2016 Oral Exam Reading Lists
U.S. History, ​Stanford University
COLONIAL & REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA:
Overviews:
  • Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (Penguin Books, 2001)
  • J.H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (Yale University Press, 2007)
  • Nicholas Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Origins of Empire, Vol. 1 (Oxford University Press, 2001)
  • P. J. Marshall, The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 2002)
Atlantic World
  • Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America - The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (Vintage, 2012)
  • Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitanism in an Age of Expansion, 1560-1660 (Oxford University Press, 2008)
  • David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History” in The British Atlantic World, 1500 -1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
  • Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)
American Revolution:
  • Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Belknap Press, 1967)
  • Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Omohundro Institute & UNC Press, 1969)
  • T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Early Republic:
  • Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press, 2001)
  • Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage, 1993)
  • Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia ​(Norton, 2001)
Native America/ Continental Approach:
  • Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (Hill & Wang, 2001)
  • William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill & Wang, 1983)
  • Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press: Lamar Series in Western History, 2008).
  • Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press, 2001)
  • James Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 69, No. ​3 (July 2012), pp. 451-512.
  • Claudio Saunt, “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 4 (Oct, 2008): 745 – 778.
Enlightenment:
  • Caroline Winterer, “What Was the American Enlightenment?” in The Worlds of American Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2016)
  • Caroline Winterer, “Where is America in the Republic of Letters?” Modern Intellectual History (2012): 597-623.
  • Susan Scott Parish, American Curiosity: Culture of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, (Omohundro Institute & UNC Press, 2006)
  • Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
  • Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)
  •  Londa Schiebinger, “Why Mammals are Called Mammals: Gender Politics in Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” The American Historical Review Vol. 98, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), pp. 382-411
Slavery:
  • Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Belknap Press, 1998)
  • Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Omohundro Institute & UNC Press, 1968)
  • Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin Books, 2008)
  • David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770 – 1823 (Oxford University Press, 1975)
  • Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton, 2008)
  • Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Harvard University Press, 2006)
  • Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772 – 1832  (Norton, 2014)
Chesapeake:
  • Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (UNC Press, 1996)
  • Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia (Omohundro Institute & UNC Press, 1982)
  • T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2001)
  • Richard Lyman Bushmann, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (Vintage, 1993)
  • Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Yale University Press, 2002)
Religion & Witchcraft:
  • Perry Miller, "Errand into the Wilderness" and "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity" in Errand into the Wilderness (Belknap Press, 1956) 
  • David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Harvard University Press, 1989)
  • Brian P. Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe (Routledge, 1987)
  • Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (Vintage, 2002)
  • Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Harvard University Press, 1974)
  • Carol Karlsen, The Devil Came in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (Norton, 1998)

NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICA:
Overviews:
  • Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998) 
Antebellum America:
  • Paul Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper (Hill and Wang, 2004)
  • Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009)
  • Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It (Vintage, reissued 1989)
  • Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007)
  • Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (Oxford University Press, 1991)
  • Daniel T. Rodger, “Republicanism:  The Career of a Concept,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 1 (Jun. 1992), 11-38
  • Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2014) 
Slavery & Capitalism:
  • Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (UNC Press, 1944)
  • Eugene D. Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (Wesleyan University Press, 1989)
  • David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991)
  • Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999)
  • Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1977) 
  • Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf, 2014)
  • Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Belknap Press, 2013) 
  • Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard University Press, 2012)
Sectional Crisis and Civil War:
  • Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (Yale University Press: Lamar Series in Western History, 2009)
  • James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988)
  • Stephanie McCurry, “The Politics of Yeoman Households in South Carolina,” in Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 22-38
  • Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (Harvard University Press, 2012)
  • Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Slavery, Soldiers, and the Civil War (Vintage, reprint 2007)
  • Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008)
  • James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (Norton, 2013)
  • Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 1999)
  • Drew Gilpin Faust, “Equine Relics of the Civil War,” Southern Cultures 6, 1 (Spring 2000), pg. 23 – 49
(Greater) Reconstruction:
  • Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics, updated 2014)
  • Eric Foner, “Reconstruction Revisited,” Reviews in American History, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Dec. 1982), pg. 82-100
  • Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
  • Steve Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Urban South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Belknap Press, 2003)
  • Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)
  • Gregory Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Harvard University Press, 2015)
  • Elliott West, The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (Oxford University Press: Pivotal Moments in American History, 2011)
  • Sarah B. Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press, 2002)
 Late Nineteenth Century: Gilded Age and Imperialism:
  • Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865-1920 (UNC Press, 2002)
  • Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (Norton, 2011)
  • Roseanne Currarino, The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age (University of Illinois Press, 2010)
  • Rebecca Edwards, Richard R. John, and Richard Bensel, “Forum: Should We Abolish the Gilded Age,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive, 8, No. 4 (Oct., 2009)
  • William Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (UNC Press, 1996)
  • Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (Yale University Press, 1998)
  • Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (UNC Press, 2006)

TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICA:
Progressive Era/Age of Reform & WWI:
  • Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (Vintage, 1960)
  • Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History Vol. 10, No. 4 (1982), pg. 113 - 132
  • Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Belknap Press, 2000)
  • David M. Kennedy, Over Here:  The First World War and American Society  (Oxford University Press, 1980)
  • Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (Scribner, 2001) 
The Depression & New Deal and the Rise of Mass Society:
  • Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1990)
  • Rachel Louise Moran, “Consuming Relief: Food Stamps and the New Welfare of the New Deal,” Journal of American History (March 2011)
  • David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999)
  • Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, “The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History," International Labor and Working-Class History (2008)
  • Sara Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Harvard University Press, 2008) 
Rise of the War State:
  • William Novak, "The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State," American Historical Review  113, 3 (2008), pp. 752-772.
    • John Fabian Witt, Gary Gerstle, Julia Adams, and William Novak, AHR Exchange on "The 'Myth' of the 'Weak' American State," American Historical Review 115, 3 (2010), pp. 766-800.
  • James T. Sparrow, Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government (Oxford University Press, 2011)
  • Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America's Vision for Human Rights (Belknap Press, 2007) 
Regionalism/The Rise of the Sunbelt:
  • Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford University Press, 2009)
  • Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (Norton, 2012)
  • Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 2009)
  •  Bruce J. Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South 1938–1980 (Duke University Press, 1994)
  • Michael E. McGerr, “Is There a Twentieth-Century West?” in Under the Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon (Norton, 1992) 
Immigration and Citizenship:
  • George Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1995)
  • Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
  • Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2009) 
Race and Civil Rights:
  • John Dittmer, Local People:  The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi  (University of Illinois Press, 1995).
  • Jacqueline Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History Vol 91, No. 4 (March, 2005): 1233-1263.
  • Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2000).
  • Denise E. Bates, The Other Movement: Indian Rights and Civil Rights in the Deep South (University of Alabama Press, 2012)
  • Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country:  Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution  (Princeton University Press, 2009)
  • Christian W. McMillian, Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory (Yale University Press, 2009)
  • Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California, 2001)
  • Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2009)
  • John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (University of Chicago Press, 1998) 
Urban History, Suburbanization, Origins of Conservatism:
  • Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)
  • Robert Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton University Press, 2003)
  • Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Sunbelt Capitalism: Phoenix and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) 
Postwar Politics, Culture, and Society:
  • Fred Turner, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (University of Chicago Press, 2013)
  • Doug Rossinow, “‘The Break-Through to New Life’: Christianity and the Emergence of the New Left in Austin, Texas, 1956-1964,” American Quarterly Vol. 46, No. 3 (1994), pg. 309 – 340.
  • Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (The New Press, 2010)
  • Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (Hill & Wang, 2012)
  • Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Harvard University Press, 2005) 
Conservatism (Intellectual History):
  • Alan Brinkley, "The Problem of American Conservatism," American Historical Review 99, 2 (1994), pp. 409-429.
    • Susan Yohn, Leo Rubuffo, and Alan Brinkley, AHR Exchange on "The Problem of American Conservatism," American Historical Review 99, 2 (1994), pp. 430-452.
  • Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press, 2009)
  • Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion:  Reinventing Free Markets Since the Depression  (Harvard University Press, 2012)
 
AMERICAN WEST
Major Overviews:
  • Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (W. W. Norton and Company, 1987)
  • Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (University of Oklahoma, 1991)
Native American History:
  • Elliott West, Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (University Press of Kansas, 1998)
  • Gary Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that Should Haunt America (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014)
  • Ari Kelman, Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013)
  • Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1999)
  • Elizabeth Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People (Hill and Wang, 214)
  • Francis Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 1986)
  • Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Harvard University Press, 2008)
  • Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History (Penguin History of American Life, 2008)
  • Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Louis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge University Press: Studies in North​ American Indian History, 2004)
  • Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press: Lamar Series in Western History, 2009)
  • Frederick Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (University of Nebraska Press, 2001)
Culture/Gender:
  • Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (University of Nebraska Press, 2010)
  • John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (Yale University Press, 1988)
  • Susan Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000)
  • Anne Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (Ecco, 2012)
  • Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (Oxford University Press, 1993)
  • Louis Waren, Buffalo Bill's America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (Knopf, 2005)
Environmental:
  •  Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (4th edition, Taylor Trade, 2010)
  • Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2010)
  • ​Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1979)
  • Donald Worster, A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir (Oxford University Press, 2008)
  • Joseph Taylor III, Making Salmon: An Environmental History of the Northwest Fisheries Crisis (University of Washington Press, 2009)
  • Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History (W. W. Norton & Co, 2013)
  • Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (University of California Press, 2007)
  • Richard White, Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (Hill & Wang, 1996)
Urban/Environment:
  • William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W. W. Norton & Company, 1991)
  • Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (Yale University Press: Lamar Series in Western History, 2007)
  • Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2004)
  • Matthew Booker, Down by the Bay: San Francisco's History between the Tides (University of California Press, 2013)
  • Philip Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (University of California Press, 2001)
Borderlands/Politics/Identity:
  • Rachel St. John, Line in the Sand: A History of the Western U.S.-Mexico Border (Princeton University Press, 2012)
  • Stacey Smith, Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2013)
  • Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (Oxford University Press, 2009)
  • David Gutierrez, Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity (University of California Press, 1995)
  • Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas (University of California Press, 1997)
  • Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (Hill and Wang Critical Issues, 1996)
  • Thomas Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire (Cornell University Press, 2002)
  • Andres Resendez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800 – 1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2004)
  • Roger W. Lotchin, Fortress California, 1910-1961: From Warfare to Welfare (Oxford University Press, 1992)
  • Margaret O’Mara, Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley (Princeton University Press, 2005)