everything.study
21H.952

Readings in American History Since 1877

Graduate · Historical course

Fall 2003

Topics

  • Introduction
  • Thinking About the 20 th Century
  • Economy and Society at the Turn of the Century
  • Immigration and Urbanization
  • Populism and Progressivism
  • Modern American Culture
  • America in Depression
  • The New Deal State
  • World War II
  • Postwar Society
  • Postwar Culture
  • Postwar Politics
  • TBA

Readings

  • Leff, Mark H. “Revisioning US Political History.” American Historical Review 100 (June 1995): 829-853.
    Listed reading
  • Maier, Charles S. “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era.” American Historical Review 105 (June2000): 807-831.
    Listed reading
  • Foner, Eric. The Story of American Freedom. 1998.
    Recommended
  • Gerstle Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century . 2001.
    Recommended
  • Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History . 1995.
    Recommended
  • Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession . 1988.
    Recommended
  • Sherry, Michael S. In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s . 1995.
    Recommended
  • Susman, Warren. Culture as History: Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century . 1984.
    Recommended
  • Zunz, Olivier. Why the American Century? 1998.
    Recommended
  • Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism. 1987.
    Recommended
  • Ayers, Edward. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction. 1992.
    Recommended
  • Boris, Eileen. Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States. 1994.
    Recommended
  • Chandler, Alfred D. Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. 1977.
    Recommended
  • Dubofksy, Melvyn. The State and the Labor in Modern America . (1994)
    Recommended
  • Galambos, Louis, and Joseph Pratt. The Rise of the Corporate Commonwealth: United States Business and Public Policy in the 20th Century. 1988.
    Recommended
  • Gamber, Wendy. The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trades, 1860-1930. 1997.
    Recommended
  • Rodgers, Daniel. The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920. 1974.
    Recommended
  • Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865-1925. 1997.
    Recommended
  • Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. 1989.
    Recommended
  • Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. 1982.
    Recommended
  • Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War. 1986.
    Recommended
  • Zunz, Olivier. Making America Corporate 1877-1920. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. 1986.
    Recommended
  • Barrett, James R. “Americanization from the Bottom Up: Immigration and the Remaking of the American Working Class in the United States, 1880-1930.” Journal of American History 79 (Dec. 1992): 996-1020.
    Recommended
  • Barth, Gunther. City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. 1980.
    Recommended
  • Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. 1985.
    Recommended
  • Deutsch, Sarah. Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. 2000.
    Recommended
  • Fuchs, Lawrence. The American Kaleidescope: Race, Ethnicity, and the Civic Culture. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Grossman, James. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerner, and the Great Migration. 1989.
    Recommended
  • Gutman, Herbert G. “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919.” American Historical Review 78 (Jun. 1973): 531-588.
    Recommended
  • Handlin. Oscar, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migration That Made the American People. 1951.
    Recommended
  • Heinze, Andrew R. Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Higham, John. Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. 1963.
    Recommended
  • Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. 1998.
    Recommended
  • Orsi, Robert. The Madonna of 115 th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem. 1985.
    Recommended
  • Roy, Rosenzweig. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920. 1983.
    Recommended
  • Thernstrom, Stephen. The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis. 1973.
    Recommended
  • Trotter, Joe William, ed. The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Zunz, Olivier. The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920. 1982.
    Recommended
  • Hofstatder, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR. 1955.
    Recommended
  • Baker, Paula. “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920.” American Historical Review. (June 1984).
    Recommended
  • Coven, Seth, and Sonya Michel. “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920.” American Historical Review 95. (Oct. 1990): 1076-1108.
    Recommended
  • Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. 1978.
    Recommended
  • Hays, Samuel P. The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914. 1957.
    Recommended
  • Hollinger, David. In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas. 1985.
    Recommended
  • Keller, Morton. Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in American, 1900-1933. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Kennedy, David. Over Here: The First World War and American Society. 1980.
    Recommended
  • Kloppenberg James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920. 1986.
    Recommended
  • Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism . 1963.
    Recommended
  • McGerr, Michael. The Decline of Popular Politics: the American North, 1865-1928. 1984.
    Recommended
  • Mink, Gwendolyn. Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875-1920. 1986.
    Recommended
  • Muncy, Robyn. Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Rogers, Daniel. “In Search of Progressivism.” Reviews in American History 10 (1982).
    Recommended
  • ———. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. 1998.
    Recommended
  • Ross, Dorothy. Origins of American Social Science. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Salvatore Nick. Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist . 1982.
