Reading List for Early America 1400-1800

Compiled by Professor Rhae Lynn Barnes to jumpstart your reading or general exam lists |  To suggest new titles, please e-mail editors@ushistoryscene.com

Native American History in Early America and Cross-Cultural Exchange

• Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (1991)
• Greg Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (1992) 
• John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994)
• Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (1995)
• Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (1998)
• Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (2001)
• Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2001)
• Laurel Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (2001)
• Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo American Frontier, 1500-1676 (2003)
• Sandos, James, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004).
• Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s-1880s (2004)
• Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (2007)
• Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (2007)
• J.H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (2007)
• Lee Irwin, Coming Down From Above: Prophecy, Resistance, and Renewal in Native American Religions (2008) 
• David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (2009)
• Christine Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (2010)
• Daniel Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (2011)
• Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (2011)
• Brent Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (2012) 
• Steven W. Hackel, Junipero Serra: California’s Founding Father (2014)
• Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Before 1607,” WMQ 1 (2015) pp. 3-24
• Joshua Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (2015)
• David Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (2016) 
• Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (2019)

Articles

• Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America” William and Mary Quarterly 33, no. 2 (April 1976): 289-299
• Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” William and Mary Quarterly 53, no. 3 (Jul., 1996): 435-458
• Kristen Sword, “Remembering Dinah Nevil: Strategic Deceptions in Eighteenth-Century Antislavery,” Journal of American History 97:2 (September 2010)
• Brian DeLay, “Indian Polities, Empire, and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations”(link is external)Diplomatic History 39:5 (December 2015), 927-42.

Environmental History in Early America

• Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972)
• William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983)
• Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (2001)
• Ted Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (2001) 
• Karen Haltunnen, “Grounded Histories: Land and Landscape in Early America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 4 (October 1, 2011): 513–32.
• Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (2012)
• Joyce Chaplin, “Ogres and Omnivores: Early American Historians and Climate History.” The William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2015): 25-32.
• Conevery Bolton Valencius, David I. Spanagel, Emily Pawley, Sara Stidstone Gronim, and Paul Lucier, “Science in Early America: Print Culture and the Sciences of Territoriality,” Journal of the Early Republic 36 (Spring 2016): 73-123.

Enlightenment 

• **Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” The American Historical Review Vol. 98, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), pp. 382-411
• Londona Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (2005)
• Susan Scott Parish, American Curiosity: Culture of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (2006).
• Caroline Winterer, “Where is America in the Republic of Letters?” Modern Intellectual History (2012): 597-623.
• Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (2012)
• Caroline Winterer, “What Was the American Enlightenment?” (forthcoming)

Migration Across the Atlantic to the New World

• David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (1987)
• Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (2001)
• Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (2007)
• Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2008)

Settler Societies, Religion, and Culture in Early America

• Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (1956)
• Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1971)
• Boyer, Paul S., and Stephen Nissenbaum. Salem Possessed (1974)
• Demos, John. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (1982)
• Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1986)
• Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (1987)
• Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (1988)
• David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989)
• Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990)
• Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1993)
• Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775 (1999)
• Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776 (2000)
• McConville, Brendan, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776 (2006)
• Michelle Morris, Under Household Government: Sex and Family in Puritan Massachusetts (2013)

Caribbean Life and Slavery in Early America and the Atlantic

• Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660 (2003)
• Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004)
• Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004)
• Jon Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (2005)
• Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2007)
• Elena A. Schneider, “African Slavery and Spanish Empire: Imperial Imaginings and Bourbon Reform in Eighteenth-century Cuba and Beyond,” Journal of Early American History, 5:1 (2015): 3-29.

• For the full and expanded list of Atlantic World and Caribbean History Reading follow this internal link

Slavery and Race in Early North America

• Wood, Peter H. Black Majority; Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (1974)
• Bolster, Jeffery W., Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (1997)
• Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998)
• Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, 1998.
• Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005)
• Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005)
• Linda Heywood and John Thornton, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and Foundation of Americas (2007)
• Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008)
• Eltis, David and David Richardson. “The ‘Numbers Game’ In Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Morality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, eds. David Eltis and David Richardson, 1-15.  Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1997.

