Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2021
Zahn, Timothy. The Last Command. The Thrawn Trilogy, 3. London: Cornerstone, 2020.
A really good conclusion to the Thrawn trilogy: world-building is still the strength, the pacing is excellent, and the climax expertly done, though the original protagonists feel thin and Thrawn’s ending too abrupt. Realistically, this is what the sequel trilogy probably should have looked like.
Rooney, Sally. Beautiful World, Where Are You. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Rooney handles attraction and intimacy well, but the emails destroy the story’s momentum and make Alice and Eileen sound like performative champagne socialists, and characters this unlikable shouldn’t get a happily ever after. It just didn’t work for me.
Zahn, Timothy. Dark Force Rising. The Thrawn Trilogy, 2. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.
Weaker worlds and characterization than the first book (Thrawn nearly unbelievable this time, Chewbacca shortchanged), but much stronger action, and the expansion of the Noghri is excellent: the Honoghr scenes were some of my favorite in the whole text.
Ward, Jesmyn. Sing, Unburied, Sing. New York: Scribner, 2017.
Fundamentally about brutal historical legacies and familial trauma, and the literal ghosts are absolutely critical to it; Jojo’s almost maternal love for his little sister was the most rewarding thread for me. If any author is capable of speaking truth to power, it’s Ward. Absolutely incredible.
Kruse and Zelizer do far better than Patterson’s Restless Giant: the roots of American polarization lie in the 1970s, with cable television a game changer. I disagree on the Reagan Revolution (its legacy ran longer, through Obama; Trump is its true rejection), but this is probably the best synthetic work on the period.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960.
Generally quite short and good, though I can’t figure out what to do with all her dashes: a pause, or some meaning I don’t quite understand? If there’s one single nineteenth century American poet everyone needs to read, I’d recommend Dickinson over Whitman, although both are critical.
Zahn, Timothy. Heir to the Empire. The Thrawn Trilogy, 1. Turtleback Books, 1992.
Whatever the cash-cow criticisms of the Expanded Universe, I can’t think of a better story to expand Lucas’s world: Thrawn is multi-dimensional where Vader was wholly evil, and the whole thing feels very Star Wars. Only the rushed ending weakens it.
Krauss, Nicole. The History of Love. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006.
I really, really like Krauss’s writing. The theme that stood out to me most was the importance of imagination; and her shifts in register tell you who’s speaking before anything is given away. The ending left me wanting, but I’ll hold on to this story for a long while.
Baldwin, Davarian L. Chicago's New Negroes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Good cultural history showing the “New Negro” and the “Black Metropolis” weren’t restricted to Harlem: Baldwin traces them through Chicago’s fashion, filmmaking, gospel music, and athletics. It left me wondering how hard white people pushed back, with Tulsa’s Greenwood as the grim case.
Transformative for me: Gregory reads the black and white Great Migrations “stereoscopically,” surfacing a third dimension neither image shows alone, and I found much of my own family history in it. Highest recommendation.
Nearly all suburban history focuses on whiteness; Wiese traces black suburbanization from the 1920s on, arguing historians have excluded African Americans from the suburbs better than white suburbanites did. Fascinating, and it had me thinking about Chicago, Ferguson, and why northern metros lag so badly.
Fedorov-Davydov, G.A. The Silk Road and the Cities of the Golden Horde. Zinat Press, 2001.
Tracked down while trying to globalize my knowledge of the Middle Ages: not transformative, but a nice taste of what lesser-covered regions can offer world historians. Closest to art history, built on archaeological plates of the Golden Horde (mostly the two Sarais); almost everything in it was new to me.
The last chronological volume in the Oxford History of the United States series, and the worst of the bunch: so weak on analysis that it functions more as a chronicle than a history, regurgitating “both sides” points from pundits. I had hoped for a lot more.
A good monograph at the intersection of racial formation, suburbanization, and popular culture: film noir, Disneyland, the Dodgers, and the freeways all reifying “chocolate cities” and “vanilla suburbs.” The Dodgers chapter lost me a bit; the rest was really solid.
Miller, John Jackson. Kenobi. Del Rey, 2013.
A pretty decent story, nowhere near a favorite: a very run-of-the-mill Western with a Star Wars cast and setting, and the shifting third-person perspective sat uncomfortably with me. A shame it’s no longer canon.
