Recommended Resources
The First Age of Reform
The books, articles, films, and websites in this section will enhance the materials included on our website for this era of American history. Many of the books are by the historians whose essays and lectures you have read and listened to here and offer in-depth studies of the topics that have caught your interest. The websites and other resources open new ways to explore American history and take advantage of new interpretations and new technologies to enhance classroom or at-home learning.
Penney, Sherry H., James D. Livingston. A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Women’s Rights. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.
Dubois, Ellen C. Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978.
Kerr, Andrea Moore. Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
Bolden, Tonya. Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl. New York: Henry N. Abrams, 2005.
Mintz, Steven. Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre–Civil War Reformers. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Isenberg, Nancy. Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Boydston, Jean, Mary Kelley, and Anne Margolis. The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Woman’s Sphere. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Wellman, Judith. The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven: Yale University, 1990.
Fritz, Jean. You Want Women to Vote, Lizzie Stanton? New York: Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1995.
Recommended Resources from Other Sub-Eras
Baym, Nina. American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Green, Constance M. Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology. New York: Longman, 1997.
McWillliams, John P., Jr. The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Gurko, Miriam. The Ladies of Seneca Falls: The Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
White, G. Edward. The Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815–1835. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.