Books about American politics

Richard Hofstader is sort of out of favor these days, but I loved and was profoundly influenced by his work back when I was an undergraduate (40 years ago)), particularly The Paranoid Style in American Politics.

Nixonland starts out as a very engaging history of Nixon’s rise to power and the way that he played in opposition to the movement towards racial equality; seems to have turned about midway through into a not-so-interesting or well-written history of the ’60’s counter-culture though. But the first half, I’d recommend highly.

The first two installments in Walter McDougall’s history of the USA are magnificent: beautifully written, wise, and funny, though a little on the cynical side. The first, Freedom Around the Corner, takes us to the ascent of Andrew Jackson. The second, Throes of Democracy, ends with the aftermath of the Civil War. I’m halfway through the second volume. It seems to me even more impressive than the first.

Congratulations on the book, Henry, and good luck w/ the tenure case.

I also liked Richard Hofstader when I was an undergrad but I was going to recommend _The American Political Tradition_. I’ve not read it for many years but really liked it when I did. It more or less ends w/ FDR so won’t get you up to the present day.

I also liked Ronald Takaki’s _A Different Mirror: A History of Multi-Cultural America_.

_Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life_ by Robert Utley is a highly readable, almost novel-like book that does a good job of showing how frontier violence developed in the US (partly as a growth out of the civil war).

Before he turned out horrible junk Stephen Ambrose wrote _The Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938_. It’s been a while since I read it but I enjoyed it a lot at the time.

Judith Sklar’s _American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion_ is also a useful, fun quick read.

Robert Caro’s volumes of Lyndon Johnson biography(3 so far, the second focusing on the 1940s and early political career, the most recent on Senate career and the 1950s) are very flawed but still net out as great books. They include lots of analysis of how large pieces of the political system worked (much of it probably true, if incomplete) along with narative and gossip. They are very readable-page turners even-albeit long. Similar for earlier biography of Robert Moses and political history of New York City and the heirs of the progressive movement in roughtly the middle third of the twentieth century.

Richard Ben Cramer’s “What It Takes” is the best analysis I’ve ever read of what goes into making top level politicians.

The recent Pulitzer Prize winner, “What Hath God Wrought” by Daniel Walker Howe is a brilliant read and a reminder of how much our current political landscape traces directly to the America of 150 years ago.

The Goodwyn book is long and tedious in places; he did a shortened version, The Populist Moment.

The Taylor Branch books on the civil rights era are well regarded, I haven’t read them.

Rising Tide by John Barry, about the great Mississippi flood, really about the economic and social development of the region, is an incredible story. Amusing subplot — blood feuds among civil engineers.

The Paranoid Style seconded.

If you’re going to go back to the revolutionary era, I’d recommend Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic and Jack Rakove’s Original Meanings to go along with Bailyn. Both books get more into the details of constitution writing than Bailyn does. Also good is an article by Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: Career of a Concept” which gives an overview of the “republican synthesis” interpretation of the revolutionary period.

For a different look at the same period, Peter Onuf, Origins of the Federal Republic is good.

David Levering-Lewis’s two volume bio of W.E.B. DuBois (each volume separately won the Pulitzer, if I remember correctly).

Anything by Leon Litwack.

No boosterism in either one.

“A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution” was a real eye-opener for me.

http://www.amazon.com/Struggle-Power-American-Revolution/dp/0679776427

Some of my favorites are:

Nature’s Metropolis, William Cronon — the growth of Chicago in an ecological-economic framework

A Consumer’s Republic, Lizabeth Cohen — politics of postwar prosperity

I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Charles Payne — the civil rights era from a grssroots perspective

Brownsville, Brooklyn, Wendell Pritchett — racial and economic change in a neighborhood

Working Class New York, Josh Freeman — how working class mobilization shaped a city

Several (especially Tom @22) already suggested what I was going to say: The Populist Moment, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Nature’s Metropolis, either of Liz Cohen’s books (although I think Making a New Deal is better than Consumer’s Republic). I can also never resist suggesting Karen Sawislak’s Smoldering City, about the aftermath of the Chicago Fire.

You’re exactly right to include fiction. The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, should be on your list. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/27/books/review/Eggers.t.html

A couple of accessible academic books are Jim Morone’s “Hellfire Nation” and his earlier “The Democratic Wish.” They are both American political development/philosophy approaches to the evolution of American democracy.

