Reading Lists for the Pre-1877 American History Major Graduate Field

Reading Lists for the pre-1877 American History Major Graduate Field,

Department of History, Ohio State University

June 13, 2003

Candidates for the General exam in U.S. History, pre-1877, should plan on developing exam lists of 120 books, plus articles, using the following list as a point of departure. The final list for each exam is to be determined by the candidate in consultation with field advisors.

Sixty-six fundamental interpretive studies, chosen by OSU Faculty in American History to 1877, June, 2003.

Appleby, Joyce. Capitalism and New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s. New York: New York University Press, 1984.

Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Belknap, 2001.

Boyer, Paul, and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Bushman, Richard. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Bynum, Victoria. Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Cott, Nancy. The Bonds of Womenhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.

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

Crosby, Alfred, Jr. The Columbian Exchange; Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Pub. Co., 1972.

Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Deloria, Philip J. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Edmunds, R. David. The Shawnee Prophet. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Escott, Paul D. After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Fehrenbacher, Donald. The Slaveholder's Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relation to Slavery, Ward M. McAfee, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Fogel, Robert William, and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

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

Foster, Stephen. The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570-1700. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.

Frey, Sylvia. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Random House, 1992.

Gomez, Michael. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Greene, Jack P. Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607-1788. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Gutierez, Ramon. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Harris, William. Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1985.

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

Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1997.

Hurst, William J. Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956. [Ch 1 or 2]

Horowitz, Morton J. The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Hurtado, Albert L. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Isaac , Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Jordan, Winthrop. White over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1550- 1812. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969.

Kammen, Michael. People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization. New York: Random House, 1973.

Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: IEAHC and the University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

Karlsen, Carol F. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Random, 1989.

Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Kraditor, Aileen. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and his Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm so Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Knopf, 1979.

Lockridge, Kenneth A. A New England Town, The First One Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts,1636-1736. New York: Norton, 1970.

Maier, Pauline. From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776. New York: Random House, 1974.

McCusker, John J., and Russell R. Menard. The economy of British America, 1607-1789. Chapel Hill: IEAHC and University of North Carolina Press, 1985

McLoughlin, William G. Cherokees and Missionaries, 1789-1839. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Meyers, Marvin. The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Boston: Beacon Press, 1953.

Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press /Belknap, 1956.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.

Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People: the Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: Norton, 1988.

Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry. OIEAHC and University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Nash, Gary. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Novak, William J. The People's Welfare Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

O'Brien, Jean. Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Paludan, Phillip S. A People's Contest: The Union and Civil War, 1861-1865. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Potter, David. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.

Potter, David. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Purdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783. IEAHC and University of North Carolina Press, 1979.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. [First half.]

Thornton, John. Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1440-1680, 2nd ed.. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Ulrich, Laurel. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Usner, Daniel. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Wood, Gordon S. Creation of the American Republic: 1776-1787. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969.

Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Wood, Peter. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion. New York: Norton, 1975.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics & Behavior in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

The following lists are recommended by the faculty as you develop your understanding of the discipline and build your reading lists:

Some bibliographical resources:

Norton, Mary Beth, and Pamela Gerardi, eds. The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature. Third edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Ammerman, David L. and Philip D. Morgan, comps. Books about Early America: 2001 Titles. Williamsburg: IEAHC, 1989. [Though this book is almost fifteen years old, it remains useful as a broad list of titles dated before 1990.]

The ACLS History E-Book Project [http://www.historyebook.org/titlelist.html ] allows electronic access to several hundred titles. This site provides the book lists; OSU is a subscriber, and you can get access through OSCAR.

Mark Grimsley and John Brooke have developed extensive additional bibliographical lists, which can be found on their department web-pages.

Works in American historiography:

Cunliffe, Marcus, and Robin Winks, eds. Past Masters: Some Essays on American Historians. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Foner, Eric, ed. The New American History. rev. and expanded ed. Philadelphia: AHA and Temple University Press, 1997.

Gaddis, John. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Higham, John. History: Professional Scholarship in America, 2d Ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington. New York: Knopf, 1968.

Molho, Anthony, and Gordon S. Wood, eds. Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Noble, David W. The End of American History: Democracy, Capitalism, and the Metaphor of Two Worlds in Anglo-American Historical Writing, 1880-1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Wise, Gene. American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry, 2nd ed. Rev. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.

Woodward, C. Vann. Thinking Back: The Perils of Writing History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

Important works of interpretation and synthesis. These are titles that are invaluable for understanding the field and for teaching purposes. Students should try to be familiar with as many of these titles as possible within the first year of graduate study.

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1972.

Berkin, Carol. First Generations: Women in Colonial America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1996.

Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press /Belknap, 1998.

Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.

Berthoff, Rowland. An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Bonomi, Patricia. Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Bremer, Francis J. The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1995.

Brown, Richard D. Modernization: The Transformation of American Life, 1600-1865. New York: Hill and Wang, 1976.

Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Butler, Jon. Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Calloway, Colin G. New Worlds for All: Indians Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Countryman, Edward. The American Revolution, rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.

Fischer, David H. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Franklin, John Hope and Alfred A. Moss. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

Greene, Jack. Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Henretta, James A., and Gregory H. Nobles. Evolution and Revolution: American Society, 1600-1820. Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1987.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.

Horton, James O. and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kelley, Robert. The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century. New York: A.A.Knopf, 1979.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

Laurie, Bruce. Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Noonday Press, 1989.

Levine, Bruce. Half Slave and Half Free: The Origins of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.

Limerick, Patricia N. Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Meinig, Donald. The Shaping of America. Vol. I: Atlantic America, 1492-1800. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2000.

Noll, Mark. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.

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

Simmons, R. C. The American Colonies: From Settlement to Independence. New York: W.W.Norton, 1976.

Spicer, Edward. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962.

Steele, Ian K. Warpaths: Invasions of North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. New York: Viking Press, 2001.

Walters, Ronald. American Reformers, 1815-1860. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.

Watson, Harry L. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1990.