Major Field: United States 1877-Present
[Elspeth Brown, May 2010]NB: a major field requires 100 books; a minor field requires 50; lists are customized to student’s research interests
Overviews:
Gary Gerstle,American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2001).
Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (1948).
Reconstruction and Populism
WEB DuBois, Black Reconstruction (1935) (2)
Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (1976)
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988).
Robert McMath, American Populism: A Social History (1993).
Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (1998).
Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract (1998)
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet (2003)
The Gilded Age + Progressive Era (GAPE): Overviews and Background
Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (1990).
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967)
Steven Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans in the Progressive Era (1998)
Progressive Era
Overview: Glenda Gilmore, ed., Who Were the Progressives? (2002)
Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R., 1955.
Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservativism, 1963.
Allen Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive
Movement, 1890-1914, 1967.
Peter Filene, "An Obituary for `The Progressive Movement,"' American Quarterly, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 1970), 20-34.
David Kennedy, "An Overview: The Progressive Era," The Historian, Vol. 37 (1975), 453-469.
Daniel T. Rodgers, "In Search of Progressivism," Reviews in American History December 1982, 113-132.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (1985).
James Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle (1987).
Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987).
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (1988)
Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988).
Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1887-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Muncy, Robyn. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935
New York (1991).
Pascoe, Peggy. Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (1990).
Lasch-Quinn, Elizabeth. Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (UNC Press, 1993).
Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Woman Suffrage (1997)
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn African American women in the struggle for the vote, 1850-1920
(1998)
Louise Michele Newman.White Women's Rights: the Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Elizabeth Sanders, The Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (1999)
Landon R.Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (UNCP, 2000).
Nancy Hewitt, Forging Activist Identities: Latin, African American and Anglo Women in Tampa, Florida, 1870s-1920s (2001).
Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (2003)
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement (2003)
Kevin P. Murphy, Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform (Columbia, 2008)
U.S. Foreign Relations and American Empire, 1860-1929
Walter L. Williams, "United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism," Journal of American History, Vol. 66, No. 4 (March 1980), 810-831.
Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: visions of empire at American international expositions, 1876-1916 (1984)
Walter LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913 (1993). [Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations, Vol. II]
Amy Kaplan, "Black and Blue on San Juan Hill" in Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., The Cultures of US Imperialism (Duke 1993): 219-236. [and look at the rest, fyi]
Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the
Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars, 1998.
Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial missionaries to the world: the politics and culture of dollar diplomacy, 1900-1930 (1999).
Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
Matthew Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The U.S. Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000).
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th Century Europe (Harvard 2005).
Mona Domosh, American Commodities in the Age of Empire (Routledge, 2006)
Kristen L. Hoganson Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (UNCP, 2007).
Work, Business, and Industrialization, 1877-1929
Alfred Chandler. The Visible Hand, 1977; skim; read with Phil Scranton Endless Novelty.
Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1977
Alan Trachtenberg, The incorporation of America: culture and society in the gilded age (1982; reprinted 2007).
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of love, labor of sorrow: Black women, work, and the
family from slavery to the present New York: Basic Books, c1985.
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 1987. Skim/check out/browse his other books, especially Workers’ Control and Citizen Worker.
Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (1989).
Richard Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America (1990).
Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1990.
Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: The Laboring Women of Lawrence Mass. 1860-1912 (1993).
Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering business: men and women in the corporate office,
1870-1930 Johns Hopkins University Press, c1994.
Walter Licht, Industrializing America: the 19th Century (Hopkins, 1995)
Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization 1865-1925. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Kathy Peiss,“’Vital Industry’ and Women’s Ventures: Conceptualizing Gender in Twentieth Century Business History,” Business History Review 72 (Summer 1998): 219-241 [also check out the other essays in this issue; it’s all about gender and business].
Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: the rise of public relations and corporate imagery in American big business (1998)
Pamela Laird, Advertising progress: American Business and the rise of consumer marketing (1998)
Nan Enstad. Ladies of labor, girls of adventure: working women, popular culture, and labor politics at the turn of the twentieth century (Columbia University Press, 1999.)
Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining consumers: design and innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (2000)
Green, Venus. Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Jung, Moon-Ho, Coolies and cane: race, labor, and sugar in the age of emancipation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Major problems in American business history: documents and essays (2006) [review this as a snapshot of a normative narrative of the field of business history]
Professional-Managerial and Middle Class Formation (to 1920)
Mary Ryan,Cradle of the middle class: the family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981)
Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (1989). Read intro and the "Things are in the Saddle" chapters.
Oldenziel, Ruth, Making technology masculine: men, women and modern machines
in America, 1870-1945 Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999.
Burton Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston, The middling sorts: explorations in the history of the American middle classNew York: Routledge, 2001.--selected essays. Or, check out Bledstein's classic discussion of the culture of professionalism in The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (NY: Norton 1976): 81-101.
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A cultural history of gender and race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995).
Marina Moskowitz Standard of living: the measure of the middle class in modern America (Hopkins, 2004).