The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
by Sean Wilentz

“In Time of Torment” by I.F. Stone. The most clear-eyed contemporary account of America in the 1960’s.
Henry Adam’s “History of the United States During The Administration of Thomas Jefferson” is a great analysis of the terribly conflicting strands of American political opinion and character. Reading his description of the typical American diet of the time is alone worth the price of admission. Plus, it will acquaint you with Albert Gallatin, the greatest American politician without a great biography.

That was Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana in America.

Your mention of Crouse’s estimable The Boys on the Bus reminds me how appalled I would have been at the time if I thought people described in it like Novak and Broder (they were old-timer and “Dean” even back then) would be setting the narrative 30+ years later. A “hmmm”-inducing exercise is to go back to that book and read the stuff on Broder and Greider and then contemplate their subsequent trajectories through American journalism and current status (and probably net worth). Gah! (And I refuse to even mention Woodward.)

_The Age of Federalism_ (I forget the authors) has a great chapter on the consequences of siting the nation’s capital in a swamp rather than a city like New York (compare to London or Paris).

There was also really good article in the most recent Organization of American Historians journal about the myth of the weak US state that contains cites of some must-read work in US political history as well.

Twain’s Life on the Mississippi

Peter Finley Dunne pretty much anything on Mr. Dooley, Mr. Dooley in War and Peace is a good place to start.

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle

Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry

John Dos Passos’ USA

Tom Wolfe’s the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test
also Mau Mauing the Flack Catchers

Neil Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie

That’s “A Bright Shining Lie,” and yes, it’s worth reading.

You might want to think about DVD’s while you’re at it. On The Waterfront. The Pawnbroker. Cool Hand Luke. Little Big Man. Giant. To Kill A Mockingbird. Philadelphia. Glory. All the King’s Men (1949). Nashville. Eight Men Out. Chinatown. The Godfather.

I’m in the middle of Derek Leebaert’s “The Fifty-Year Wound” and it’s a helluva book. It’s an idiosyncratic history of the costs of the Cold War. I’m learning a lot and the prose is propulsive and witty.

To add to my previous recommendations now that I’m at my bookshlef, I want to second other’s recommendations of Bright Shining Lie, Battle Cry Freedom, and Hodgson’s “America in our Time.” I also greatly enjoy Maryilyn Young’s “The Vietnam Wars,” which is a great left-leaning take on the 30 plus years in Vietnam (Its partially Vietnamese history, but mostly American”

Lastly, a book that changed my outlook when I was an undergrad history major: Ideology in U.S. Foreign Policy.” by Michael Hunt. The book is a fantastic exploration on American exceptionalism, which I think is key to understanding US history.

Lastly: The Things They Carried by Tim Obrein, The Quiet American, and “Arc of Justice,” about race, housing, and 1920s Detroit. This has been a great list everyone, I have to read a lot of what people suggested now.

Thanks

Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine and The Creation of the Media are both great books.

oh, also Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom, Reconstruction, and Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.

I very much enjoyed Russell Baker’s Looking Back

It is hard for me to understand that it took 52 comments to mention Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. Yes, his prose is not the best, and yes, it is selective rather than comprehensive, but it is such a refreshing and radical take on American history that it is really required reading for all Americans and all non-American residents in the US.

This growing list is tremendous & makes me want to spend the rest of the summer in the library & a favourite reding spot.

But, there’s an absence of works on the west. I’m not a historian or political scientist, so I can’t recommend the best in those areas. But the essays of Larry McMurty (often book reviews) and Wallace Stegner are eye-opening & beautifully written in very different ways. My favourites are McMurtry’s Sacagawea’s Nickname and Stegner’s Wolfwillow. The latter (a history/memoir about an isolated Canadian prairie town in the 1910s, with comparisons to the US) pictures the constricted lives of settlers—including the failed immigrants and last chance professionals—is an excellent antidote to Westerns.

For fiction, Twain of course. But also try Willa Cather. My Antonia is the most famous; my favourite is Death Comes to the ArchBishop about French missionaries in New Mexico.

Two oddities, that may not be as important as other tomes, but which I enoyed and learned from: “Stranger at the Party” is a rich, gossipy, sexually frank book about New York, and Vanity Affair from the 20s to the 40s. Helen Lawrenson knew Luce, Clare Booth Luce, and Berensen. She had affairs with Bernard Baruch, the head Conservative Rabbi of New York, and others. She married a dissident longshoreman and ended up as Abbie Hoffman’s mother-in-law (though this last occurs after this tale has ended). Theories of War is an amazing novel about a bonded (sold) white boy in post-Civil War Kansas. Everyone is cynical, everyone is angry. The past is with us in Kansas, in the Pacific Northwest, and in Washington, DC.