Dense as can be but so full of fantastic analytical nuggets I can’t fault Self: he unites the suburbanization and civil rights stories, recasting white flight as a pull toward subsidized suburbs and backlash as a tax revolt that underdeveloped the city. His opening claim outruns a single-metro study, but I think he’s right.
Federal defense spending drove a dizzying wartime migration to the East Bay: white newcomers assimilated into the suburbs while black migrants were segregated into projects, a stratification that fed the violence of the 1960s. Good, if lacking the narrow focus of comparable texts; it contextualizes my other reading.
Grossman’s big contribution is examining black southerners at all stages of the migration, so the book is as much about the South as about Chicago: a “Land of Hope” with real liberations and many failings, residential segregation and gerrymandered schools among them.
A good basic overview and reference: Burgwyn rejects the idea of a “Fascist foreign policy” before 1935, seeing continuity with the liberal years. But Libya, Somalia, and Eritrea are missing, as is the saber-rattling at Tunisia, Egypt, and Palestine; there’s more than Europe in Italian foreign policy.
The first novel published by an African-American slave: Clotel, Jefferson’s fictional enslaved daughter, makes the case that slavery is so insidious not even a president’s children are immune. Less subtle than some abolitionist works, but quite an achievement.
Not a huge stride in the literature, but an interesting case study of the Great Migration in action: black Milwaukeeans “rose” into industrial labor rather than falling into it as white artisans had. Striking that a city I think of as German and black had under 100 black residents in 1900.
A great study, almost more historical anthropology than history, of the African American women who migrated to the East Bay for wartime defense work. Her subtle contribution: these women were critical to black working-class communities, and urban poverty traces to spatial isolation and labor discrimination, not a “culture of dependence.”
This book must have been so difficult to write. The most skillful innovation: citizenship as a category constituted locally, enforced through regional conceptions of race and gender, whatever the formal definitions say. Easy to get lost in the many threads, but a critical work on inequality and citizenship.
Larner, John. Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
John Larner absolutely adores Marco Polo, and the book exudes excitement: a great introduction to “Polo Studies” for the academically-oriented non-specialist. I was most interested in Polo’s attitudes toward Muslims, and amused by the European editors who masked them (“Muhammad” becoming “abominable Muhammad”).
One of the best in the Oxford History of the United States series: Patterson balances high politics with on-the-ground coverage of social movements, economic transformations, and popular opinion. A bit more conservative in his assessments than I would be, but generally very balanced and informative.
Kennedy, Joe and Dana Gioia. An Introduction to Poetry. Boston: Longman, 2010.
I worked through the 1966 first edition; The Art of Poetry Writing had more life to it, but Kennedy’s strength is the wealth of poems with exercises attached, plus a nice anthology in the back of the text.
Hard to review because of its historical importance: long, slow, full of racial stereotypes, though Stowe does confront slavery as a system rather than individual experience. Her religious abolitionism paints slaveholders as Godless atheists, and Eliza’s Liberia ending leaves Stowe guilty of the Northern racism she criticizes.
Doerr’s tastes here are more consistently solid than the two most recent years, though none of the stories hit quite the same highs as 2020 or 2021; Nicole Krauss’s “Seeing Ershadi” is the one that stuck with me most.
Brett, Michael. Ibn Khaldun and the Medieval Maghrib. Variorum, 1999.
A really weird book: collected essays on the medieval Maghrib (Islamization, Arabization, urban history) with no general argument and little explicitly about Ibn Khaldun, making the title a bit of a misnomer. Its real value is gathering Brett’s hard-to-find articles in one place.
A good synthetic work on immigrants who are women and how their experiences differ from men (ordinarily framed as genderless immigrants). The biggest problem is the size: 170 years and many ethnic groups in under 200 pages; doubling the length would have done more justice. Still an achievement.
Packard, William. Art of Poetry Writing. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
A short, pretty easy book on the main aspects of poetry: rhyme, form, meter, sound. Packard can come off as a crotchety conservative old man; he’s right that careerism is a problem, but poetry slams don’t deserve the derision they get here.
Madelung disentangles the factional feuds behind the Sunni-Shi’a split and comes out more on the side of the Shi’a: the Qur’an’s family-centered model of prophethood suggests Muhammad would have favored succession through his own line. A hard book to get through, but I learned a lot from it.
Halter recovers an effectively invisible immigrant group: Cape Verdeans, an “ethnic-racial” people whose classification depended on who was looking, problematizing the American assumption that whites have “ethnicity” while everyone else has “race.” So glad I discovered this one.
