HISTORY 1051: American History Since 1877
Spring 2007
Professor Gerald Prokopowicz
BOOK REVIEW Assignment
Choose a book from this list, find a copy, and bring it to class no later than Friday,
February 16. Read it and write an analytical book review (not a book report) of
approximately 750 words that discusses the author’s thesis and evaluates its strengths and
weaknesses.
The review is due in class on Wednesday, April 4. Reviews submitted late will be
marked down one full grade for each day they are late; no reviews will be accepted after
Friday, April 6.
Most of the books are available from many sources, including Joyner Library, Sheppard
Memorial Library, local bookstores, and online. Some may be available at the campus
bookstore, but because there are so many books listed, none have specifically been
ordered for this class.
If you would like to review a book not listed here, please submit the title for approval.
For this assignment, the book should be an academic history, with references (footnotes
or endnotes). Memoirs and other primary sources, although they are valuable for studying
history, are not appropriate for this assignment.
Reconstruction, 1865-1877: Chapter 15
A Short History of Reconstruction (1990) Eric Foner
From Bondage to Contract (1999) Amy Dru Stanley
Old South, New South (1986) Gavin Wright
The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (1993) Edward Royce
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) David W. Blight
A Nation under Our Feet (2003) Steven Hahn
Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction
(1977) Thomas Holt
The Promise of the New South (1992) Edward Ayers
Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrows (1985) Jacqueline Jones
The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 18301925 (2000) Mia Bay
Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (2001) Michael Perman
The American West: Chapter 16
The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987) Patricia
Nelson Limerick
“It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West
(1991) Richard White
The Indian Frontier of the American West (1984) Robert M. Utley
The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West (1996)
Frieda Knobloch
The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History (2000) Andrew C. Isenberg
Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) Ronald Takaki
Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979) John Mack Faragher
California and the American Dream, 1850-1915 (1973) Kevin Starr
The Military and the United States Indian Policy (1988) Robert Wooster
Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks
(1999) Mark David Spence
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000) Joy S. Kasson
Capitol and Labor in the Age of Enterprise 1877-1900: Chapter 17
The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1968) Robert Wiebe
The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977) Alfred D.
Chandler, Jr.
Making America Corporate, 1870-1920 (1990) Olivier Zunz
The Battle for the Homestead 1880-1892 (1992) Paul Krause
America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (1977)
David F. Noble
From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932 (1984) David Hounshell
Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998) Kevin Kenny
Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (2001) Elliott J. Gorn
Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982) Alice
Kessler-Harris
The Rise of the City: Chapter 18
Streetcar Suburbs, 1879-1900 (1962) Sam Bass Warner
The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930 (1991)
Harold L. Platt
The Devil in the White City (2003) Erik Larson
Suburban Lives (1990) Margaret Marsh
The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (1999) Howard B. Chudacoff
Adapting to Abundance (1990) Andrew R. Heinze
City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture (1982) Gunther Barth
Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1978) John F. Kasson
Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
(1986) Kathy Peiss
The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society, 1865-1893 (1983)
Alan Trachtenberg
The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in America (1985) John Bodnar
Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (2000) Sarah
Deutsch
No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (1981)
T.J. Jackson Lears
Metropolitan Corridor (1985) John R. Stilgoe
Politics in the Age of Enterprise 1877-1896: Chapter 19
Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth-Century America (1977) Morton Keller
Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1987) Nell Irvin Painter
The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (1955) Richard Hofstadter
The Populist Moment (1978) Lawrence Goodwyn
The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the
Georgia Upcountry (1983) Steven Hahn
Conceiving a New Republic (2006) Charles Calhoun
The Populist Persuasion (1995) Michael Kazin
The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (1986)
Michael E. McGerr
Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work (1995) Kathryn Kish Sklar
The Progressive Era: Chapter 20
Pivotal Decades: 1900-1920 (1990) John Milton Cooper
Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (1973) John D. Buenker
The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) Nancy F. Cott
The Great Merger Movement in American Business 1895-1904 (1985) Naomi Lamoreaux
The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 (2002) Nancy Cohen
Atlantic Crossings: Social Democracy in a Progressive Age (1998) Daniel T. Rodgers
Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (1996) Sara Hunter Graham
W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (1993) David Levering Lewis
The Triumph of Conservativism (1963) Gabriel Kolko
A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America (2003)
Michael McGerr
The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999) Linda Gordon
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
(1984) Paula Giddings
Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina,
1896-1920 (1996) Glenda Gilmore
The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Challenge to Legal Orthodoxy
(1992) Morton J. Horwitz
Progressivism (1983) Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick
John Dewey and American Democracy (1991) Robert Westbrook
1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Debs (2004) James Chace
Prophets of Regulation (1984) Thomas K. McCraw
The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (1981) Stephen R.
Fox
An Emerging World Power 1877-1914: Chapter 21
The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion (1963) Walter LaFeber
From Wealth to Power (1998) Fareed Zakaria
Empire by Default (1998) Ivan Musicant
Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (1961)
Ernest R. May
The Spanish-American War and President McKinley (1982) Lewis Gould
Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American
and Philippine-American Wars (1998) Kristin L. Hoganson
Intervention! The United States and the Mexican Revolution (1993)
John S. D. Eisenhower
Theodore Roosevelt, Culture, Diplomacy, and Expansion (1985) Richard H. Collin
Manifest Destiny: American Expansionism and the Empire of Right (1995) Anders
Stephanson
The Mirror of War: American Society and the Spanish-American War (1974) Gerald F.