It may be a bit trite for this crowd, but I thought Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen was an eye-opening account of how corrupt the history textbook industry is.

Apparently not. Moderator! Please to be helping with the open tag.

Also, if you haven’t read it:

Barack Obama: Dreams From My Father.

Yes, I know, but it’s really, truly very well-written and enjoyable.

Studs Terkel. The full collection, especially “Working”. It’s history and politics from the trenches rather than just highlights of the generals.

Three stunning books: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz, and Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson (third in the so-called Blowback Trilogy — the first two are worth reading, too). They do not focus on US politics per se, but throw US political/economic policies into harsh relief from a more international perspective. Total eye-openers and for me the best three books of 2008.

All of the Oxford History of the United States

but particularly

James T. Patterson
Grand Expectations: the United States 1945-74

and its sequel Restless Giant (1974-2000).

Also David M. Kennedy
Freedom from Fear (about the New Deal era)

All of these books will fill you with stuff that you thought you ‘knew’ about contemporary American history and politics, but in fact didn’t. They are fair, balanced treatments of controversies that rage to the current day.

I second the nomination of Nixon Agonistes by Garry Wills.

‘Bright Shining Lie’ is an excellent history of US involvement in Vietnam.

Robert Dallek’s biography of Lyndon B Johnson is much more digestible than Robert Caro’s. By contrast, his ‘The Power Broker’ about Robert Moses, is almost the perfect study of mid 20th century America and political and institutional power– a classic amongst organisational behaviour specialists.

Philip K Dick captures very well the 1960s-70s paranoid zeitgeist.

(@56 et seq: fixed.)

I found Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 very informative and eye-opening.

It’s not an easy read, though, because the author discusses the convoluted subject matter in great detail. But if you are interested in the topics mentioned in the subtitle and most importantly the strangely inconsistent US policy towards Pakistan/ISI, then this book is essential.

It’s occurred to me, that a good resource you might tap for reading suggestions would be MIT’s Open Course Ware. http://ocw.mit.edu/

Melissa at 57 recommended Wolf Willow (pretty sure it’s two words) by Wallace Stegner. To go with that I would put Ivan Doig’s first memoir about growing up in Montana, This House of Sky. A more cheerful view of the same territory, but a little cheerfulness does not come amiss from time to time.

And speaking of childhood memoirs, everyone should read Haven Kimmell’s A Girl Called Zippy, which is both screamingly funny and a dead-on picture of small-town Indiana.

I don’t know if I’m qualified to make recommendations, but I benefited a lot from Richard Drinnon’s Facing West, about the westward expansion of the American empire. Apparently, it’s along the same lines as the better known Regeneration Through Violence by Richard Slotkin, which I haven’t read.

I don’t hear much about Randolph Bourne’s essays on the intellectual culture of WWI, but I found them incredibly insightful about the American intellegensia – they seem relevant even now.

Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Paul Fussell’s books on the two big wars (The Great War and Modern Memory and Wartime are great.

I’ll second Lasch (with caution), Vidal, Mencken and Steffens. I’ll also note that Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch called Robert Sherrill’s The Gothic Politics of the Deep South “one of the most instructive books ever written on American politics.” I haven’t read the book, so I can’t comment.

I second Cadillac Desert. I read it because Mark Schmitt described it in a post as one of the best books written about American politics, and, as always, he was right.

I absolutely love “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” but it’s very, very long and it’s more about James Agee than it is about the farmers. But the Walker Evans photos are extraordinary.

In fact, another good book would be Walker Evans: American Photographs.

The East Coast and non-political stuff is way over-represented thus far. In my mind, James Gregory’s American Exodus is the one book you must read if you want to understand America. It covers the migration of Okie culture/politcs from the Dust Bowl to the sixties, introduces a useful concept – Plain Folks Americanism – and connects the dots from Woody Guthrie to the rise of Ronald Reagan. You want to understand modern America read this book before the Cohen books (which really are quite good) or even the Power Broker (which is great but of limited interest if you don’t think New York is the center of the Universe).

