Help me become interested (and educated) in American history

Cafe Society
1

I have a confession to make. I am a librarian and a voracious reader, and will check almost anything out if it looks remotely interesting. (I currently have 40 books checked out, as I was told today.) I read all the time, even while I’m brushing my teeth, and my tastes run mainly to non-fiction these days, with favorite authors in SF and mysteries to keep up with as well. History is a particularly favorite subject.

Well, any history but American, that is. The confession is: I am woefully–no, horrifically undereducated in the history of my own country. I keep hearing that American history is tremendously exciting, full of fascinating characters. I am sure that is true. But I have never seemed to be able to get myself very interested. If you wish, you may blame this on my non-existent education in the subject. I spent my junior year of HS abroad and crammed US History in with about 7 other things when I came back–all I remember is Sally Fields getting upset about unions. I took American History at a JC in the one semester I spent there before going on to a university, but the teacher was a nutball who considered the writers of the Constitution to be criminals* and therefore wouldn’t discuss anything that happened after 1787, so we spent the semester hearing about primary vs. secondary sources and sometimes 12 years of American history, but not very often. I even managed to avoid taking much American literature, though I was a lit major. And there you have the total of my education in US history.

Anyway. I am now taking suggestions about what to read in order to become educated and interested in American history. Any time period, any subject, but no super-heavy intellectual tomes, because I have 2 small children and my brain has turned to mush. Barbara Tuchman is about my top speed.

So, please submit nominations below, and do your part to help fight ignorance.

*Because, you see, they took away the sovereignity of the states but still called them states, when they should be called residualities, and we should really be the United Residualities of America, and therefore they were criminals.

2

The Story of America is a good, balanced, introductory history of the United States. The basic idea is to pick a significant event from each period and focus on that, while providing enough background to understand what is going on. It’s a Dorling Kindersly book, which means it’s filled with top notch illustrations and photographs. It’s far from comprehensive, but it’s a good way to get your feet wet.

For example, the chapter on the Revolutionary period focuses on the Boston Massacre. You don’t get the “heroic unarmed protesters fired on by cruel, poorly trained British troops” version–which is the propaganda promoted by separatists such as Sam Adams and is still the accepted version in a lot of mainstream textbooks. The authors look at the incident from both sides and show that the British soldiers fired in self-defense after being literally backed into a corner by agitators trying to provoke a response, but Sam Adams and others put a political spin on the incident to rally support for their cause.

From there, I’d suggest you take note of what events seem interesting enough that you want more in depth info, and look for books on those subjects.

3

[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060930349/qid=1063969861/sr=8-3/ref=sr_8_3/102-9122993-9220121?v=glance&s=books&n=507846]A History of the American People, Paul Johnson. Thick, but readable.

4

Well, I’m glad the URL still worked even after I fubared it up. :rolleyes:

5

Johnson’s book IMO is often embarrassingly inaccurate, and skewed to the right, particularly as he gets closer to contemporary history, Once he gets up to LBJ, the book is more of a rant than an attempt at evenhanded history, which is OK if you can correct for his biases, but he sucks some unwary readers into his polemics. He may do this, in subtler ways, with the earlier material, but reading him on the twentieth century is like reading Limbaugh.

6

Another quality book, but from an entirely different viewpoint than Johnson’s is Howard Zinns A Peoples History of the United States. It is likely more readable than the Johnson, and is definitely more biased towards one end of the political spectrum (though the Left will likely say the same about Johnson).

7

See?

8

There is a book call Midnight Ride about the famous midnight ride of Paul Revere. The actual story is nothing like you know. This book does a great job of expalining the life of PR and the events that lead to the famous midnight ride and the start of the American Revolutionary War. The book is informative and a thrilling read.

Highly recomended by Zebra

9

The new biography of Benjamin Franklin is selling like hotcakes:

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

10

A great non-fiction book about the Revolutionary War is Angel in the Whirlwind, by Benson Bobrick. It almost reads like a novel. One of my favorite books.

And Jeff Shaara’s novel Rise to Rebellion is pretty good too. Adams, Franklin, Washington, et. al are fully realized characters, sometimes hilariously so (especially Franklin). I haven’t read its sequel, * The Glorious Cause*, yet.

11

I’ve got two rec’s for the history of the early Republic.

