AP U.S. History
Summer Assignment 2012
Mr. Heffernan
Northern Highlands Regional High School
Welcome to AP US History! The course is a college-level course that will requires extensive
knowledge and understanding of US History. It is imperative to have a strong foundation as a class
for our return in September. As such, every student is expected to complete the following summer
reading assignment.
SUMMER READING
1. Read and take notes on pages 59 – 125 in the textbook, A People and a Nation.
(You do not have to take notes in any particular format, but I’ve included the
Cornell University Note Taking System for your reference.)
2. Read A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz
In September...
1. On the first full day of class there will be a multiple-choice test on the text material. For this test
you may use your notes.
2. On the next class meeting the class will have an essay & short-answer test on A Voyage Long and
Strange.
Reading list:
Below is a list of books covering different topics in American History. These books may be useful
in expanding your knowledge and understanding of US history. Reading all of these books in one
summer would be an impossible task, and is in no way encouraged. But reading or familiarizing
yourself with some of these books can assist in your understanding of US History.
APUSH Reading List
Discovery & Colonial Era
New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America – Colin Calloway
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop – Edmund Morgan
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War – Nathaniel Philbrick
The Wordy Shipmates – Sarah Vowell
The Emergence & Rise of the American Republic
The Federalist Papers
The Autobiography of Ben Franklin – Ben Franklin
The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789 – Edmund Morgan
Antebellum Period
Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right – Stephan Anderson
The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th Century America – Paul Johnson
Walden – Henry David Thoreau
Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
The Civil War
Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War – Tony Horwitz
Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War – Tony Horwitz
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era – James McPherson
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Reconstruction
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
The Gilded Age/American Capitalism
American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 - H.W. Brands
Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century – John Kasson
The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson
The ‘Conquest’ of the West &Native Americans
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Brown
The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Big Horn – Nathaniel Philbrick
Progressive Era
Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy
Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era- Neil Painter
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
Women’s Rights
Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New
Left – Sara Evans
Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States – Eleanor Flexner
The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan
World War I
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemmingway
The First World War – John Keegan
Interwar Period
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age – Kevin Boyle
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America – Nathan Miller
The Great Depression
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust
Bowl
Freedom from Fear: The American People in the Depression and War, 1929-1945-David
Kennedy
World War II
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War – John Dower
In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin – Erik Larson
The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer
Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War – William Manchester
Civil Rights
Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age – Kevin Boyle
Coming of Age in Mississippi – Anne Moody
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America – Beryl
Satter
Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X
The Cold War
Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties – Peter
Biskind
The Cold War – John Lewis Gaddis
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State – Gary Wills
Vietnam
A Rumor of War – Philip Caputo
Dispatches – Michael Herr
Vietnam: A History – Stanley Karnow
Watergate
All the President’s Men – Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein
Time of Illusion: An Historical and Reflective Account of the Nixon Era – Jonathan Schell
The Road to September 11th and the Post-September 11th World
102 Minutes: the Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside The Twin Towers – Jim
Dwyer
The Forever War – Dexter Filkins
The Good Soldiers – David Finkel
War – Sebastian Junger
Jarhead – Anthony Swofford
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 – Lawrence Wright
American Ideas
The Education of Henry Adams – Henry Adams
The Metaphysical Club: The Story of Ideas in America – Louis Menand
Biography
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt –
H.W. Brands
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt – Edmund Morris
Theodore Rex – Edmund Morris
Colonel Roosevelt – Edmund Morris
General US History
American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 – H.W. Brands
The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls- Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Lies My Teacher Told Me – James Loewen
A Pocket History of the United States – Allan Nevins, Henry Steele Commager
A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
The Cornell Note Taking System
Recall Column
------2 1/2”-------- ----------------6”-------------------Reduce ideas and facts to
concise jottings and
summaries as cues for
Reciting, Reviewing,
and Reflecting.
Record the lecture as fully and as
meaningfully as possible.
The format provides the perfect opportunity for following through with the 5 R's of note-taking. Here they
are:
1. Record. During the lecture, record in the main column as many meaningful facts and ideas as you
can. Write legibly.
2. Reduce. As soon after as possible, summarize these ideas and facts concisely in the Recall Column.
Summarizing clarifies meanings and relationships, reinforces continuity, and strengthens memory. Also, it
is a way of preparing for examinations gradually and well ahead of time.
3. Recite. Now cover the column, using only your jottings in the Recall Column as cues or "flags" to help
you recall, say over facts and ideas of the lecture as fully as you can, not mechanically, but in your own
words and with as much appreciation of the meaning as you can. Then, uncovering your notes, verify
what you have said. This procedure helps to transfer the facts and ideas of your long term memory.
4. Reflect. Reflective students distill their opinions from their notes. They make such opinions the
starting point for their own musings upon the subjects they are studying. Such musings aid them in
making sense out of their courses and academic experiences by finding relationships among them.
Reflective students continually label and index their experiences and ideas, put them into structures,
outlines, summaries, and frames of reference. They rearrange and file them. Best of all, they have an eye
for the vital-for the essential. Unless ideas are placed in categories, unless they are taken up from time to
time for re-examination, they will become inert and soon forgotten.
5. Review. If you will spend 10 minutes every week or so in a quick review of these notes, you will retain
most of what you have learned, and you will be able to use your knowledge currently to greater and
greater effectiveness.
©Academic Skills Center, Dartmouth College 2001