Women, Sexuality, and Family History in Early America

• Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980)
• Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (1980)
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (1982)
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990)
• Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkins, “‘The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776-1807,” Journal of the Early Republic, (Summer, 1992): 159-193.
• Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (1996)
• Alfred Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (2004)
• Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford,UK:OxfordUniversity Press, 2009)
• Jill Lepore, The Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (2013)
• Carol Shammas et. al., “Centering Families in Atlantic Histories,” WMQ (2013)
• Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (2013)
• Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (2016)

The American Revolution and the Early Republic

• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
• Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992)
• Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (1995)
• Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (1999)
• Gordon Wood, The American Revolution: A History (2005)
• Gary Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (2006)
• Robin Blackburn, “Haiti, Slavery, and the Age of the Democratic Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 4 (October 2006): 643-674.
• David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007)
• Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (2007)
• Einhorn, Robin, American Slavery, American Taxation (2008)
• Gloria Main, “Women on the Edge: Life at Street Level in the Early Republic” Journal of the Early Republic 32:3 (2012): 331-47

Recent Additions

• Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (2009)
• J. William Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah (2009)
• Margot Minardi, Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (2010)
• Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution (2011)
• David Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making (2012)
• Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles (2012)
• Rebecca Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia (2012)
• Glenda Goodman, “‘But they differ from us in sound’: Indian Psalmody and the Soundscape of Colonialism, 1651-75′” WMQ 69 (2012): 793-822.
• Billy G. Smith, Ship of Death (2013)
• Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England (2015)
• “The bloody writing is for ever torn”: Domestic and International Consequences of the first Governmental Efforts to Abolish the Atlantic Slave Trade. Video.

Reading List for Modern U.S. History, 1800-1970

Antebellum America

• Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll; The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books (1974)
• Johnson, Paul, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (1978)
• Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984)
• White, Deborah G. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985)
• Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986)
• Hodes, Martha Elizabeth. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (1997)
• Henkin, David M. City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998)
• Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998)
• Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)
• Penningroth, Dylan C., The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South, (2003)
• Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005)
• Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: Norton (2005)
• Howe, Daniel Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007)
• Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013)
• Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014)
• Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016)
• Tera Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (2017)
• Keri Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites & Slavery in the Antebellum South (2017) 
• Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (2017)
• Joanne B. Freeman, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to the Civil War (2018)
• Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018)
• Caitlin C. Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management(link is external) (2018) 
• David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018)
• Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers,  They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2019) 
• For an expanded list of nineteenth-century historiography reading suggestions, follow this link. 

Native Americans

• Walter Williams, The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture (1988)
• Al Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (1990) 
• Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, The Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (1991)
• Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (1998)
• West, Elliott. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado (1998)
• Deloria, Philip, J. Playing Indian (Yale Historical Publications Series 1999)
• Brooks, James. Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002)
• Deloria, Philip Joseph. Indians in Unexpected Places (2004)
• Miles, Tiya. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005)
• Reséndez, Andrés. Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (2005)
• Blackhawk, Ned. Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006)
• Jace Weaver, “More Heat Than Light: The Current State of Native American Studies,” American Indian Quarterly 31: 2 (Spring 2007): 233-255.
• Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)
• Ben Madley, “Unholy Traffic in Human Blood and Souls: Systems of California Indian Servitude Under U.S. Rule,” Pacific Historical Quarterly 83:4 (2014): 626-667.
• Willy Bauer, We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850-1941 (2012) 
• Fenn, Elizabeth. Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (2015) 
• Barbara Krauthammer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (2015) 
• Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (2015) 
• Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (2015)
• Ben Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (2017) 
• Andres Resendez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2017) 
• Louis Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (2017)