Racial Formation, Ethnicity, and Immigration, 1890s-1945
Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (1951)
John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (1985)
John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955; second edition, 1988)
Donna Gabaccia, From the other side: women, gender, and immigrant life in the
U.S., 1820-1990 Indiana University Press, 1994
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore, 1989.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990)
James Barrett & David Roediger, “In between Peoples: Race, Nationality, and the ‘New
Immigrant’ Working Class, “ Journal of American Ethnic History, 1997.
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York, 1993).
David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (1993)
Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Klu Klux Klan (1994)
Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995).
Glenda E. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (1996)
Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom (1997).
Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in 20th Century America, 1998.
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South (1998).
Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (1998)
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 1998.
Nyan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (2001).
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (2002).
Erika Lee, At America's gates: Chinese immigration during the exclusion era, 1882-1943 (2003)
Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2003)
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press 2003).
Donna Gabaccia, D. From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820- 1990 (Indiana University Press, 2004).
Peggy Pascoe, What comes naturally: miscegenation law and the making of race in America
(Oxford University Press, 2009).
Vicki L. Ruiz, “Nuestra America: Latino History as United States History,” Journal of American History 93, no. 3 (Dec. 2006): 655-672.
Diana Selig, Americans All: The Cultural Gifts Movement (2008).
Popular, Mass, and Commercial Culture, 1877-1920
John Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, 1978.
T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981)
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920- 1940 (1985)
T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 3 (1985), 567-593.
Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (1986).
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986).
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, eds., Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, 56-62 (1990).
Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American culture (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 1991).
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (Norton, 1992).
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993).
David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, 1993.
T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994)
Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture (1995).
Richard M. Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (1996).
Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1999).
Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-century Chicago (1998).
Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (1999)
Shelley Stamp, Movie-struck girls: women and motion picture culture after the nickelodeon (2000)
Lary May, The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way (2000).
Ben Singer, Melodrama and modernity: early sensational cinema and its contexts (2001)
John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the perfect man: the White male body and the challenge of modernity in America Hill and Wang, 2001.
Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (2002).
Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (2008)
Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (Chicago, 2009).
David Suisman, Selling sounds: the commercial revolution in American music (2009)
Gender and Sexuality, 1877-1945
Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987)
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 (Norton, 1992).
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (NY: Basic Books, 1994)
Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn. African American women in the struggle for the vote, 1850-1920
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998),
Elizabeth Alice Clement. Love for Sale: Courting, Treating, and Prostitution in New York City, 1900–1945. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
The South (1877-1945)
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913, 1951.
Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 1977.
Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry, 1994.
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 1996.
Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, 1997
Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1998.
Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge University Press 1998)
Stephen Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard 2004)
Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Hopkins, 2006)
The West (19th c-1945)
Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1984.
Deutsch, Sarah. No separate refuge: culture, class, and gender on an Anglo-Hispanic frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Patricia N. Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, 1987.
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, 1991.
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York, 1993).
Neil Foley. The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture,1997.
Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, 1999.
Robert V. Hine & John Mack Faragher, The American West: a New Interpretive History (2000)
Matt García, A World of its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970 (2001).
Pablo R. Mitchell, Coyote Nation: Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920 (The University of Chicago Press, 2006)
Science, Technology and Medicine
David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate
Capitalism, 1977.
Jeffrey Meikle, Twentieth Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1979.
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, "The 'Industrial Revolution in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century" in Technology and Culture 17 (1976): 1-23.; later part of More Work for Mother (1983). Though on the topic of women, technology, and the home, see Joy Parr's work in Canadian context.
David Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, 1984.
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the uses of Human Heredity (1985)
David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meaning of a New Technology, 1990.
Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (1994)
Nina Lerman, Arwen Mohun, and Ruth Oldenzeil, "The Shoulders we Stand and the View From Here: Historiography and Directions for Research," in Technology and Culture Jan. 1997, vol. 38 no. 1, 9-31.
Claudia Clark, Radium Girls, Women and Industrial Reform: 1910-1935 (1997)
Keith Wailoo, Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth Century America (1997)
Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (1998)
Dinerstein Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the Wars. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.
To do: check out the journal Technology and Culture on line or in person; check out SHOT on line (Society for the History of Technology).
1920s, the Great Depression, and the New Deal
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem was in Vogue (1981).
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity (1985)
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill
World, 1987.
David Grossman, Land of Hope: Black Southerners and the Great Migration1989).
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (1989)
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990)
Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justices, 1991.
Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: racism and gender in the 1920s (1991)
Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (1991)
George Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford 1993).
Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Klu Klux Klan (1994).
Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995)
Lynn Dumenil, A Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (1995) [start with this for an overview of the 1920s]
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century (Verso 1997).
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999)
Kimberly Phillips, Alabama North: African-American migrants, community, and working-class activism in Cleveland, 1915-45 (1999).
Mai M. Ngai, “The Architecture in American Immigration Law: A Reexamination of the 1924 Immigration Act,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999).