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PAPER 24 THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1865 READING LIST Updated September 2019 2 Historical Tripos, Part I, Paper 24 The History of the United States since 1865 [NB: Many readings overlap with other sections, especially between Themes and Topics, but are not necessarily listed twice. Please be sure to check corresponding Themes and Topics.] AHR = American Historical Review JAH = Journal of American History MAH = Modern American History * = primary source Themes 1. American Exceptionalism 3 2. History of Capitalism 5 3. Gender and Sexuality 6 4. Religion 9 5. Immigration, Ethnicity, and Nationality 12 6. Popular and Consumer Culture 15 7. The U.S. and the World 17 8. The West and the Environment 19 9. Politics and the State 21 10. Intellectual Culture 23 Topics 11. Reconstruction 26 12. Whites, Indians, and the Consolidation of the West 27 13. Industrializing and Urbanizing America 28 14. Populism, Progressivism, Socialism 29 15. Segregation and Its Cultures 31 16. Becoming a World Power, 1865-1920 32 17. World War I Homefront and the 1920s 34 18. The Great Depression and the New Deal 35 19. World War II and the Homefront 37 20. The Cold War 39 21. McCarthyism 41 22. Liberal Ascendancy, 1945-1968 41 23. Vietnam 43 24. The Civil Rights Revolution 45 25. Conservative Resurgence, 1968-1992 48 26. Political Economy in a Global Age 50 27. America and the World After the Cold War 52 3 1. AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM Subjects include: whether America is unique or has developed along a different path, particularly regarding Europe; the difference between “quantitative” and “qualitative” exceptionalism; transnational and international challenges to exceptionalism; exceptionalism as a form of nationalism; possible areas of American difference, such as socialism and religion. a. General Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006) “Review Essays on American Exceptionalism,” AHR (June 1997) James W. Ceaser, “The Origins and Character of American Exceptionalism,” American Political Thought (Spring 2012) William Cronon, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly (April 1987) Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop (Spring 1984) François Furstenberg, “Hartz Is Dead. Long Live Hartz,” Reviews in American History (June 2012) Thomas L. Haskell, “Taking Exception to Exceptionalism,” Reviews in American History (March 2000) Michael Kammen, “The Problem of American Exceptionalism: A Reconsideration,” American Quarterly (March 1993) James T. Kloppenberg, “Requiescat in Pacem: The Liberal Tradition of Louis Hartz,” in Mark Hulliung, ed., The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered: The Contested Legacy of Louis Hartz (2010) Deborah L. Madsen, American Exceptionalism (1998) Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (1998) Byron E. Shafer, ed., Is America Different? A New Look at American Exceptionalism (1991) “The Debate Table: Eric Rauchway and Ian Tyrrell Discuss American Exceptionalism,” MAH (July 2018) Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” AHR (October 1991), plus commentary by Michael McGerr b. Nationalism, Patriotism, and National Identity Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005; 2013) ——, ed., The Short American Century: A Postmortem (2012) 4 Richard M. Gamble, In Search of the City on a Hill: The Making and Unmaking of an American Myth (2012) Peter Gardella, American Civil Religion: What Americans Hold Sacred (2014) Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607-1876 (2007) Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, eds., Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (2006) Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (2004; 2012) Anders Stephenson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (1995) Wendy L. Wall, Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (2008) c. Transnational/International Perspectives and Comparisons Michael Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History,” AHR (December 2001) Nicolas Barreyre, et al, eds., Historians across Borders: Writing American History in a Global Age (2014) Brooke L. Blower, Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (2011) Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley, eds., The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015) Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (2016) James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986) Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks, It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (2000) Andrew Preston and Doug Rossinow, eds., Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of U.S. History (2017) Eric Rauchway, Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America (2006) Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998) Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History (December 2001) Ian Tyrrell, Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (2007; 2015) 5 2. HISTORY OF CAPITALISM Subjects include: the transformation of the rural economy and the growth of cities; slavery and capitalism; class relations and perception of them; American economic development in comparative perspective; the rise of corporations and the development of a managerial culture; the development of labour unions and socialism. a. Overviews and general economic history Richard F. Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (2000) Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Vol. 2: The Long Nineteenth Century (1996) Nan Enstad, “The ‘Sonorous Summons’ of the New History of Capitalism; Or, What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Economy?” MAH (March 2019) Herbert S. Klein, A Population History of the United States (2004) Michael Merrill, “Putting ‘Capitalism’ in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature,” William and Mary Quarterly (1995) Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth- Century Atlantic Economy (1999) Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern, and Matthias Judt, eds., Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (1998) Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith, eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (2012) Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century? (1998) b. Corporate growth and managerial culture Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014) Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977) Nan Enstad, Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism (2018) Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (1995) Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (2005), especially Introduction Sanford M. Jacoby, Employing Bureacracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900-1945 (1985) 6 c. Finance and speculation Peter James Hudson, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (2017) Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (2011) Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (2012) Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (2011) Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), pp. 1-35 Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Economic Crises Changed the World (2018) d. Labour Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (2010) Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1999) William E. Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (1991) Steve Fraser, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (2015), Introduction and chapters 1-7 Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (1997) Herbert G. Gutman, Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class (1992) Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” JAH (June 1993) Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002) Ronald Mize and Alicia Swords, Consuming Mexican Labor: From the Bracero Program to NAFTA (2010) David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991) Robert H. Zieger, American Workers, American Unions (1994) 3. GENDER AND SEXUALITY Subjects include: the origins, development and characteristics of suffrage and feminist movements; women’s involvement in various reform movements; women’s roles within families and the home; the changing nature of women in the workforce; sexuality
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