Best Books on American History

[Anton Gramscescu]

Over the past couple of years I have been reading a lot of books on US history. It started I guess in the summer of 2017 when I went to St. Louis for the eclipse and saw Cahokia and realized exactly how diverse this area in the middle of the country was in the 1700s (french,spanish, american, and a whole whack of different indian nations) and how moncultural it had become, essentially via ethnic cleansing. And then in 2018 when I went to Atlanta for a TFC match, dropped by Stone Mountain and realized America was way weirder than I had ever realized.

I have read a lot since then, particularly about the South (The Rising Tide, about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, and River of Dark Dreams, about the antebellum south, were two particularly good ones) and about American first nations and the history of contact and colonization (very different from Canada - and yet not, too). But I am always looking for more.

So, good OTF folks: what are your favourite books on American history? What would you recommend? Any period, any region - I'm up for any of it.

[San Bernardhinault]

Are you talking about books based on singular events, like - say - Killers of the Flower Moon, or Devil In The White City? Or books that are bigger and more overarching?

[Anton Gramscescu]

Anything! Open call.

[Levin]

I really don't have any American history on my shelves. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is very good. Jungle Capitalists, about United Fruit was fun but most of the action happens outside the US.

[Mr Cogito]

Definitely Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States; I haven't read many, and none for a long time, but would think they are both classics that would make for a good start.

[Nefertiti2]

Mike Davis: City of Quartz

[Anton Gramscescu]

OK, I finally got around to reading City of Quartz. Thanks for recco, am glad I read it. liked the history of the city pre-WWII, a lot more than I enjoyed the 1980s land use-zoning stuff, Seems like a period piece now though, the most recent stuff being almost 30 years old. It's a California that doesn;t really exist any more (which doesn't mean much of it does not remain true, i am just not sure which bits).

[Amor de Cosmos]

Recently read (and mentioned in passing on here) The First Salute, Barbara Tuchman's book on maritime issues during the War of Independence. It was her final work, and wanders a bit — there's a lot on Anglo-Dutch relations, fascinating but maybe a little more than is required. Otherwise it's well up to her very high standards.

[Incandenza]

I highly recommend Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon. It's about the settlement of the west and the relationship between the city and nature in Chicago.

[Sunderporinostesta]

Another vote for Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.

A Bright And Shining Lie is an excellent history of the Vietnam war but I’m sure it’s been usurped in the critical eye by one written later. Someone on here will know it’s name.

The Untold History Of The United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. The book behind the TV series. A guide to some of the scandals, cover ups, lies, deception, criminality, corruption of the 20th century in the US. I’ve no idea how much is over exaggerated paranoia but it’s highly entertaining. US based posters will probably be able to cast a more critically correct eye over it.

Dont Know Much About History: Everything You Need To Know About American History But Never Learned by Kenneth C Davis. A useful quick, quirky, humorous, informative ride through 600yrs of high and low spots in US history. Entertaining though not aimed at intellectuals. I’d struggle to imagine a quicker way of becoming informed of a countries history though.

[Uncle Ethan]

Another vote for Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.

And another.

[Hot Pepsi]

I'd recommend anything by Sara Vowell. She writes about the history but also about how the history is being remembered at tourist sites and museums, etc. It's very accessible. She's not an historian, but an NPR-type storyteller, but still does proper history. If you listen to her books on Audible, she gets famous actors to read the voices. Nick Offerman is George Washington.
I think I've read all her books except Take the Cannoli. I'll get on that.
https://www.amazon.com/Sarah-Vowell/...8085789&sr=1-3



Manhood at Harvard by Kim Townsend taught me a lot about the origins of American football, foreign policy, philosophy and education all at once.
https://www.amazon.com/Manhood-at-Ha.../dp/0393331318

I also liked Washington's Spies.
https://www.amazon.com/Washingtons-S...8085544&sr=1-1
The very good TV series, TURN was based on it. Canadians may not like it because it portrays Simcoe as a monster.

[Hot Pepsi]

And another.

I saw the film. Does that count?

[Hot Pepsi]

Another vote for Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.

A Bright And Shining Lie is an excellent history of the Vietnam war but I’m sure it’s been usurped in the critical eye by one written later. Someone on here will know it’s name.

The Untold History Of The United States by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. The book behind the TV series. A guide to some of the scandals, cover ups, lies, deception, criminality, corruption of the 20th century in the US. I’ve no idea how much is over exaggerated paranoia but it’s highly entertaining. US based posters will probably be able to cast a more critically correct eye over it.

Dont Know Much About History: Everything You Need To Know About American History But Never Learned by Kenneth C Davis. A useful quick, quirky, humorous, informative ride through 600yrs of high and low spots in US history. Entertaining though not aimed at intellectuals. I’d struggle to imagine a quicker way of becoming informed of a countries history though.

I really wouldn't trust anything from Oliver Stone, TBH.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/201...g-our-history/
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...een-better-off

[imp]

Peter Matthiessen's 'In the Spirit of Crazy Horse' is captivating and consciousness-raising. 'Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq' by Steven Pinzer I've recommended on here before - you kind of know that the USA's foreign interventions have always done more to fuck up other countries up than help them, but this is a handy land-by-land guide to the State Department's self-interested destabilising. 'The Worst Hard Time' by Timothy Egan is an exceptional account of the Great Depression.

[ursus arctos]

I really don't know where to start

If you've read about contact, then I assume you've done Francis Jennings' Invasion of America, which is a polemic and over-reaches in several details, but remains essential for completely re-orienting the discussion.

