Field: Modern American History, 1815-1975



Note: This list is tailored to include extra readings that focus on women, gender, and sexuality.

Professor Nancy F. Cott

U.S. History since 1815

Recommended Long-Scope Books:

1. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds., American History Now (2011) (portions)

2. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, “Since Intimate Matters: Recent Developments in the History of Sexuality in the United States,” Journal of Women’s History 25, No. 4 (Winter 2013): 88-100.

3. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (2009)

4. Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations

5. Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2001)

6. J.-C. Agnew ed. et al., A Companion to Post-1945 America (2006)

7. Barbara Young Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (2010).

8. Butler, Walker, Balmer, Religion in American Life: A Short History (2011)

9. Eric Foner, Story of American Freedom

Antebellum America

10. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848

11. Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865

12. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986)

13. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780-1835

14. Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)

15. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of Antebellum S. Carolina (1995)

16. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005)

17. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

18. Ann Hyde, Empires, Nations and Families: A History of the North American West 1800-1860

19. Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2005)

20. Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore

21. Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005)

Civil War and Reconstruction Era

22. Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South and the American Civil War

23. Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (2012)

24. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988)

25. Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003)

26. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Era of Slave Emancipation (1998)

27. Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (1997)

28. Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (1998)

29. David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (1976)

30. Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction (1990)

31. Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (5): 1405-1438 (2004).

National Consolidation and Conquest

32. Herbert Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919,” AHR 78:3 (1973)

33. Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (1997)

34. Eliot West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (1998)

35. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011)

36. Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the U.S. and the Philippines (2006)

37. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (1995)

38. Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (2012)

39. Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1998)

40. Kristin Hoganson, “Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream, 1865-1820,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 55-83

Reform Era

41. Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in N.C. 1896-1920 (1996)

42. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent

43. Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a progressive Age (1998)

44. Daniel Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (1982)

45. Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994)

46. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the U.S. (1995)

47. Blair Kelly, Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Age of Plessy v. Ferguson (2010)

48. Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (2001)

49. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (2007)

Two Wars and between the Two Wars

50. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment

51. Margot Canaday, “Heterosexuality as a Legal Regime” in The Cambridge History of Law in America, vol. 3 (2008), eds. Michael Grossberg and Chris Tomlins

52. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism

53. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994)

54. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004)

55. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in 20th Century America (2009)

56. David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (2004)

57. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (2013)

58. Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (1993)

59. Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (2009)

Postwar/Cold War

60. Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" JAH 75 (Dec. 1988), 786-811

61. Lizabeth Cohen, Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (2003)

62. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988)

63. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race, Industrial Decline, and Housing in Detroit, 1940-1960 (1996)

64. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2000)

65. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Intervention and the Making of Our Times (2005)

66. Melvyn Leffler, “The Cold War: What Do 'We Now Know'?" AHR 104:2 (Apr. 1999).

67. James N. Gregory, "Southernizing the American Working Class: Postwar Episodes of Regional and Class Transformation," Labor History 39:2 (1998), 135-68

68. David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (2004)

69. Alice Kessler Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America

Sixties/Social Movements

70. Jacquelyn D. Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," JAH 91:4 (March 2005).

71. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (1979)

72. Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement (2010)

73. Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California 1941-1978

74. Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995)

75. Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2003)

76. Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008)

77. Nancy Maclean, "Postwar Women's History: The 'Second Wave' or the End of the Family Wage?" in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. J.-C. Agnew et al., pp. 236-259.

78. Robert Self, "Bodies Count: The Sixties Body in American Politics," in The Long 1968,

ed. A. Aneesh

79. Becky Thompson; “Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave

Feminism,” Feminist Studies 28:2 (Summer 2002), pp. 337-60.

80. Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955 (2003)

81. Serena Mayeri, Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution

82. Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (2004)

New Right and Late Twentieth Century

83. Rosalind Petchesky, "Antiabortion, Antifeminism, and the Rise of the New Right,"

Feminist Studies 7:2 (Summer 1981), 206-46.

84. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001)

85. Nancy Maclean, "Southern Dominance in Borrowed Language: the Regional Origins of American Neoliberalism," in New Landscapes of Inequality, ed. Jane L. Collins et al., (2008)

86. Kimberly Phillips-Fein, "Conservatism: A State of the Field," JAH 98:3 (Dec. 2011).

87. Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968-1980

88. Jeremi Suri, "Explaining the End of the Cold War: A New Historical Consensus?" Journal of Cold War Studies,4:4 (Fall 2002),60-92

89. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)

90. Matthew Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006)

91. Jefferson Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010)

92. Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (2009)

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