Reading list for AMER10002 From Reconstruction to Reagan: American History 1877-1988

UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

 

ENGLISH, AMERICAN STUDIES and CREATIVE WRITING DIVISION

 

FROM RECONSTRUCTION TO REAGAN: AMERICAN HISTORY 1877-1988 (AMER10002)

 

Essential Reading

To succeed on this course, students should try to read as widely as possible from the vast literature on US history during this period, a small sampling of which appears in the Guide to Further Reading published later in the main syllabus of the course.

You must get hold of the following assigned texts for this module:

Survey Text

Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty: An American History (3^rd ed) (London: Norton/Seagull, 2012)*

Monographs

Lewis Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1984)

Mike Marqusee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties (Verso, 2005)

           

* Those of you who take/have taken AMER 10211 (American History to 1877) should already have the Foner book. If you do not/did not take that course you can buy the shorter, post-1877 version. If you do this, please bear in mind that the page numbers and chapter references in this syllabus relate to the complete volume.

 

A VERY BRIEF GUIDE TO ADDITIONAL READING ON US HISTORY & CULTURE, 1877-1988

 

Overall Histories

The following texts are very good and we’ll be using parts of the Major Problems book on the course, a collection which is in effect a selection of documents and essays dealing with successive periods of American history from the end of the Civil War. But it should be stressed they are recommended but not essential texts and they should not replace the Foner book so much as complement it in your reading and further research.

George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi, America, A Narrative History (9^th ed) (London: Norton, 2013)

Paul Boyer, Neal Salisbury, Clifford Edward Clark, et al, The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (8^th ed) (Wadsworth, 2013)

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Edward J. Blum, Jon Gjerde, Major Problems in American History Vol II: Since 1865 (3^rd ed) (Wadsworth, 2012)

 

 

Section A, 1877-1940

1. General

John Milton Cooper, Pivotal Decades: America 1900-1920 (Norton, 1992)

Michael Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920-1941 (Norton, 1994)

John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1865-1925 (Rutgers, 1955)

Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (Vintage, 1955)

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of Amerca: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (Hill & Wang, 1982)

 

Section B, 1941-1988

1. General

John Blum, Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974 (Norton, 1991)

Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (Knopf, 2003)

Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap  (Basic Books, 2000)

Tom Englehardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (University of Massachussets Press, 1998)

Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (Harper & Row, 1985)

William Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (Cornell University Press, 1983)

Mark Lytle, America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (OUP, 2006)

James Patterson, Grand Expectations: The US, 1945-1974 (OUP, 1996)