If you have to go back to Jacksonianism try Chuck Sellars’ one volume The Market Revolution which covers all the bases. Quite frankly, America as we know it begins with Jacksonianism. The Kingdom of Matthias is also great (and short!) but I think requires a bit of pre-knowledge about wacky Americans in the market revolution era.

I’ll save you the time on Zinn with the following synopsis with props to Tim Burke:

The underclass and overclass always understand their interests perfectly and act in ways that are appropriate to them. The overclass always wins because it has power. In the cases where it looks like the underclass has won, it is only because the overclass has conceded the minimum necessary to prevent revolution. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I’ve picked up W. E. B. DuBois, The souls of Black Folk (1903).

Henry, try Beyond the 100th Meridian by Wallace Stegner. It’s old, but it’s good. The life and career of John Wesley Powell. Powell rafted down the Colorado River at least as ill-equipped as Mallory was when he tried Everest, so Stegner’s got the ripping yarn built right in, fit to compare with any of the usual list of Remarkable Journeys of Exploration of the Nineteenth Century. Powell and his company, haphazardly prepared, wandering off into the unknown like Humboldt and his crew in South America, going to check out a vast region claimed to be part of the United States, but as yet relatively unknown to the nation supposed to own it, to make eventually a formal survey, complete with all the maps and specimens and journal entries and such that are the rudiments of useful knowledge. Powell sits in a highchair strapped to the middle of a raft running rapids bigger than a house. Oh, yeah.

And then he returns with the makings of his formal survey to Washington, where he’s engaged in a decades-long battle with Congress and committees over the interpretation and uses of what he’s described. So that’s the other and equally vividly presented harrowing journey of Powell, which took decades rather than days to play out, and which of course helped seal the fate of the American Southwest. And in this part of the book, Stegner’s picture of what late nineteenth century Congress and the delimited Federal government of the time amounted to and how they operated is as good as any we’ve got.

Nineteenth Century Derring-Do meets high policy wonkery in the conquest of the Southwest! What’s not to like?

Maybe I’m just cynical about politics, but I think a good way to get acquainted with American political history is to read the muckraking journalists who exposed a lot of the less appitizing details of it. Riis and Steffens have already been mentioned. I’d add Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson (Confessions of a Muckraker – great book), George Seldes, I.F. Stone and more recently Greg Palst. (I wasn’t around when these guys were writing, so it’s history to me, anyway.) Matthew Josephson’s histories The Robber Barons and The Politicos are in the same cavalier spirit. They may not be exactly what you’re looking for – not the last word in accuracy, anecdotal, not academic – but they sure are invigorating.

When I recommended Gore Vidal, I was thinking of his essays, and I’d like to recommend another essayist: Dwight Macdonald.

Powell and his company, haphazardly prepared, wandering off into the unknown like Humboldt and his crew in South America

And he only had one arm!

Second and third the Taylor Branch trilogy, esp. Parting the Waters. Also, haven’t seen this mentioned yet, but for an interesting take on the Vietnam War, try Dispatches by Michael Herr.

To essential war novels:

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead

Two books by the great West Indian Marxist CLR James: American Civilisation and Mariners, Renegades and Castaways. Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes is remarkable, so is Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism.

Many excellent recommendations here, so I’ll resist the urge to second them and only add:
W.J. Cash, The Mind of the South
Gore Vidal, United States: essays 1952–1992
Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (A lighter read, but fascinating.)

McDougall also wrote an excellent and very readable interpretation of the whole history of American foreign policy in one volume: “Promised Land, Crusader State.” I don’t agree with everything he has to say by any means, but it’s a great place to start in that genre.

Henry, in addition to what other kind readers have suggested I would highly recommend anything by Gore Vidal, fiction and non fiction on the USA.

Norman Mailer – OF A FIRE ON THE MOON.

For a change of pace. Brilliant book.

more on the west besides the works mentioned above — Richard White’s It’s Your Misfortune and None of my Own is not as much of a narrative as the syntheses in the Oxford series (McPherson, Howe, Kennedy) mentioned above, but it is equally authoritative and also funny in parts. Patricia Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest and Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire are also classics of the (not so) new western history. Elliott West’s The Contested Plains is just a great book.

Oh and Karl Marx’s journalistic writings on US politics c. 1860s are absolutely fantastic great read, mostly because they are so refreshingly perceptive!

God, I’m late to this party.