“The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republig, 1788-1800” by Stanley Elkins & Eric McKitrick. This book details the period between ratification of the Constitution and the election of Thomas Jefferson as the third President. Basically, this is the high point of the federalists (the guys pushing early for a strong central government) and the opposition of the republicans (not today’s repub’s, these guys wanted a smaller central gov, and stronger, more autonomous state govs). There is some really good stuff about the conflict between Jefferson and Hamilton.

“Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic” by Joanne Freeman. This book looks at how politicians interacted with each other in a time before organized parties. Stories include the Burr-Hamilton duel and a fight between two members of Congress on the floor of the House of Reps. If you thought politics within the party system was bad, this might open your eyes.

If you’re looking for any specific periods or topics, I might be able to help with those as well.

12

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. If nothing else, you’ll be really pissed about the quality of the American history education you received, and you’ll pick up a lot of threads and information you can follow up on at your leisure. Despute the combative title, it’s a nice, light readable book, too.

13

The John Adams biography by McCullough was outstanding. You get a sense of the people involved, what life was like then. A good read.

A very light but fun read might be Don’t Know Much About History : Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned. It is a series of short essays about common things in our history.

14

Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause aren’t bad books, but they seem really too worshipful to me. He did the same things in his two Civil War books to Lee, I think, and especially Jackson.

Another good book about the American Revolution, this one from a British perspective, is “A Few Bloody Noses” by Robert Harvey.

15

Walter Lord, known best for his Titanic books of course, has at least two others about the 20th century–THE GOOD YEARS, in which he takes each year from 1900-1914 and focusses on one event–the McKinley assassination, the anarchist movement killers, etc. and puts it into context. He has the gift for letting you know why people thought the way they did, something that Loewen doesn’t IMO. His DAY OF INFAMY is an absolutely fascinating page-turner about Pearl Harbor.

I would read TO BE A SLAVE (Booker T. Washington?), the autobio of Frederick Douglass, and the original articles of separation by each Southern state in the Civil War. FREEDOM ROAD by Howard Fast for early Reconstruction.

For something different, RAGTIME by E.L. Doctorow is very odd and has lots of sax and violins but is another interesting take on the early 20th century, fictionalized.

Oh yeah, your teacher was a cuckoo clock.

16

For a textbook, anything by Alan Brinkley. And Zebra, I think that’s Paul Revere’s Ride, by David Hackett Fischer. I recently picked up Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s old but very enjoyable to read The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919-1933. Paul Johnson is very readable, as is Hugh Brogan’s Penguin History of the American People (these last two are an Englishman’s take).
I’ll second Akennett on Elkin’s and McKitrick’s The Age of Federalism, but you have to be into that period–although picking it up and reading it cold will make you interested in that era.
Also, in that Oxford series, James McPherson’s, James T. Patterson’s, and David Kennedy’s books are great for the Civil War, Depression and WW2, and post-war US up until the mid-1970s.

17

cleops,

you are correct sir.

18

A Different Mirror by Ronald Takaki.

It is a detailed history of American Immigrants and their experiences.

Ditto on Lies My Teacher Told Me.

19

Oh boy, what a question. Let me leap into this with both feet.

Start with the three-volume The Americans by Daniel J. Boorstin. Not your conventional American history, it is instead a series of chapter-long essays on the important factors that shaped the American experience. Its greatest value is that it is one of the few books to get away from the Great Man theory of writing history. In its place, Boorstin shows that invention, infrastructure, innovation, and the Industrial Revolution were a thousand times more important in creating the America we see today.

If you can read no other books about American history I would still recommend this one first. And Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress, is one of the world’s great writers of history. All his books are good and worth reading. His three volumes, The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers, do for world history what The Americans does for our country.

Now to go through our history in more or less chronological order. I’m not going to mention any biographies, even group biographies. In the first place, there are millions of them. And most of the ones coming out these days are pretty good. We are in a new golden age of historical writing, clear, well-written, well-researched, and aimed at the general reader rather than fellow historians. You have to go back to the 40s and 50s for another such age. By all means read them. It’s just that you don’t need me for that.

For colonial history, you can start with The Bold and Magnificent Dream: America’s Founding Years 1492-1815. The marvelous Civil War historian Bruce Catton wrote it with his historian son William B. (Catton’s Civil War books were the highlight of the Centennial in the early 1960s and are still well worth reading.)

If you really want to get to the heart of the writing of the Declaration of Independence, forget books and rent the film (or even better, see the play) of 1776. I’m serious. No book that I know of does this miracle of compaction in setting out the issues and the characters and sectional rivalries as well as this does - and it does it with the best witty conversation you’ve ever heard and lots of good songs.

