]
Manifest Destiny and the West
William Cronon, Nature=s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991).
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America
(1978).
Reginald Horseman, Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
(1981).
William Appleman Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959).
Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West (1985).
[Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 18001860 (2011).]
[Perry Miller, "Errand into the Wilderness," in Errand into the Wilderness (1956), Chapter 1.]
5
Reconstruction and the New South
Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877 (1988).
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North
Carolina, 1896-1920 (1996).
Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the
Civil War (1887).
Howard Rabinowitz and C. Vann Woodward, APerspectives: The Strange Career of Jim Crow,@
Journal of American History 75, no. 3 (Dec. 1988): 842-868.
Jonathan Wiener, "Class Structure and Economic Development in the American South 18651955," American Historical Review 84 (1979): 970-992.
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955).
Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War
(1986).
[Barbara J. Fields, AIdeology and Race in American History,@ in Region, Race, and
Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, eds. J. Morgan Kousser and James
McPherson (1982), 143-177.]
Urbanization, Industrialization, and Labor
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., "The Beginnings of >Big Business= in American Industry," Business
History Review 33 (Spring 1959): 1-31. (Also in Thomas K. McCraw (ed.), The Essential Alfred
Chandler, Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business (1988), 47-73.
Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor
Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1999).
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
(1982).
[George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890-1940 (1994).]
[Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the
Civil War (1887).]
[Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985).]
6
[David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (1991).]
[Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1982).]
Immigration and Ethnicity
Gary Gerstle, "Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of America"; Donna R. Gabaccia, "Liberty,
Coercion and the Making of Immigration Historians," Journal of American History, 84, no. 2
(September 1997): 524-558, 570-575.
Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2003).
Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 18801950 (1986).
George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los
Angeles, 1900-1945 (1993).
[David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working
Class (1991).]
The Gilded Age and Progressive Eras
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890-1940 (1994).
Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987).
Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994).
Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American
People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933 (1979).
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American
Culture, 1880-1920 (1981).
George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: the Shaping of Twentieth-Century
Evangelism, 1870-1925 (1980).
Richard McCormick, AProgressivism: A Contemporary Reassessment,@ in The Party Period
and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (1986).
7
Michael E. McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in
America, 1870-1920 (2003).
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical
Profession (1988).
Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural
Expansion, 1890-1945 (1982).
Theda Skocpol, “State Formation and Social Policy in the United States,” in Social Policy in the
United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective (1995).
[Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political
Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620-647.]
[Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., "The Beginnings of >Big Business= in American Industry," Business
History Review 33 (Spring 1959): 1-31. (Also in Thomas K. McCraw (ed.), The Essential Alfred
Chandler, Essays Toward a Historical Theory of Big Business (1988), 47-73.)]
[Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor
Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1999).]
[Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North
Carolina, 1896-1920 (1996).]
[Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America
(1978).]
[Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985).]
[Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
(1982).]
Imperialism and World War One
Eileen J. Findlay, “Love in the Tropics: Marriage, Divorce, and the Construction of Benevolent
Colonialism in Puerto Rico, 1898-1910,” in Gilbert M. Joseph et al., eds., Close Encounters of
Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations (1998).
David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980).
Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the
Philippines (2006).
8
[Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American
People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933 (1979).]
[Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical
Profession (1988).]
[Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural
Expansion, 1890-1945 (1982).]
[William Appleman Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959).]
1920s
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990).
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995).
[George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 1890-1940 (1994).]
[Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987).]
[Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American
People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933 (1979).]
[Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985).]
[George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: the Shaping of TwentiethCentury Evangelism, 1870-1925 (1980).]
[Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2003).]
[Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural
Expansion, 1890-1945 (1982).]
The Great Depression and World War Two
Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents (1998).
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers= Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (2003).
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986).
9
Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold
War, 1917-1953( 1994).
Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957
(1997).
[Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990).]
[Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994).]
[Ellis Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American
People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933 (1979).]
[Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985).
[Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical
Profession (1988).]
[Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural
Expansion, 1890-1945 (1982).]
The Cold War
Barton Bernstein, “Atomic Bombings Reconsidered,” Foreign Affairs 74 (Jan-Feb 1995): 13552.
Mary Dudziak, Cold War, Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2002).
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988).
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East,
(2001).
Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1999).
Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (1991).
[Melvyn P. Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold
War, 1917-1953( 1994).]
[Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical
Profession (1988).]
[William Appleman Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959).]
1945 to present
10
Alice Echols, "'We Gotta Get Out of This Place': Notes Toward a Remapping of the Sixties,"
Socialist Review 22, no. 2 (1992): 9-34.
David Greenberg, Nixon=s Shadow: The History of an Image (2003).
Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,”
Journal of American History, 91 (Mar. 2005): 1233-1263.