Borders and Borderlands

• David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (1995)
• Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104:3 (June 1999): 814-841
• David Gutiérrez, “Migration, Emergent Ethnicity, and the ‘Third Space’: The Shifting Politics of Nationalism in Greater Mexico,” Journal of American History, 86 (September 1999), 481-517
• Louise Pubols, “Fathers of the Pueblo: Patriarchy and Power in Mexican California, 1800-1880,” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, eds. Samuel Truett
  and Elliott Young (2004)
• Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (2005) 
• Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (2006).
• Jacoby, Karl. Shadows At Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (2008)
• Casey Walsh, Building the Borderlands: A Transnational History of Irrigated Cotton along the Mexico-Texas Border (2008) 
• Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US-Mexican War (2009)
• Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western US-Mexico Border (2012) 
• Adams, David Wallace, and Crista DeLuzio. On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American Southwest (2012).
• Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (2012) 
• Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez, “A Different Look at Native American Depopulation: Comanche Raiding, Captive Taking, and Population Decline.” Ethnohistory 61 (3; Summer 2014): 391-418.
• Katrina Jagodinsky, Legal Codes and Talking Trees: Indigenous Women’s Sovereignty in the Sonoran and Puget Sound Borderlands, 1854-1946 (2016) 
• George Colpitts, Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts on Plains, 1780-1882 (2018) 

American West

• Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)
• Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (1973)
• John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (1979)
• Patricia Nelson Limerick. Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987)
• Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (1990)
• Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (1990)
• White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (1991)
• Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (1991).
• Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (Norton, 1992)
• Marc Resiner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (1993)
• John Mack Faragher, “The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West,” American Historical Review 98 (1993): 106-117
• Eugene P. Moehring, Urbanism and Empire in the Far West, 1840-1890 (1994)
• Benson Tong, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (1994) 
• Milner, O’Connor, Sandweiss. Oxford History of the American West (1996)
• Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (1996)
• Kerwin Lee Klein, “Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word, or Becoming Postwestern,” Pacific Historical Review 65 (1996), 179-215
• William Deverell, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (1996) 
• Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (1998)
• Malcolm Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (1998) 
• Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (1999)
• Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (1999)
• JS Holliday, Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California (1999)
• Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (2000)
• Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (2001)
• Sandweiss, Martha A., Print the Legend: Photography and the American West (2002)
• Edward Dolnick, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy through the Grand Canyon (2002)
• Daniel Belgrad, “’Power’s Larger Meaning’: The Johnson County War as Political Violence in an Environmental Context,” Western Historical Quarterly 33 (2002), 159-77
• William Deverell, ed., A Companion to the American West (2004)
• William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of its Mexican Past (2004)
• Rebecca Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914 (2004) 
• David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller and Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920 (2005)
• Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (2005) 
• Louis Waren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (2005)
• Douglas Flamming, Bound For Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (2006)
• Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (2007)
• Jared Farmer, On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (2010) 
• Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (2010)
• Keyes, Sarah. “’Like a Roaring Lion’: The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest.” The Journal of American History 96 (2009): 19-43
• Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (2013)
• Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History (2013)
• John Mack Faragher, Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles (2016) 
• Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Going West and Ending Up Global,” Western Historical Quarterly, 32 (Spring 2001), 5-24
• Stephen Aron, “Lessons in Conquest: Towards a Greater Western History,” Pacific Historical Review, 63 (May 1994), 125-47
• Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature,” Journal of American History, 86 (December 1999), 976-986
• Norris Hundley, The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s-1990s
• Mark Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks 
• John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California
• William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds, The Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles
• Valerie Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982
• Roger Daniels, Prisoners without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II
• Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture
• James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California
• David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity
• Lisbeth Haas, Conquests and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936

Free Black Life

• Litwack, Leon F. North of Slavery; The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (1961)
• Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (1996)
• Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002)
• Jones, Martha S. All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture (2007)