The Revolution. Rather than sort though war books, I’ll make a more or less blanket statement that you should find all the various books that American Heritage has put out on American wars. Some of the them are old, although they get revised regularly, but they all use top historians who were told to write for reading, not for research (or edited that way).

There are two essential books on the writing of the Constitution: Miracle at Philadelphia by Catherine Drinker Bowen and Decision at Philadelphia by Christopher and James Lincoln Collier. The first looks more at the personalities; the second more at the issues. They complement each other nicely.

Stephen E. Ambrose was simply the best writer among modern historians. His books are, pardon the phrase, unputdownable. He slips in here in chronological order with Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, but you should also read Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 and Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors.

I have a problem here because the next set of years is unbelievably essential for understanding what comes after, but I don’t have any good popular histories to recommend. One historical novel that does tackle the subject of slavery and abolitionism in those decades is the monumental Cloudsplitter, by Russell Banks, a huge book that studies John Brown’s life through the eyes of his son. I know of nothing better on daily life and passions in the US in that era.

For the Civil War, there are two routes to take. One is the overall history, than which in one volume there is no better example than Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, by James M. McPherson. (Christopher Ward’s book supplementing Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary is surprisingly excellent and of course supremely well illustrated.) Shelby Foote’s three-volume Civil War is even more outstanding, but it’s friggin’ huge. (How huge? They excerpted just the piece on the battle of Gettysburg and issued it as a 250-page book.)

Or you can poke around the war from the sides. I won’t go through the gazillion books on individual battles, but I must mention a classic work of history: Reveille in Washington, 1860 - 1865, by Margaret Leech. It makes the city come alive and gives the feel of what it meant to live through that war at close range for everyone from Lincoln to the prostitutes the soldiers visited.

Nobody actually likes reading about Reconstruction, a horrible period of history that depresses everyone who comes near it, but the standard is Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, by Eric Foner. There’s even an abridged version now available.

Cowboys. The West. How can you read American history and not read about cowboys? So the place to start is Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries by the noted western historian David Drury. Two big illustrated books with text good enough to read for itself are The Wild West, another documentary spin-off and The Native Americans: An Illustrated History.

Post reconstruction came the most crooked period in American history and boy is that saying a lot. Ray Ginger’s 1965 Age of Excess: The United States from 1877 to 1914, one of the last great narrative histories of its era captures these decades as well as anyone. Then you can go on to read Lincoln Steffens’ early century classic The Shame of the Cities to see what the result of unchecked greed can do. (I would write “unchecked capitalism” but some Libertarian would come along to diss me, not knowing what a champion of capitalism I am.)

Walter Lord was already mentioned, but I like Frederick Lewis Allen. His 1930 Only Yesterday is a remarkable thing: a good historical book about a period that had just ended, the 1920s. (He extends this look at both ends in The Big Change: American Transforms Itself 1900-1950.) William L. O’Neill manages somewhat the same feat for the 1960s with his 1971 Coming Apart, though it is less popularly written than Allen.

Fat and sassy is William Manchester’s The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America 1932-1972, which captures the depression and the war quite well, but it weaker on the later years.

Nixon led to some wonderful books slagging him, from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72 by the inimitable Hunter S. Thompson to that Watergate must: All the President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward.

I think I’ll stop there because a) it’s already too much and b) it’s the exception rather than the rule to find good histories about recent years. Anyway, this is just a tiny sampling of the thousands of wonderful books on history and a biased sampling at that since I confined myself to my own shelves.

American history is wonderful, amazing, astounding, horrifying, depressing, masterful, and a sight to behold. Dive in deep.

20

Yes to all 3 of your Civil War choices, but be forewarned that Foote’s can be a heavy read. By that I mean that it isn’t the kind of book that you will sit and read for hours and hours. As he puts it, his 3 volume series is a narrative.

All The Presidents Men did not slag Nixon it merely reported the facts.

Nixon did his own slagging, thank you very much.

If you want to get a taste of the 1950’s, David Halberstam’s The Fifties is a must read. He manages to accomplish a neat and not so easy trick with this book: he will go into detail about certain events but will leave you wanting to go and find out more on your own.

For a history of the Civil Rights movement in America you should look for Juan Williams Eyes On The Prize which was the companion book to the wonderful PBS series.

You should also check out Taylor Branch’s two volume history of the movement: Parting The Waters: America in the King Years 1955 - 1962, which is Volume One and Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1962 -1965, which is Volume 2.