U.S. History

By Theme and Period

Note: Bold titles cross-listed with other lists

Overviews

Colonial and Revolutionary America

Atlantic World

Native Americans

Interpretations of the Revolution

Slavery

Nineteenth Century

Early Republic

Politics and Culture in the Age of Jackson

Gender and Family in the Early Republic

Religion

  • Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Cultural History


Slavery


Race


Sectional Crisis

    • Potter, David Morris. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. 1st ed. Harper Colophon Books. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

    • Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War With a New Introductory Essay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 1995.


The Civl War and Emancipation


Reconstruction and Redemption


Gendering Reconstruction


The New South


Gilded Age and Populism

  • Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. [1st ed.]. A Borzoi Book. New York: Knopf, 1972.

  • Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. Oxford Uni. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

  • Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

  • Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. 1st ed. American Century Series. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.


Gender, Race, and Culture, in the Age of the New Empire

  • Bederman, Gail. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

  • Capó, Julio. Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940. The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

  • Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. Yale Historical Publications (Unnumbered). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

    • Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Cultural Studies of the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Twentieth Century


Progressive Era


Interwar


Postwar

Late Twentieth Century

Characterized by demands for equality and a recognition of heterogeneity on the left, largely synchronous with the apex of the Black Freedom Struggle in the 1960s, met with a vehement squaring off of the New Right, a coalition of religious-conservatives and laissez-fair libertarians embedded in the ideology of “family values.” It is important to note that religious conservatives did not just comprise lower SES folks, but included a range of what Lisa McGirr refers to as “suburban warriors,” essentially upwardly mobile white folks benefitting from New Deal projects who shifted from anti-Communism and the overt racism of Goldwater to the racist politics masked by single-issue voting. Both McGirr and Self help explain how it was possible for religious conservatives and libertarians to develop alliances that would usher in the Reagan era.

  • Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002.

  • McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.

  • Self, Robert O. All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s. First edit. New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Alphabetical

  1. Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Fiftieth a. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017.

  2. Bederman, Gail. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

  3. Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. ACLS Humanities E-Book. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

  4. Boag, Peter. Same-Sex Affairs Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

  5. Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

  6. Breen, T H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

  7. Brown, Kate. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Disasters. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2013.

  8. Bushman, Richard L. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. 1st ed. Vintage Books. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1992.

  9. Canaday, Margot. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009.

  10. Capó, Julio. Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami Before 1940. The University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

  11. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

  12. Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

  13. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. 1st ed. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 2003.

  14. Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. Yale University Press, 1987.

  15. Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. Yale Paperbound. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

  16. Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.

  17. Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Norton Paperback. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.

  18. Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford, England ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  19. Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War and Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.

  20. Edwards, Laura F. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Cultures of Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

  21. Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

  22. Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War With a New Introductory Essay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 1995.

  23. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

  24. Frasier, Steve, and Gary Gerstle, eds. The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.

  25. Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. 1st ed. New York: Ballantine Books, 2002.

  26. Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. [1st ed.]. A MARC Book. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

  27. Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Gender & American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

  28. Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. ACLS Humanities E-Book. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

  29. Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. Yale Historical Publications. Miscellany ; 129. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

  30. Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

  31. Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. 1st ed. New York: A.A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1997.

  32. Hofstadter, Richard. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840. Jefferson Memorial Lectures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

  33. Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. [1st ed.]. A Borzoi Book. New York: Knopf, 1972.

  34. Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. Yale Historical Publications (Unnumbered). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

  35. Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.

  36. Hunter, Tera W. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. ACLS Humanities E-Book. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.

  37. Hurley, Andrew. Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

  38. Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

  39. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998.

  40. Kasson, John F. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

  41. Kennedy, Elizabeth L., and Madeline D. Davis. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2014.

  42. Kerber, Linda K. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

  43. Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

  44. Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

  45. Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

  46. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization ; 1986. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

  47. Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Race and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

  48. Lyons, Clare A. Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. Sex among the Rabble. The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

  49. Mann, Bruce H. Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.

  50. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. 1st pbk. p. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

  51. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

  52. McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.

  53. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford History of the United States ; v. 6. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

  54. Meyerowitz, Joanne, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960. Critical Perspectives on the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994.

  55. Mills, Charles Wright. White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1951.

  56. Molina, Natalia. How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. University of California Press, 2013.

  57. Morgan, Edmund S (Edmund Sears). Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. New York]: New York University Press, 1963.

  58. Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Impossible Subjects. Princeton University Press, 2014.

  59. Nicolaides, Becky M. My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. Historical Studies of Urban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

  60. Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society. 1st ed. New York: A.A. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1996.

  61. Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

  62. Oakes, James. The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.

  63. Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987.

  64. Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

  65. Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision. Oxford Uni. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

  66. Potter, David Morris. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. 1st ed. Harper Colophon Books. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

  67. Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. Gender & American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

  68. Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.

  69. Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

  70. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

  71. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Haymarket Series. London ; New York: Verso, 1991.

  72. Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 1993.

  73. Saunt, Claudio. “West of the Revolution : An Uncommon History of 1776.” New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2014.

  74. Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.

  75. Self, Robert O. All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s. First edit. New York: Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

  76. Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

  77. Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown. American Crossroads ; 7. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

  78. Sklaroff, Lauren Rebecca. Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

  79. Snorton, C Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

  80. Stanley, Amy Dru. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

  81. Stewart-Winter, Timothy. Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics. Politics and Culture in Modern America. Philadelphia: Penn, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

  82. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. The Origins of the Urban Crisis. Princeton University Press, 2010.

  83. Summers, Martin. Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

  84. Tiemeyer, Phil. Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants. Plane Queer. University of California Press, 2013.

  85. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. 1st ed. American Century Series. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

  86. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. 1st ed. New York: A Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1990.

  87. Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Cultural Studies of the United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

  88. White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. 20th anniv. Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

  89. Wood, Gordon S. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

  90. Woodward, C Vann (Comer Vann). The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Third revi. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.

  91. Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 1986.