Best Books on American History

[caja-dglh]

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.

Carlo really intimidates me. I really want to read both his series but <gulp>

[ursus arctos]

Goddamn AutoCorrect

It's Caro.

And yes, they are a lot.

Though even the paperbacks are useful self-defence aids.

[caja-dglh]

I thought about doing the audiobook from the library (the library here is excellent and does a huge volume of ebook and audiobook online stuff). Volume 1 is 22 hours.

[Furtho]

I've just started Daniel Immerwahr's How To Hide An Empire: A Short History Of The Greater United States and it's looking good. He's interviewed about it on the always interesting Mass For Shut-Ins podcast, here.

[Anton Gramscescu]

So many people in a Books thread! Dizzying.

Thanks to all for advice - some of the authors I had already read (Foner, Branch, Wilkerson, Perlstein, Desmond, Caro...although Master of the Senate was enough for me, one 1100-page doorstopper is enough, thanks), but I am weak on some of the revolutionary stuff and i had not even heard of Jennings, so that stuff is now on my list.

One author I have come to like a lot is Alan Taylor, who writes US history from a continental perspective. Basically his shtick is that you need to understand what was going on in Montreal, Mexico, Port-au-Prince and Kingston in order to understand what was going on in America up until the civil war. He recently put out "American Republics", covering the period (roughly) from 1790s to the 1850s and it;s excellent. His earlier book "the Civil Wars of 1812" is an excellent re-telling of that conflict (and deserves much greater readership in Canada).

One thing that puzzles me a bit about the US history book market is how - outside Texas and the Old South (and even there it is mostly antebellum stuff) - the market for regional histories seems pretty thin. There are a lot fewer books about California or Ohio (say) than you would think there would be. I was in Hawaii a decade ago and was amazed I couldn't find a decent history of the state there (I think there is one now, and i later found Sarah Vowell's book on the subject, which was fun). Louisiana would be a hell of a story - Acadians, floods, Huey Long, the general insanity of New Orleans...but there doesn't seem to be much in the way of integrating that stuff into local histories. Oddly, the best recent "local" history may be Sam Anderson's "Boom Town", which is at least as much about James Harden as it is about Oklahoma City.

(Actually, wait, no - Stephen Harrigan's Big Shining Thing, is a genuinely decent history of Texas...but Texas is one of the few states which writes about itself a lot, so lots of material to work with).

[ursus arctos]

The history market doesn't encourage works of that kind.

Virtually every academic author's first book is derived from their PhD dissertation, and regional history is much too broad a topic for any serious department to approve. It also is virtually never taught at "elite" universities absent a local hero professor (Columbia - NYC - Ken Jackson, Cal - California - Ken Starr). That state of affairs leaves one at the whims of the market, which is unfortunately driven by the tastes of old white men with disposable income, thus the endless parade of Civil War books, Lincoln biographies, etc.

Two additional recommendations in this vein are Sam Bass Warner's Streetcar Suburbs on suburban Boston (SB would now have a greater appreciation for this too) and John Demos' A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony, which essentially created the field of Colonial social history.

[Anton Gramscescu]

Is there an explanation for why the history market consistently rewards door-stopper 800-pagers? There are far more of these in US history than anywhere else.

[ursus arctos]

I think it is a reflection of the fact that old white men with disposable income have a lot of time on their hands and favour shopping at Costco.

There is also a tendency within the field to see length as an essential characteristic of the "definitive" work that many are quixotically chasing.

It also isn't just US history. See, e.g., Sumption's work on The Hundred Years War, Whaley's on The Holy Roman Empire, etc. Even Braudel, who revolutionised the field in many ways, tended to write long books (and his publishers made them even longer through page design and illustration choices).

[Satchmo Distel]

On the Vietnam War, Stanley Karnow's book was a big influence on me in the mid-80s:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96110.Vietnam