James M. MacPherson: ‘Battle Cry of Freedom’. The volume of the Oxford History of the USA dealing with the Civil War, and its causes. The second half of the book is one of the best narratives of the war I have ever read. But the first half of the book is even better: an account of the economic and social development of the US in the 1840s adn 1850s, which includes (among other things) brilliant discussions of the nature of US capitalism, the differences between different immigrant communities, the decline of the Whigs and the emergence of the Republicans, the guerrilla war in Kansas. There is an account of slavery that is both viscerally horrifying and analytically convincing (and contains a cool but brilliant dismissal of ‘Time on the Cross’).

The treatment of the causes of the Civil War is brilliant: the first time I felt I had grasped the key issues. MacPherson argues hard on a number of points- that the Mexican War was key to precipitating the Civil War, or that a Confederacy could never have co-existed peacefully with the North (or with its Southern neighbours).

Very few flaws indeed. Really a fine book.

My candidate for the Great American Novel is _Guard of Honor_ by James Gould Cozzens. Tells a lot about America during WW-2, when the whole country (it seemed) went to war.

Lemme take a mulligan (and congratulations)

If you are feeling maniacal after getting tenure there never was a worse downer than Rolvaag’s “Giants in the Earth” which illuminates the Scandinavian migrations to the Great Plains.

Since this thread seems about done with, I compiled all the suggestions so far into a list:

Abbey, Edward: The Monkey Wrench Gang
Adams, Henry: History of the United States During The Administration of Thomas Jefferson
Adams, Henry: The Education of Henry Adams
Agee, James and Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Allen, Frederick: Only Yesterday (followed by a sequal, Since Yesterday)
Ambrose, Stephen: The Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938.
Anderson, Jack: Confessions of a Muckraker
Anderson, Terry: The Movement and the Sixties.
Ayers, Edward: The Promise of the New South
Bailyn, Bernard: Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
Baker, Russell: Looking Back
Barry, John: Rising Tide.
Berry, Wendell: Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community
Boorstin, Daniel: The Americans
Bourne, Randolph: essays
Bouton, Jim: Ball Four.
Bowden, Mark: Blackhawk Down
Boyle, Kevin: Arc of Justice
Brady, Joan: Theory of War
Branch, Taylor: Parting the Waters (part of 3 part series).
Branch, Taylor: trilogy about America in the King years.
Brands, H.W.: The Strange Death of American Liberalism
Brooks, Juanita: Quicksand and Cactus
Brown, Dee: Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee
Brown, Dee: Hear that Lonesome Whistle Blow
Bryan, John: Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary
Caro, Robert: Lyndon Johnson.
Caro, Robert: The Power Broker
Carter, Dan: From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich : race in the conservative counterrevolution, 1963-1994.
Carter, Dan: The politics of rage : George Wallace, the origins of the new conservatism, and the transformation of American politics.
Carter, Dan: When the war was over : the failure of self-reconstruction in the South, 1865-1867.
Carter, Jimmy: book on his first election.
Carter, Stephen: The Culture of Disbelief.
Cash, W.J.: The Mind of the South
Cather, Willa: Death Comes to the Archbishop
Cather, Willa: My Antonia
Cather, Willa: The Bohemian Girl
Chandler, Raymond: The Long Goodbye
Cohen, Lizabeth: A Consumer’s Republic.
Cohen, Lizabeth: Making a New Deal.
Coll, Steve: Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001
Cozzens, James Gould: Guard of Honor
Cramer, Richard Ben: What It Takes.
Cronon, William: Nature’s Metropolis.
Dallek, Robert: His biography of Lyndon B Johnson
Dawidoff, Nicholas: The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg
Debo, Angie: And Still the Waters Run
DeLillo, Don: Underworld
Deloria, Vine: Custer Died for Your Sins (very funny, believe it or not!)
Dick, Philip K.: novels
Dickens, Charles: American Notes: For General Circulation
Dionne, EJ: Why Americans Hate Politics.
Doig, Ivan: This House of Sky
Dos Passos, John: USA Trilogy
Draper, Theodore: A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution.
Drinnon, Richard: Facing West
DuBois, W.E.B.: Reconstruction
DuBois, W.E.B.: The souls of Black Folk
Duncan, Dayton: Miles from Nowhere (US life in rural counties).
Dunne, Peter Finley: The Mr. Dooley books (e.g. Mr. Dooley in War and Peace)
Ehrenreich, Barbara: Fear of Falling
Ehrenreich, Barbara: The Hearts of Men
Elkins, Stanley and Eric McKitrick: The Age of Federalism
Ellroy, James: Novels (esp. American Tabloid, The L.A. Quartet)
Evans, Walker: Walker Evans: American Photographs
Faulkner, William: Light in August, among others
Fisher, David Hackett: Albion’s Seed.
Foner, Eric: Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men
Foner, Eric: Reconstruction
Foner, Eric: The Story of American Freedom
Frank, Thomas: What’s the Matter With Kansas
Freeman, Josh: Working Class New York.
Fussell, Paul: Wartime
Genovese, Eugene: Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.
Genovese, Eugene: The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation.
Ginsberg, Ben: The American Lie.
Goldman, Eric: Rendezvous With Destiny
Goodwyn, Lawrence: Democratic Promise.
Goodwyn, Lawrence: The Populist Moment.
Greene, Melissa Fay: Praying for Sheetrock.
Gregory, James: American Exodus
Griffith, Robert: The Politics of Fear.
Gunther, John: Inside USA
Haldeman, Joe: 1968
Hayley, Alex: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Herr, Michael: Dispatches
Hodgson, Godfrey: America in Our Time
Hofstader, Richard: The American Political Tradition.
Hofstader, Richard: The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
Hofstadter, Richard: The Age of Reform.
Hofstadter: The American Political Tradition
Howe, Daniel Walker: What Hath God Wrought, the Oxford History of America 1815-1848.
Hunt, Michael: Ideology in U.S. Foreign Policy
Jacoby, Susan: Freethinkers
Jaffa, Harry V.: Crisis of the house divided: An interpretation of the issues in the Lincoln-Douglas debates
James, C.L.R.: American Civilisation
James, C.L.R.: Mariners, Renegades and Castaways
Johnson, Chalmers: Nemesis (part III of a trilogy)
Johnson, James Weldon: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Johnson, Paul: Sam Patch the Famous Jumper
Jones, Edward: The Known Worl (novel).
Josephson, Matthew: The Politicos
Josephson, Matthew: The Robber Barons
Karp, Walter: The Politics of War
Kauffman, Bill: Ain’t My America
Kauffman, Bill: Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette
Kauffman, Bill: Look Homeward, America
Kay, Terry: The Year the Lights Came On (novel).
Kennedy, David M.: Freedom from Fear
Kennedy, David: Freedom from Fear.
Kerouac, Jack: On the Road
Kesey, Ken: Sometimes A Great Notion
Key, V.O.: Southern Politics in State and Nation.
Kimmell, Haven: A Girl Called Zippy
Klein, Naomi: The Shock Doctrine
Krugman, Paul: Conscience of a liberal
Lacy, Al: Tears of the Sun
Lasch, Christopher: The Agony of the American Left
