Recommended Readings

Year one: A Nation is Born, 1492-1815

• "1491” by Charles Mann
• “A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America” by James Horn
• “First Generations: Women in Colonial America” by Carol Berkin
• “Tobacco Culture” by T.H. Breen
• “1776” by David McCullough
• “A People's History of the American Revolution” by Ray Raphael
• “His Excellency, George Washington” by Joseph Ellis
• “American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia” by Edmund S. Morgan
• “Founding Mothers and Fathers” by Mary Beth Norton
• “Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution” by Jack N. Rakove
• “The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders” by Jacob Needleman
• “The American Republic: Primary Sources” and “The Founders Almanac” by Bruce Frohnen
• “The Americans: The Colonial Experience” by Daniel Boorstin
• “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution” by Bernard Bailyn
• “Washington's Crossing” by David Hackett Fischer
• “Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution” by Forrest McDonald

 Resources recommended by 2010 Summer Seminar speakers (.docx) 

Year two: Transformation of the Republic, 1801-1920

• “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848” by Daniel Walker Howe 
• “Ideas That Shape a Nation: Historical Ideas Important to the Development of the United States” by James L. Smith 
• “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War” by Eric Foner 
•   “The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas In American” by Louis Menand 
• “The American Reader, Words That Moved a Nation” by Diane Ravitch, ed. 
• ” Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara 
•  “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville 
•  “A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration” by Steven Hahn 
• “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe 
•  “Confessions of Nat Turner” William Styron 
• “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass 
• “Up From Slavery” by Booker T. Washington 
• “American Slavery, American Freedom” by Edmund S. Morgan 
• “Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman” by Patricia McKissack 
• “Lincoln” by David Herbert Donald 
• “Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America” by Gary Wills 
• “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” by Doris Kearns Goodwin 
• “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era” by James M. McPherson 
•  “Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860, volumes 1 & 2” by Michael O'Brien 
• “Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877” by Eric Foner 
• “Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain 
• “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age” by Kevin Boyle 
• “The Americans: The Democratic Experience” by Daniel Boorstin 
• “The Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum 
• “The Historians Wizard of Oz” by Ranjit S. Dighe 
• “The Gilded Age” by Mark Twain 
• “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair 
• “Looking Backward” by Edward Bellamy 
• “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown 
• “The Red Badge of Courage” by Stephen Crane 
• “Essays and Lectures” by Ralph Waldo Emerson 
• “The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” by Drew Gilpin Faust 
•  “Leaves of Grass” Walt Whitman 

Trade Book Resources 

Year three: Modern America and the Global Community, 1914-present

Early 20th Century  

• "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s" by Frederick Lewis Allen
• "Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age" by Kevin Boyle  
• "Triangle: The Fire That Changed America" by David von Drehle
• "A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration" by Steven Hahn
• "Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion" by Edward J. Larson
• "The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America" by Louis Menand

• "Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World" by Liaquat Ahamed
• "Roosevelt: The Soldier Of Freedom" by James MacGregor Burns
• "The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right" by Sally Denton
• "No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II" by Doris Kerns Goodwin
• "Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945" by Max Hastings
• "Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945" by David M. Kennedy 

Postwar America 

• "American Dreams: The United States Since 1945" by H.W. Brands
• "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson
• "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan
• "Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of a Nation" by Rick Perlstein
• "The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s" by Robert Weisbrot

Civil Rights 

• "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63" by Taylor Branch
• "Pillar of Fire : America in the King Years 1963-65" by Taylor Branch 
• "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68" by Taylor Branch 
• "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation" by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff

Foreign Affairs 

• "Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938" by Stephen Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley 
• "A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History" by Thomas Bender
• "Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations from 1897" by Howard Jones 

General United States History 

• "The Americans: The Colonial Experience" by Daniel Boorstin,
• "The Americans: The National Experience" by Daniel Boorstin,
• "The Americans: The Democratic Experience" by Daniel Boorstin, 
• "A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present" by Howard Zinn