Nineteenth Century Reading List

Early Republic
1. Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (2001)
2. Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2009)
3. Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (2009).
4. Paul E. Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper (2004).

Jacksonian Politics
5. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1994).
6. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (2007).
7. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005).

Slavery and Race
8. Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (1961).
9. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1997)
10. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (2001).
11. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1981).
12. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991).

The West
13. Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, & the Rush to Colorado (2000).
14. Louis S. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (2005).
15. Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire (2008).
16. Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (2005).
17. Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (2008).

Communications
18. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1998).
19. Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (1994).
20. Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010).
21. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011)

The Civil War
22. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988).
23. James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (2007)
24. Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War (2007).

Reconstruction
25. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves (1997).
26. Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (1998).
27. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988).

Post-Civil War (Politics)
28. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955).
29. Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (2009).
30. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003).
31. Michael Perman, The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869-1879 (1984).

Post-Civil War (General)
32. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1966).
33. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (2009).
34. Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992).

Urban History
35. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991).
36. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (2003).

Culture
37. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (1986).

Gender
38. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986).
39. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (2000).

Miscellaneous
40. Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (2002).
41. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (1999).