History books for your field list
12/10/2011 17:40
This is a list of the books I’ve read over the last couple of years that I’ve written something about. It finally occurred to me that leaving them buried in the archives of this blog isn’t helpful -- I can’t even find them myself when I need them! I’m only including ones that are important enough that when I go back and read what I wrote, I still care. There’s also a new page called Dan’s index of books that has a brief summary of each book. The links there, and the titles below connect to the original notes I posted about the books. I read many of these for my PhD oral exams, so if you’re putting together field lists, maybe these will help.
Popular History (history for the general public):
Glenn Beck, Broke: The Plan to Restore Trust, Truth and Treasure, 2010.
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, 1984.
Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War, 2002.
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, 2004.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, 2005.
Stewart H. Holbrook, Lost Men of American History, 1947.
Gary B Nash,The Unknown American Revolution, 2005.
Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, 2001.
Cultural History (inc. Intellectual):
Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, 1984.
Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution, 1977.
Malcolm Cowley & Bernard Smith, Books that Changed Our Minds, 1939.
Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order, 1998.
Gray, Susan E. The Yankee West : Community Life on the Michigan Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Johnson, Paul Edward. A Shopkeeper's Millenium : Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837." 2004.
Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938, 2007.
Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, 1965.
Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States, 1947.
W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, 1979.
Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class, 1998.
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, 1982.
Ed White, The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America, 2005.
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920, 1967.
Environmental History:
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England, 1983, 2003.
Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis : Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 1972.
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, 2001.
Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment, 2001.
Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature, 2001.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West,1987.
Shawn William Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America, 2007.
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, 2000.
Joachim Radkau, Thomas Dunlap tr., Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, 2002, 2008 tr.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.
James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, 2009.
Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production, 2001.
Smil, Vaclav. Creating the Twentieth Century : Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Red Earth, 2004.
Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England, 1991.
Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire : Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
Legal & Political History:
Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s, 1992.
Peri E. Arnold, Remaking the Presidency: Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, 1901-1916, 2009.
Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Eric Foner, Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 1988.
Oscar Handlin & Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth, A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861, 1947.
Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860.
Paul L. Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War, 1987.
John, Richard R. Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications. 2010.
Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898, 1963.
Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, 1996.
Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. Oxford: New York, 2007.
David M. Potter & Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861, 1976.
Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America, 2003.
Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901, 2001.
Heather Cox Richardson, West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War, 2007.
Richardson, Heather Cox. Wounded Knee : Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837,1968.
Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State 1877-1917, 1999.
J.C.A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783-1830, 1983.
Social History (inc. Economic, Business, Labor)
Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America, 2001.
Bodenhorn, A history of banking in antebellum America : financial markets and economic development in an era of nation-building, 2000.
Howard Bodenhorn, State Banking in Early America: A New Economic History, 2003.
Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860, 2002.
Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Rural Capitalism : Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War, 2006.
Paul K. Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929, 2008.
Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, 2003.
Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era, 2009.
Hammond, Bray. Banks and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People, 1951.
Howard R. Lamar, The Trader on the American Frontier: Myth’s Victim, 1977.
Bruce Laurie, Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America, 1989.
Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, 2007.
Donald H. Parkerson, The Agricultural Transition in New York State, 1995.
Glenn Porter and Harold C. Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing, 1971.
Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy, 1992.
Sellers, Charles Grier, The Market Revolution : Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, 1991.
John L. Shover, First Majority-Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America, 1976.
John Thompson, Closing the Frontier: Radical Response in Oklahoma, 1889-1923, 1986.
Alfred F. Young, ed. Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, 1993.
Historiography/Theory (inc. the “old chestnuts”):
John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America, 1965.
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R., 1955.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1996.
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 2007.
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, 1988.
Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 1927.
Larry Schweikart, 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School), 2009.
Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section: Selected Essays, 1961.
Ian Tyrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970, 2005.
Hayden White, Metahistory, 1973.
Popular History (history for the general public):
Glenn Beck, Broke: The Plan to Restore Trust, Truth and Treasure, 2010.
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre, 1984.
Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War, 2002.
Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, 2004.
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, 2005.
Stewart H. Holbrook, Lost Men of American History, 1947.
Gary B Nash,The Unknown American Revolution, 2005.
Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, 2001.
Cultural History (inc. Intellectual):
Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s, 1984.
Colin Bonwick, English Radicals and the American Revolution, 1977.
Malcolm Cowley & Bernard Smith, Books that Changed Our Minds, 1939.
Peter S. Field, The Crisis of the Standing Order, 1998.
Gray, Susan E. The Yankee West : Community Life on the Michigan Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Johnson, Paul Edward. A Shopkeeper's Millenium : Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837." 2004.
Laura L. Lovett, Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938, 2007.
Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, 1965.
Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States, 1947.
W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition, 1979.
Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class, 1998.
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, 1982.
Ed White, The Backcountry and the City: Colonization and Conflict in Early America, 2005.
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920, 1967.
Environmental History:
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England, 1983, 2003.
Cronon, William. Nature's Metropolis : Chicago and the Great West. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.
Alfred W. Crosby, Jr. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 1972.
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, 2001.
Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and Environment, 2001.
Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature, 2001.
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West,1987.
Shawn William Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America, 2007.
Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, 2000.
Joachim Radkau, Thomas Dunlap tr., Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, 2002, 2008 tr.
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 1998.
James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, 2009.
Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production, 2001.
Smil, Vaclav. Creating the Twentieth Century : Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Red Earth, 2004.
Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England, 1991.
Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire : Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.
Legal & Political History:
Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s, 1992.
Peri E. Arnold, Remaking the Presidency: Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson, 1901-1916, 2009.
Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.
Eric Foner, Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, 1988.
Oscar Handlin & Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth, A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861, 1947.
Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860.
Paul L. Huston, The Panic of 1857 and the Coming of the Civil War, 1987.
John, Richard R. Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications. 2010.
Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898, 1963.
Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America, 1996.
Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. Oxford: New York, 2007.
David M. Potter & Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861, 1976.
Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America, 2003.
Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901, 2001.
Heather Cox Richardson, West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War, 2007.
Richardson, Heather Cox. Wounded Knee : Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837,1968.
Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State 1877-1917, 1999.
J.C.A. Stagg, Mr. Madison’s War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783-1830, 1983.
Social History (inc. Economic, Business, Labor)
Edward J. Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America, 2001.
Bodenhorn, A history of banking in antebellum America : financial markets and economic development in an era of nation-building, 2000.
Howard Bodenhorn, State Banking in Early America: A New Economic History, 2003.
Martin Bruegel, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1860, 2002.
Clark, Christopher. The Roots of Rural Capitalism : Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Christopher Clark, Social Change in America: From the Revolution Through the Civil War, 2006.
Paul K. Conkin, A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929, 2008.
Deborah Fitzgerald, Every Farm a Factory: The Industrial Ideal in American Agriculture, 2003.
Jennifer Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era, 2009.
Hammond, Bray. Banks and Politics in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People, 1951.
Howard R. Lamar, The Trader on the American Frontier: Myth’s Victim, 1977.
Bruce Laurie, Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America, 1989.
Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States, 2007.
Donald H. Parkerson, The Agricultural Transition in New York State, 1995.
Glenn Porter and Harold C. Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing, 1971.
Winifred Barr Rothenberg, From Market-Places to a Market Economy, 1992.
Sellers, Charles Grier, The Market Revolution : Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, 1991.
John L. Shover, First Majority-Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America, 1976.
John Thompson, Closing the Frontier: Radical Response in Oklahoma, 1889-1923, 1986.
Alfred F. Young, ed. Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, 1993.
Historiography/Theory (inc. the “old chestnuts”):
John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America, 1965.
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R., 1955.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1996.
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, 2007.
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, 1988.
Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 1927.
Larry Schweikart, 48 Liberal Lies About American History (That You Probably Learned in School), 2009.
Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section: Selected Essays, 1961.
Ian Tyrell, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890-1970, 2005.
Hayden White, Metahistory, 1973.