Peniel E. Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power
Era (2006).
Nancy Maclean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (2006).
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001).
Joanne Meyerowitz, ABeyond the Feminine Mystique: A Reassessment of Postwar Mass
Culture, 1946-1958,@ Journal of American History 79 (March 1993): 1455-1482.
Bruce Schulman and Julian Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in
the 1970s (2008).
Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(1996).
[Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and its Discontents (1998).]
[Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers= Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (2003).]
[Mary Dudziak, Cold War, Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2002).]
[Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985).]
[Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988).]
[Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media and U.S. Interests in the Middle East
(2001).]
[Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical
Profession (1988).]
[Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1999).]
Brief Profiles of the Faculty Members in 6020
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Marc Egnal
My interests have evolved during the several decades that I’ve been at York – an evolution
that’s reflected in the books I’ve written. My dissertation and earliest work focused on the
Revolutionary period. My research in this area led to A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the
American Revolution (1988). Another field of interest has been comparative Canadian-US
economic history. My work in this field provided the basis for Divergent Paths: How Culture and
Institutions Have Shaped North American Growth (1996) and New World Economies: The
Growth of the Thirteen Colonies and Canada (1998). My book on the Civil War, Clash of
Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War appeared early in 2009. Finally, I remain most
interested in the US novel as social history, which is the focus of my fourth-year seminar and
my current book project.
Molly Ladd-Taylor
My research focuses on the intersection of ‘private’ life and ‘public’ policy, especially in health,
welfare, poverty, and reproductive policy. My monograph, Mother-Work: Women, Child
Welfare and the State investigates progressivism, maternalism, and the American welfare state.
Women, Health and Nation: Canada and the United States Since 1945 (co-edited with York
colleagues Kate McPherson, Gina Feldberg, and Alison Li), addresses the impact of national
policy differences on women’s health and feminist politics. My current research looks at similar
themes from a different angle. I explore eugenics, disability, childhood, and the punitive side of
US welfare policy in ‘Bad' Mothers: The Politics of Blame in 20th-Century America (co-ed. with
Lauri Umansky); “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage: the Strange Career of Paul
Popenoe,” Gender & History (2001), “The ‘Sociological Advantages’ of Sterilization: Fiscal
Politics and Feebleminded Women in Interwar Minnesota,” in Mental Retardation in America,
eds. S. Noll and J. Trent; and a forthcoming article on US social policy and the “hopeless” child.
I also teach a 5000-level seminar on race, class and gender in US history.
Carolyn Podruchny
My research and teaching interests reside in early North American history, from the last ice age
to the mid 19th century. My research has focused on the relationships forged between
indigenous peoples and French newcomers. My first monograph, Making the Voyageur World:
Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (2006), focuses on French Canadian
voyageurs that worked in the North American fur trade based out of Montreal, and ranging to
the Great Lakes, the Great Pains, northern woodlands. and the subarctic. I co-edited, with
Laura Peers, Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories (2010), which illuminate new
theories and methodologies in ethnohistory in central North America, spanning the Canadian
and U.S. borderlands. I have co-edited, with Nicole St-Onge and Brenda Macdougall, a volume
exploring Metis history in the same region, entitled Contours of a People: Metis Family, Mobility
and History (2012). I am currently writing books on the meeting and mixing of narratives
between voyageurs, Anishinaabe, and Cree; on a French-Anishinaabemowin dictionary
compiled in the mid 19th century by a Catholic missionary; and on the material culture of Metis
buffalo hunters on the Great Plains.
Marlene Shore
12
I have two major fields of research interest -- 19th and 20th-century cultural history and the
history of the social and behavioral sciences in the United States and Canada. These are
reflected in the books I have written: The Science of Social Redemption: McGill, the Chicago
School, and the Origins of Social Research in Canada (1987); The Contested Past: Reading
Canada's History (2002); The Transformation of Psychology: Influences of 19th-Century
Philosophy, Technology, and Natural Science (2001), co-edited with Christopher Green and
Thomas Teo. I am currently finishing a book on psychology and the culture of modernism in
North America, 1880 to World War II.
Marc Stein
My specialty is the history of sexuality in the United States, but I am also a social, cultural, and
political historian and my teaching and research interests include urban history, the history of
social movements, legal history, the history of race and gender, and the history of African
Americans and women. My first book, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay
Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (2000), deals with urban geographies, public culture, and political
activism. I also served as the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender History in America (2003). My second monograph, The U.S. Supreme Court’s
Sexual Revolution? 1965-1973 (2010), examines major rulings concerning abortion, birth
control, homosexuality, interracial marriage, and obscenity. My most recent major publication is
Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (2012).