U.S. History Qualifying Exams: Book Summaries

*Note: The following summaries were written in 2011. I cannot attest to their accuracy and are intended only for personal or educational use.*

Colonial America

1. Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of Revolution
2. Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
3. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
4. Timothy Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence
5. Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority
6. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities
7. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People
8. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England
9. Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Pennsylvania
10. J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830
11. Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1782
12. David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
13. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World
14. David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England
15. Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America
16. Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt
17. Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812
18. Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America
19. Bruce Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence
20. Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry
21. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800
22. John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence
23. Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America
24. Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic
25. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812
26. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815
27. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic
28. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution

Nineteenth-Century America

1. Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War
2. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans
3. Ed Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction
4. Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896
5. Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America
6. William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
7. Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America
8. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
9. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom
10. Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South
11. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
12. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870
13. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire
14. Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars
15. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
16. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
17. Richard John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications
18. Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse
19. Paul Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper
20. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
21. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
22. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture & Black Consciousness
23. Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War
24. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
25. Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States
26. James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics
27. Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879
28. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision
29. Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850
30. Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore
31. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
32. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America
33. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846
34. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation
35. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860
36. Louis Warren, Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show
37. Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado
38. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
39. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920
40. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln

Twentieth-Century America

1. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
2. Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
3. Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism
4. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
5. Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Poor Whites, and Blacks in Texas Cotton Culture
6. John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947
7. Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920
8. James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California
9. Thomas Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945
10. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR
11. Matthew Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
12. Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class
13. David Kennedy, Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945
14. Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism
15. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
16. Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943
17. Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
18. Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
19. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right
20. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
21. Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965
22. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America
23. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York
24. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement
25. Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture
26. Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
27. Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950
28. George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Race, Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945
29. Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
30. Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
31. Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
32. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
33. Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente
34. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920

U.S. History Qualifying Exams: Book Summaries by Cameron Blevins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.