Linderman
Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion (1982)
Emily S. Rosenberg
“Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903
(1982) Creighton Miller
Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad
(2000) Matthew Frye Jacobson
War and the American State 1914-1920: Chapter 22
The Last Days of Innocence: America at War, 1917-1918 (1997)
Meirion Harries and Sue Harries
The United States and the First World War (2000) Jennifer D. Keene
Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (1970) William M. Tuttle Jr.
The World War and American Isolation (1959) Ernest R. May
Over There: The Story of America’s First Great Overseas Crusade (1964) Frank Freidel
Over Here: The First World War and American Society (1980) David Kennedy
Women, War, and Work (1980) Maureen Greenwald
The Great Influenza: the Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (2004) John M.
Barry
Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2002) Margaret MacMillan
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (1955) John Higham
World War I and the Origins of Civil Liberties Paul L. Murphy
Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (2003) Alan
Dawley
To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (1992)
Thomas Knock
Modern Times--The 1920s: Chapter 23
The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (1995) Lynn Dumenil
Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920-1941 (1992) Michael
Parish
The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (1979) Ellis Hawley
The Perils of Prosperity (1994) William E. Leuchtenburg
Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors (2002) David Farber
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 18901940 (1994) George Chauncey
American Crucible (2000) Gary Gerstle
Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1998) Andrew Gyory
Harlem Renaissance (1971) Nathan I. Huggins
Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science
and Religion (1997) Edward J. Larson
Women and the Klan: Racism and Politics of Provincialism (1991) Kathleen M. Blee
Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 19001933 (1990) Morton Keller
The Great Depression: Chapter 24
Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979) Donald Worster
The Great Depression (1984) Robert S. McElvaine
The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939
(1987) Michael Bernstein
Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression
Years (1973) Richard Pells
Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (1982) Susan Ware
The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (1984) Harvey Klehr
Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (1975) Joan Hoff Wilson
The New Deal 1933-1939: Chapter 25
Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963) William E. Leuchtenburg
The New Deal: The Depression Years (1989) Anthony Badger
For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private
Welfare State (2003) Jennifer Klein
Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994) Linda Gordon
The New Deal and the West (1984) Richard Lowitt
Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (1982) Alan
Brinkley
From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt (1991) Bruce Schulman
Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (1983) Nancy J.
Weiss
The World at War 1939-1945: Chapter 26
V Was for Victory (1976) John Morton Blum
Rosie the Riveter Revisited (1988) Sherna B. Gluck
At Dawn We Slept (1981) Gordon Prange
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (1986) John Dower
Justice at War (1981) Peter Irons
The Boys’ Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe (2003) Paul Fussell
The Abandonment of the Jews (1984) David Wyman
The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) Richard Rhodes
Cold War America: Chapter 27
The Cold War (2005) John Lewis Gaddis
Rise to Globalism (8th ed., 1997) Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley
America, Russia, and the Cold War; 1945-1967 (7th ed.) Walter LaFeber
The Marshall Plan (1987) Michael Hogan
Nightmare in Red (1990) Richard Freid
Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2000) Mary
Dudziak
The Affluent Society and the Liberal Consensus: Chapter 28
Promises to Keep (1995) Paul Boyer
Grand Expectations (1996) James T. Patterson
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War (1988) Elaine Tyler May
Coming of Age in Buffalo (1990) William Graebner
As Seen on TV (1996) Karal Ann Marling
The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985) Kenneth T.
Jackson
A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003)
Lizabeth Cohen
By The Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic
Age (1985) Paul Boyer
Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties (2002) W.J. Rorabaugh
The Kennedy Imprisonment (1982) Garry Wills
Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (1976) Doris Kearns
Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the
South (1994) John Egerton
Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (2001)
James T. Patterson
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1965 (1988) Taylor Branch
Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement (1990) Robert Weisbrot
Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for
Freedom (1980) William Chafe
The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991)
Nicholas Lemann
War Abroad and at Home: The Vietnam Era 1961-1975 Chapter 29
America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (1999) Maurice Isserman and Michael
Kazin
The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (1984) Allen J.
Matusow
The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (1994) David Farber
The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in
American Politics (2000) Matthew Dallek
The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971) Graham T. Allison
A Time For War: The United States and Vietnam, 1945-1975 (1997) Robert D.
Schulzinger
A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988) Neil Sheehan
Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (1993) Christian J. Appy
The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (1979) Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts
The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, The Origins of the New Conservatism, and the
Transformation of American Politics (1995) Dan T. Carter
Chicago '68 (1988) David Farber
1968: The Year That Rocked the World (2003) Mark Kurlansky
Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974 (1991) John Morton Blum
"Democracy in the Streets": From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (1987) James
Miller
Betty Friedan and the Making of "The Feminine Mystique" (1998) Daniel Horowitz
The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (1992) Margaret Cruikshank
Make Love Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (2000) David Allyn
The Lean Years 1969-1980 Chapter 30
It Seemed Like Nothing Happened (1982) Peter N. Carroll
The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (2001) Bruce J.
Schulman
The Wars of Watergate (1990) Stanley I. Kutler
Abuse of Power: The Nixon Tapes (1997) Stanley Kutler
All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter with Iran (1986) Gary Sick
Jimmy Carter and the Energy Crisis of the 1970s (2005) Daniel Horowitz
Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (1991)
Thomas Byrne Edsall with Mary D. Edsall
Common Ground (1985) J. Anthony Lukas
The World Turned Upside Down: A History of the Conservative Ascendancy in America
(1996) Godfrey Hodgson