    Recommended
  • Kish Sklar, Kathryn. Florence Kelley and the Naton’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900. 1995.
    Recommended
  • Sklar, Martin. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1790-1914: The Market, Law and Politics. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Skocpol, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States . Harvard, 1992.
    Recommended
  • Skowronek, Steven. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1977-1920. 1982.
    Recommended
  • Steel, Ronald. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. 1980.
    Recommended
  • Weinstein, James. The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1910. 1968.
    Recommended
  • Westbrook, Robert. John Dewey and American Democracy. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877-1920. 1967.
    Recommended
  • William Appelman, Williams. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy . 1959.
    Recommended
  • Dowd Hall, Jaqueline. Like A Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Textile Mill World. 1987.
    Recommended
  • Chauncy, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. 1994.
    Recommended
  • Cott, Nancy F. The Grounding of Modern Feminism. 1987.
    Recommended
  • Cross, Gary. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. 2000.
    Recommended
  • Dumenil, Lynn. Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. 1995.
    Recommended
  • Glickman, Lawrence, ed. Consumer Society in American History: A Reader. 1999.
    Recommended
  • Hale, Grace. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940. 1998.
    Recommended
  • Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. 1993.
    Recommended
  • Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. 1981.
    Recommended
  • ———. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. 1994.
    Recommended
  • MacLean, Nancy. Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan. 1994.
    Recommended
  • Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940. 1985.
    Recommended
  • May, Lary. Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry. 1980.
    Recommended
  • Peiss, Kathy. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. 1998.
    Recommended
  • Ross, Steven J. Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America. 1998.
    Recommended
  • Sanchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles. 1993.
    Recommended
  • Scanlon, Jennifer, ed. The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader. 2000.
    Recommended
  • Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Readings in Steve Fraser, and Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of New Deal Order , 1930-1980. 1989.
    Recommended
  • Bernstein, Michael. The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change. 1987.
    Recommended
  • Brinkley, Alan. Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression. 1982.
    Recommended
  • Daniel, Pete. Breaking the Land; The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880. 1985.
    Recommended
  • Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front. 1996.
    Recommended
  • Faue, Elizabeth. Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915-1945. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Fraser, Steve. Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Gertsle, Gary. Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960. 1989.
    Recommended
  • Gregory, James. American Exodus: the Dustbowl Migration in an Okie Culture in California. 1989.
    Recommended
  • Jacobs, Meg. “‘Democracy’s Third Estate:’ New Deal Politics and the Construction of a ‘Consuming Public.’” ILWCH, no. 55 (Spring 1999): 27-51.
    Recommended
  • Katz, Michael. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. 1986.
    Recommended
  • Kelley, Robin. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Melosh, Barbara. Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Pells, Richard. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years.
    Recommended
  • Sitkoff, Harvard. A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue, the Depression Decade. 1979.
    Recommended
  • Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. 1979.
    Recommended
  • Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Depression and War. 1995. Readings in Fraser, and Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of New Deal Order.
    Recommended
  • Badger, Anthony. The New Deal, The Depression Years, 1933-1940. 1989.
    Recommended
  • Gordon, Colin. New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935. 1994.
    Recommended
  • Gordon, Linda. “Social Insurance and Public Assistance: The Influence of Gender in Welfare Thought, 1880-1935.” American Historical Review 97, no. 1 (Feb. 1992): 19-54.
    Recommended
  • Gordon, Linda. Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare. 1994.
    Recommended
  • Gordon, Linda, ed. Women, the State and Welfare. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Hawley, Ellis. The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly. 1966.
    Recommended
  • Jacobs, Meg. “‘How About Some Meat?’: The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom-Up. 1941-1946.” Journal of American History 84, no. 3 (Dec. 1997): 910-41.
    Recommended
  • Kennedy, David. Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, 1999.
    Recommended
  • Leff, Mark H. The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation, 1933- 1939. 1984.
    Recommended
  • Leuchtenberg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940. 1963.
    Recommended
  • Lichtenstein, Nelson. State of the Union: A Century of American Labor. 2002.
    Recommended
  • Rosenof, Theodore. Economics in the Long Run: New Deal Theorists and their Legacies, 1933-1993. 1997.
    Recommended
  • Schlesinger, Arthur. The Age of Roosevelt, 1957-1960.
    Recommended
  • Schwarz, Jordan. The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt. 1993.
    Recommended
