Recommended Resources

Literature and Language Arts

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.

Basker, James G., ed. Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitian Books, 2000.

Baym, Nina. American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Castronovo, David. Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Mensh, Elaine, and Henry Mensh. Black, White, and Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001.

Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Fishkin, Shelley Fisher. Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Reynolds, David S. Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America. New York: Norton, 2011.

Blight, David W. ed. “Introduction” in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

New Deal Network

Salzman, Jack, ed. New Essays on The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

Clinton, Catherine. Phillis’s Big Test. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

Fraser, Mary Ann. Ten Mile Day and the Building of the Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993.

Douglas, Ann. Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995.

McWillliams, John P., Jr. The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Super, John C., ed. The Fifties in America. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2005.

McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Bonner, Robert E. The Soldier’s Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.

Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. First published 1975.

Caretta, Vincent. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996.