Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (107 page)

Rossiter, Clinton, ed.
The Federalist Papers.
New York: Mentor, 1999. (Many other editions are available.) A collection of the series of essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay in defense of the Constitution as it was being debated before ratification by the states.

CHAPTER 4. APOCALYPSE THEN

Bernstein, Iver.
The New York City Draft Riots.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Scholarly, in-depth treatment of the 1863 rioting that followed the Conscription Act and left hundreds dead in New York.

Brands, H. W.
The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream.
New York: Random House, 2002.

Catton, Bruce.
A Stillness at Appomattox.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953.

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This Hallowed Ground.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956.

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The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War.
New York: American Heritage, 1960.

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The Coming Fury.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961.

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Terrible Swift Sword.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963.

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Never Call Retreat.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965.

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Gettysburg, the Final Fury.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968.

Classic military histories, although Catton is now somewhat dated by more recent works.

Davis, Burke.
Sherman’s March.
New York: Random House, 1980. Excellent account of the infamous march to the sea.

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The Long Surrender.
New York: Random House, 1985. Excellent account of the closing days of the war.

Douglass, Frederick.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
New York: Signet, 1968. (Other editions are available.) Originally written and published in 1845, this autobiography by a self-taught slave is an American classic, perhaps the most eloquent indictment of slavery ever written.

Eisenhower, John S. D.
So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848.
New York: Random House, 1989. A narrative account of the war with Mexico by the son of the president.

Foner, Eric.
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution.
New York: Harper and Row, 1988. A massive book that examines the social, political, and economic aspects of this controversial period.

Foote, Shelby.
The Civil War: A Narrative
(3 vols.). New York: Random House, 1958–74. A narrative account sometimes called “America’s Odyssey.”

Goodwin, Doris Kearns.
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. The men who surrounded Lincoln in his cabinet.

Kaplan, Justin.
Walt Whitman: A Life.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980. One of the best portraits of the poet and his times.

Kolchin, Peter.
American Slavery: 1619–1877.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Scholarly but very useful and carefully researched history of slavery in the United States.

Kunhardt, Philip B., Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kun-
hardt.
Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography.
New York: Knopf, 1992. A wonderfully illustrated photobiography, companion to a public television series.

Litwack, Leon F.
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery.
New York: Knopf, 1979. A standard work on postwar life for former slaves.

Lowery, Thomas P.
The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War.
Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 1994. Fascinating look at the true underside of the war—from brothels and venereal diseases to nineteenth-century homosexuality.

McFeely, William S.
Grant: A Biography.
New York: Norton, 1981. A strong single-volume life of the soldier and president.

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Frederick Douglass.
New York: Norton, 1991. Excellent account of the former slave turned abolitionist leader.

McPherson, James M.
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.
London: Oxford University Press, 1988. This prizewinning book is an indispensable single-volume history of the war and the events leading up to it.

Mellon, James.
Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember.
New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988. Compiled during the Depression, this volume brings together reminiscences of life by the last surviving slaves.

Mitchell, Lt. Col. Joseph B.
Decisive Battles of the Civil War.
New York: Putnam’s, 1955.

Oates, Stephen B.
To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown.
New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Excellent account of the controversial abolitionist.

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Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion.
New York: Harper and Row, 1975. A dramatic account of the most famous American slave uprising and its controversial and charismatic leader.

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With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln.
New York: Harper and Row, 1977. This biography of Lincoln is one of the best and most balanced single-volume histories of Lincoln’s life and times.

Rosengarten, Theodore.
Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter.
New York: Morrow, 1986. Using diaries, the author re-creates a vivid portrait of southern plantation life in this prizewinning best seller.

Sears, Stephen W.
The Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam.
New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983. A compelling account of one of the bloodiest battles in American history.

Stampp, Kenneth M.
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South.
New York: Knopf, 1956. Groundbreaking study of the “peculiar institution” by one of the deans of Civil War scholarship.

———, ed.
The Causes of the Civil War.
New York: Spectrum/Prentice-Hall, 1974. A collection of scholarly essays discussing the full range of social, economic, political, and moral causes of the war.

Swanson, James L.
Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.
New York: Morrow, 2006. Thrilling account of the days following Lincoln’s assassination.

Ward, Geoffrey C., with Ric Burns and Ken Burns.
The Civil War.
New York: Knopf, 1990. Companion to the award-winning PBS television series.

Winik, Jay. April 1865:
The Month That Saved America.
New York: Harper-
Collins, 2001. A best-selling narrative portrait of the crucial last month of the Civil War.

CHAPTER 5. WHEN MONOPOLY WASN’T A GAME

Adams, Henry.
The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

Addams, Jane.
Twenty Years at Hull-House.
New York: Macmillan, 1910. The personal account of the remarkable reformer who started one of the nation’s first settlement houses in Chicago.

Anbinder, Tyler.
Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum.
New York: Free Press, 2001. Portrait of New York’s underside.

Brady, Kathleen.
Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker.
New York: Putnam, 1984. Life of the crusading journalist.

Brown, Dee.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An American Indian History of the American West.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. A modern classic, retelling American history from the Indian perspective.

Chernow, Ron.
The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern American Finance.
New York: Grove, 1990. Winner of the National Book Award, a biography of the first family of American finance.

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Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller.
New York: Random House, 1998. A great biography of a man who has been called the Jekyll and Hyde of American capitalism—a rapacious robber baron who was one of America’s great philanthropists as well.

Collier, Peter, and David Horowitz.
The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty.
New York: New American Library, 1977. A popular history of the family by a pair of modern “muckraking” journalists, this book covers the rise of John D. Rockefeller.

Connell, Evan S.
Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn.
Berkeley, Calif.: North Point, 1984. A novelist recounts the most famous battle of the Plains Indian wars with a compelling character study of the controversial soldier.

Dray, Philip.
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America.
New York: Random House, 2002. A compelling social and cultural account of the history of thousands of black Americans lynched between the 1880s and World War II.

Ferguson, Niall.
The Pity of War.
New York: Basic Books, 1999. Monumental reassessment of World War I and its aftermath.

Fussell, Paul.
The Great War and Modern Memory.
London: Oxford University Press, 1975. An award-winning book about the British experience of trench warfare from 1914 to 1918, emphasizing the literature that this experience produced.

Hofstadter, Richard.
The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R., 1890–1940.
New York: Knopf, 1955. Pulitzer Prize–winning landmark history of the populist and progressive movements at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Josephson, Matthew.
The Robber Barons.
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934. An American classic recounting the corrupt growth of some of America’s greatest fortunes.

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The Politicos.
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963. A 1938 sequel to the muckraking
The Robber Barons
chronicles America’s Gilded Age.

Kaplan, Justin.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966.