 The Civil War

• Potter, David Morris, and Don E. Fehrenbacher. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976)
• McPherson, James M. The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (2003)
• Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (2007)
• Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008)
• Stephanie McCurry. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (2010)
• Arenson and Graybill, Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (2015)

 Reconstruction

• Du Bois, W E B. Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (1935)
• Litwack, Leon F. Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979)
• Foner, Eric. Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983)
• Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988)
• Foner, Eric. “The Meaning of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation.” The Journal of American History 81, no. 2 (1994): 435–460.
• Hunter, Tera. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labor After the Civil War (1997)
• Stanley, Amy Dru. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (1998)
• Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003)
• Scott, Rebecca. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (2005)
• O’Donovan, Susan. Becoming Free in the Cotton South (2007)
• Richard White. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011)
• Stacey Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle Over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (2013)

 Race, Culture, Labor, and Empire

• Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955)
• Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991)
• Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (1995)
• Bederman, Gail. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995)
• Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (2000)
• Nayan Shah. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2001)
• Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2001)
• Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
• Lee, Erika. At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (2003).
• Colleen O’Neill, Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century (2005) 
• Kramer, Paul, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006)
• Lucy Maddox, Citizen Indians: Native American Intellectuals, Race, and Reform (2006)
• Natalia Molina, Fit To Be Citizens?: Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879-1939 (2006)
• Postel, Charles. The Populist Vision (2007)
• Grandin, Greg, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (2007)
• Andrews, Thomas G. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2008)
• Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (2010)
• Levy, Jonathan. Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (2012)
• Rosina Lozano. An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States (2018)
• Lew-Williams. Beth. The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (2018)

Gilded Age and Progressivism

• Morton White. Social Thought in America: The Revolt against Formalism (1949)
• Richard Hofstadter. The Age of Reform (1955)
• Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967)
• Edward Purcell. The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value (1973)
• Thomas Haskell. The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (1977)
• Alfred D. Chandler. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977)
• Morton Horwitz. Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960 (1977)
• Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982)
• Daniel Rodgers. “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History (December 1982), 113-32.
• Roy Rosenzweig. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (1985)
• Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York, 1986)
• Peiss, Kathy Lee. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986)
• Nancy Cott. The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987)
• Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1989)
• Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White  Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (1996)
• Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
• Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998)
• Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000)
• Canaday, Margot. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in 20th Century America (2009)
• Sandweiss, Martha. Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (2009)
• Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (2009)
• Kelley, Blair. Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessey v. Ferguson (2010)
• Daniel R. Ernst. Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The Administrative State Emerges in America, 1900-1940 (2014)
• Lisa McGirr. The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (2015)

Jim Crow

• Logan, Rayford. The Negro in the United States (1957-1971).
• Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow, (1974).
• Painter, Nell Irvin. Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction, (1977).
• Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, (1993).
• Gaines, Kevin. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the 20^th Century, (1996).
• Gilmore, Glenda. Gender and Jim Crow: Woman and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920, (1996).
• Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940, (1998).
• Daily, Jane. Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia, (2000).
• Rosen, Hannah. Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South, (2009).

World War I, The Interwar Years, and World War II

• Donald Worster. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979)
• Alan Brinkley. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, & the Great Depression (1983)
• Cohen, Liz. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (1990)
• Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (1993)
• Kelley, Robin. “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South.” The Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 75–112.
• Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994)
• Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995)
• Daniel E. Bender. Sweated Work, Weak Bodies: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns and Languages of Labor (2004) 
• Phillips, Sarah. This Land is Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal (2007)
• Allison Sneider. Suffrage in the Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929 (2008)
• Christopher Capozzola. Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (2008)
• Morris Dickstein. Dancing in the Dark a Cultural History of the Great Depression (W.W. Norton & Company 2009)
• Ira Katznelson. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013)