  • Skocpol, Theda. “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theory of the State and the Case of the New Deal.” Politics and Society 10, no. 2 (1980): 155-202.
    Recommended
  • Storss, Landon. Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era. 2000.
    Recommended
  • Tomlins, Christopher. The State and the Unions. 1985.
    Recommended
  • Sherry, Michael. The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon. 1987.
    Recommended
  • Aperowitz, Gar. Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam. 1965.
    Recommended
  • Blum, John Morton. V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II. 1976.
    Recommended
  • Daniels, Roger. Concentration Camps North America: Japanese in the United States and Canada During World War II. 1981.
    Recommended
  • Dower, John. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. 1986.
    Recommended
  • Hartmann, Susan. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s. 1982.
    Recommended
  • Jeffries, John. Wartime America: The World War II Home Front. 1996.
    Recommended
  • Lichtenstein, Nelson. Labor’s War at Home: the CIO in World War II. 1982.
    Recommended
  • Lipsitz, George, A Rainbow at Midnight: Labor and Culture in the 1940s. 1982.
    Recommended
  • Milkman, Ruth. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II. 1987.
    Recommended
  • O’Neill, William. A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II. 1993.
    Recommended
  • Sherwin, Martin. A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race. 1973.
    Recommended
  • Westbrook, Robert. “Fighting for the American Family: Private Interests and Public Obligation in World War II.” In Richard W. Fox, and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Power of Culture. 1993, pp. 195-221.
    Recommended
  • Sugrue, Thomas. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. 1996.
    Recommended
  • Fones-Wolfe, Elizabeth. Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor Liberalism, 1945-1960. 1994.
    Recommended
  • Freeman, Joshua. *Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II. * 2000.
    Recommended
  • Gaddis, John. The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. 1972.
    Recommended
  • Griffith, Barbara. The Crisis of American Labor: Operation Dixie and the Defeat of the CIO. 1989.
    Recommended
  • Hirsch, Arnold. Making of the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960. 1983.
    Recommended
  • Honey, Michael. Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers. 1993.
    Recommended
  • Jacobson, Walter A. Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Lichtenstein, Nelson. The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor. 1995.
    Recommended
  • Patterson, James T. Grand Expectations: Postwar America, 1945-1974. 1995.
    Recommended
  • Pells, Richard. The Liberal Mind in the a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s. 1985.
    Recommended
  • Powers, Richard. Not Without Honor: A History of American Anticommunism. 1995.
    Recommended
  • Schrecker, Ellen. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. 1986.
    Recommended
  • ———. Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. 1998.
    Recommended
  • Horowitz, Daniel. Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique. 2000.
    Recommended
  • Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. 1985.
    Recommended
  • Clarke, Alison. Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. 1999.
    Recommended
  • Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption.
    Recommended
  • Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War American and the Disillusioning of a Generation. 1995.
    Recommended
  • Evans, Sara. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. 1979.
    Recommended
  • Horowitz, Daniel. Vance Packard and American Social Criticism. 1994.
    Recommended
  • Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. 1985.
    Recommended
  • Lemann, Nicholas. The Big Test: The Secret History of American Meritocracy, 1999.
    Recommended
  • Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture. 1990.
    Recommended
  • May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. 1988.
    Recommended
  • May, Lary. ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of the Cold War. 1989.
    Recommended
  • Meyerwitz, Joanne, ed. Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960. 1994.
    Recommended
  • Spiegel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. 1992.
    Recommended
  • Matesow, Allen. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. 1984.
    Recommended
  • Readings in Fraser, and Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of New Deal Order.
    Recommended
  • Carter, Dan. The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. 1995.
    Recommended
  • Collins, Robert. More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America.
    Recommended
  • Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Dittmer, John. Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. 1996.
    Recommended
  • Farber, David, ed. The Sixties: From Memory to History. 1994.
    Recommended
  • Formisano, Ronald P. Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. 1987.
    Recommended
  • Graham, Hugh Davis. The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960-1972. 1990.
    Recommended
  • Hays, Samuel P. Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985. 1987.
    Recommended
  • Jacoby, Sanford. Modern Manners: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal. 1997.
    Recommended
  • Leffler, Melvyn. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War. 1992.
    Recommended
  • Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Migration and How it Changed America. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Schulman, Bruce. From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980. 1991.
    Recommended
  • Stein, Judith. Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism. 1998.
    Recommended
  • Zelizer, Julian. Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 1945- 1975. 1998.
    Recommended
Sources