Bernard Bailyn, Edmund Morgan and Gordon Wood would be on the Mount Rushmore of scholars of the Revolutionary and Post-Refolutionary period. They didn't write bad books, but Ideological Origins, American Slavery, American Freedom and The Creation of the American Republic are foundational texts. They also each wrote excellent and important books later in their careers: Voyagers to the West, Benjamin Franklin and The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll fundamentally changed the discourse on slavery. Eric Foner is my favourite 19th c US historian and is another to have never written a bad book. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, his dissertation book on the early Republican Party, made his reputation, and his Reconstruction Is the best single book on an essential period. In the last decade, he has written important books on the Underground Railroad and Lincoln.

Those are all by old, and in some cases dead, white men. Two of the best recent histories I've read are by a black woman who isn't an academic historian: Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns on the Great Migration and Caste, which looks beyond the US in attempting to explain it, Jill Lepore's These Truths is probably the best one volume survey to have appeared this century.

To follow on Sundepor's point, I don't think that the definitive successor to A Bright Shining Lie has been written yet, as it will require a com and of the Vietnamese sources, to the extent those are available. Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake is another essential book on Vietnam.

[caja-dglh]

I was trying to remember which book it was that Mrs dglh was exceptionally taken by and it was The Warmth of Other Suns. Weirdly my father in law also really found it interesting and he normally reads Tom Clancy and James Patterson stuff.

[Sunderporinostesta]

I really wouldn't trust anything from Oliver Stone, TBH.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/201...g-our-history/
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...een-better-off

Aaaaah. So it’s a load of old bollocks or at least some of it is.

[ursus arctos]

It is a remarkable book that stays with you and calls you back periodically.

It may be apparent from my list that I was trained in a department that took it as self-evident that "history" stopped in 1945 and that anything that happened after that was "government" (because only the hoi polloi called that discipline "political science".

The best single series of books on events of my lifetime are Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisibles Bridge and Reaganland. I've previously recommended Taylor Branch's three volume biography of MLK, which is as much a history of the Civil Rights Movement as a biography. Robert Carlo's The Power Broker is never going to be surpassed on the shaping of post-war New York (and is illuminating for the history of many other cities that had their own Robert Moses). I also believe that future historians are going to view Matthew Desmond's Evicted as a seminal text on the reality of precarity in the 21st century.

[Hot Pepsi]

I really don't know where to start

If you've read about contact, then I assume you've done Francis Jennings' Invasion of America, which is a polemic and over-reaches in several details, but remains essential for completely re-orienting the discussion.

Bernard Bailyn, Edmund Morgan and Gordon Wood would be on the Mount Rushmore of scholars of the Revolutionary and Post-Refolutionary period. They didn't write bad books, but Ideological Origins, American Slavery, American Freedom and The Creation of the American Republic are foundational texts. They also each wrote excellent and important books later in their careers: Voyagers to the West, Benjamin Franklin and The Radicalism of the American Revolution.

Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll fundamentally changed the discourse on slavery. Eric Foner is my favourite 19th c US historian and is another to have never written a bad book. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, his dissertation book on the early Republican Party, made his reputation, and his Reconstruction Is the best single book on an essential period. In the last decade, he has written important books on the Underground Railroad and Lincoln.

Those are all by old, and in some cases dead, white men. Two of the best recent histories I've read are by a black woman who isn't an academic historian: Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns on the Great Migration and Caste, which looks beyond the US in attempting to explain it, Jill Lepore's These Truths is probably the best one volume survey to have appeared this century.

To follow on Sundepor's point, I don't think that the definitive successor to A Bright Shining Lie has been written yet, as it will require a com and of the Vietnamese sources, to the extent those are available. Frances Fitzgerald's Fire in the Lake is another essential book on Vietnam.

Good to know that Caste is ok. I heard an interview with her and was very disappointed in it. The word "money" never appeared once. I thought that was way off. The implication was that class is just about race and how one talks.

[Hot Pepsi]

Aaaaah. So it’s a load of old bollocks or at least some of it is.

His contention that it was all going in the right direction with FDR and then all went wrong with Truman is, I think, a pretty fringe understanding of that era.

[ursus arctos]

Wilkerson would argue that race cannot be separated from the accumulation of wealth (and I would agree), but her focus certainly isn't on economics per se.

[Hot Pepsi]

Wilkerson would argue that race cannot be separated from the accumulation of wealth (and I would agree), but her focus certainly isn't on economics per se.

Yeah. I couldn't tell if it was just the way the interviewer was framing it.

[matt j]

I don't have much to contribute here at the moment, but Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides revealed a lot of general 'fucked-up-ed-ness' of the American West to me personally.

Still trying to finish off Cadillac Desert which is great, but grinds a bit as some of the personalities are explored. Water-specific 'fucked-up-ed-ness'.

[tee rex]

I think I mentioned Wilkerson's book on here somewhere, so might be repeating or contradicting myself, but anyway ... highly recommended. It has stuck with me because, unlike many books on the civil rights movement and that general period, it is about daily degradations which don't get into the headlines or adapted for the screen. And of course it's easy to agree that murder is bad and bombing churches is bad and so on, and that basically distorts the picture with consequences still evident today. At what point do you crack when you've been driving and only want a motel room, and politely ask and are politely refused, again? You eventually run out of patience and it is only then that the story as seen from the outside begins ("he started it"). Wilkerson brings that home in an understated way really well, I think.