Lasch, Christopher: The Culture of Narcissism
Lasch, Christopher: The Revolt of the Elites
Lasch, Christopher: The True and Only Heaven
Lasch, Christopher: The World of Nations (essays)
Lawrenson, Helen: Stranger at the Party
Least Heat Moon, William: Prairyerth
Lebergott, Stanley: Pursuing Happiness
Leebaert, Derek: The Fifty-Year Wound
Lemann, Nicholas: The Promised Land
Levering-Lewis, David: two-volume bio of W.E.B. DuBois.
Lewis, Michael: Moneyball.
Lewis, Sinclair: Elmer Gantry
Limerick, Patricia: Legacy of Conquest
Lindblom, Charles E.: Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Policy
Linn, Brian: The Philippine War, 1899-1902
Litwack, Leon: anything by him.
Loewen, James W.: Lies My Teacher Told Me
Macdonald, Dwight: essays (e.g. Notes of a Revolutionist or Politics Past: Essays in Political Criticism)
Mailer, Norman: Of a Fire on the Moon
Mailer, Norman: The Naked and the Dead
Martin, George: The Armageddon Rag.
Marx, Karl: Journalism (see: Marxists.org)
McCarthy, Cormac: Novels, esp. Blood Meridian
McCormick: America’s Half-Century
McDougall, Walter: history of the USA: Freedom Around the Corner.
McDougall, Walter: Promised Land, Crusader State
McDougall, Walter: Throes of Democracy.
McMurty, Larry: essays and review (e.g. Sacagawea’s Nickname)
McPherson, James: Battle Cry of Freedom.
Mencken, H.L.: Newspaper Days
Mencken, H.L.: Selected Prejudices
Meyers, Marvin: The Jacksonian Persuasion.
Michener’s Centennial and Texas.
Nash, George: The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America
Nevins, Allen: Ordeal of the Union (reads like poetry).
Norris, Frank: The Octopus
North, Douglass: Growth and Welfare in the American Past and The Economic Growth of the United States 1790 – 1860.
Obama, Barack: Dreams From My Father
O’Brien, Tim: The Things They Carried
Onuf, Peter: Origins of the Federal Republic is good.
Oxford History of the United States, esp. James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: the United States 1945-74 & Restless Giant (1974-2000)
Payne, Charles M.: I’ve Got the Light of Freedom.
Percy, William: Lanterns on the Levee.
Perlstein, Rick: Nixonland.
Phillips, Kevin: The Cousins’ Wars.
Pollan, Michael: The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Powell, John Wesley: travels
Powers, Richard: Gain
Pritchett, Wendell: Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Rakove, Jack: Original Meanings.
Reisner, Marc: Cadillac Desert
Renda, Mary: Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism 1915-1940
Rhodes, Richard: Arsenals of Folly
Riis, Jacob: How the Other Half Lives
Robinson, Kim Stanley: “The Lucky Strike”
Rodgers, Daniel: Republicanism: Career of a Concept.
Rolvaag, Ole: Giants in the Earth
Rosenfeld, Richard N. and Edmund S. Morgan: American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns: The Suppressed History of Our Nation’s Beginnings and the Heroic Newspaper That Tried to Report It
Royko, Mike: Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago
Sawislak, Karen: Smoldering City.
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr.: The Cycles of American History
Schlosser: Fast Food Nation
Schulman, Bruce: The Seventies.
Sellars, Chuck: The Market Revolution
Sheehan, Neil: A Bright Shining Lie
Sherrill, Robert: The Gothic Politics of the Deep South
Sinclair, Upton: The Jungle
Sklar, Judith: American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion is also a useful, fun quick read.
Sloman, Larry: Reefer Madness: The History of Marijuana in America
Starr, Paul: The Creation of the Media
Starr, Paul: The Social Transformation of American Medicine
Steele, Ronald: Walter Lippmann and the American Century
Steffens, Lincoln: The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
Steffens, Lincoln: The Shame of the Cities (with preface by Hofstadter)
Stegner, Wallace: Beyond the 100th Meridian
Stegner, Wallace: Essays (e.g. Wolf Willow)
Steinbeck, John: The Grapes of Wrath
Stiglitz, Joseph: Making Globalization Work
Stone, I.F.: In Time of Torment
Stuart, Jesse: The Thread that Runs so True.
Takaki, Ronald: A Different Mirror: A History of Multi-Cultural America.
Terkel, Studs: works, esp. Working
Thompson, Hunter S.: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
Toomer, Jean: Cane
Twain, Mark: Life on the Mississippi
Twain, Mark: works
Twelve Southerners: I’ll Take My Stand
Utley, Robert: Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life.
Utley, Robert: High Noon in Lincoln
Vale, Lawrence: From the Puritans to the Projects
Vidal, Gore: seven-volume “American Chronicles” series (historical novels)
Vidal, Gore: The United States: Essays
Vonnegut, Kurt: Jailbird.
Washington, Booker T.: Up from Slavery.
Watson, Harry: Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America
West, Elliott: The Contested Plains
White, Richard: It’s Your Misfortune and None of my Own
Wilentz, Sean and Paul Johnson: the Kingdom of Matthias
Wilentz, Sean: The Rise of American Democracy
Willeford, Charles: novels (esp. Cockfighter, The Woman-Chaser)
Williams, Harry: book on Huey Long.
Williams, William Appleman: The Contours of American History
Wills, Garry: His book about the Gettysburg Address
Wills, Garry: Nixon Agonistes
Wolfe, Tom: Mau Mauing the Flack Catchers
Wolfe, Tom: The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test
Wolfe, Tom: The Right Stuff.
Wood, Gordon: Creation of the American Republic.
Woodward, C. Vann: The Strange Career of Jim Crow
Worster, Donald: Rivers of Empire
Yates, Richard: Revolutionary Road
Young, Marilyn: The Vietnam Wars
Zinn, Howard: A People’s History of the United States