A classic of French colonial history: cities engineered to juxtapose “traditionalism” with modernism, persuading the colonized that France respected their cultures. It didn’t work; the most heavily engineered cities faced the largest nationalist movements, while doubling as laboratories for reforms France couldn’t attempt at home.
Waters asks why third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation Americans claim ancestries they have no direct connection to, and finds no overarching answer: stereotypes, foods, family stories, or simple exoticism. Both significant and interesting, especially for putting the ethnic revival of the 1960s and 70s in context.
A pretty standard bureaucratic history of the Corps of Colonial Administrators, at the expense of the rest of France’s colonial bureaucracy. The surprise is the war years: ENFOM’s latitude in Occupied Paris, mirror-image purges in the two sub-Saharan federations. Given that imperial history was then imploding, a pretty good job.
Such a great book I double-checked Orsi’s academic background more than once: history, anthropology, and religious studies all at work showing American Catholicism as lived religion, not something calcified inside churches. He’s a bit too forgiving of the festa’s sexism, but the work is outstanding; pair it with The Cheese and the Worms.
Not the best history, but it isn’t meant to be: Woodford is a British urban planner making sense of the Tunis we know today. I miss Tunis immensely, and his 1970s city stayed true to my 2010s experience (and I finally know where the old Maltese quarters were).
A really tough 90 pages (plus 210 of appendices and notes) arguing that early Arabic sources shouldn’t be taken too seriously and that the Islamic polity ran on ever-weaker peoples, from Arab generals to Khorasanis to Mamluk slaves. I like the methodological point, but I’m profoundly skeptical; Crone pushes too hard in the opposite direction.
I, uh, love this book. Gerstle’s “Rooseveltian nation” (civic nationalism muted by racial nationalism) is an utterly convincing way to read twentieth-century America, from its wartime construction through its 1970s unraveling to the culture wars and Trump. Highest recommendation.
A good, if simplistic, study of how a small lobby of port-city financiers turned the French public toward empire: by the Paris Peace Conference the Colonial Lobby had, like UKIP, succeeded into non-existence, empire having become a hegemonic issue across the political spectrum.
Reviewed together with Volume 2: Brody argues Britain was nearly wholly at fault for the conditions that permitted the Second World War, with Lord Cecil’s Peace Ballot pushing it to bind Italy rather than Germany. Realpolitik par excellence, and I’m skeptical; still a generally solid study.
Reviewed together with Volume 1: Brody gives Laval effusive praise as the man who understood the need to keep Italy encircling Germany alongside Britain and France. He’s too soft on Laval, too hard on Britain, and mostly right on Italian foreign policy in western Europe.
A great study where space and gender intersect: women and men experienced Boston’s urban space differently, often as much by class as gender, and from the 1890s women pushed to shape the spaces they inhabited. Yet women were far more divided than united, and that tension runs through the whole seventy years.
Brown, Peter R.L. The World of Late Antiquity, AD 150-750. Thames & Hudson, 1971.
To call it a whirlwind is an understatement: Brown moves with speed (and grace) from the western Mediterranean’s veritable collapse to the east’s subtler blurring of Roman structures into new institutions and the caliphates. Fifty years old and inarguably dated, but an illuminating taste of era and region.
Melville, Herman. The Piazza Tales. Independently Published, 2020.
An interesting collection of Melville’s short stories and novellas: the stand-outs are “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby the Scrivener,” with some interest in “The Piazza”; the others leave much to be desired.
The institutional argument convinces: rooted, territorial Catholic parishes versus portable, congregation-based synagogues explain who stayed in Boston and who left. The larger claim that “white flight” hardly existed does not hold up to scrutiny; racism still looks like the single most important driver.
Connolly pushes back on the idea that ethnic conflict always defined Boston: the Democratic machine muted Yankee-Irish tensions until Progressive charter reform broke that common banner and made ethnic politics far more contentious. As a fundamentally 21st century person living in Boston, I hadn’t realized how palpable the tensions were.
Melville, Herman. Pierre or The Ambiguities. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.
One of the weirder novels I’ve read: a sham marriage to a possible half-sister, disinheritance, murder, poison. It has the potential to be really compelling, but I don’t love Melville’s style here; it’s difficult to follow and drier than other mid nineteenth-century novels.
A good survey of Black Friday 1929 to V-J Day, probably near the top of the Oxford History of the United States series; the height of the New Deal and the wartime Home Front were the best parts. It runs a bit too “top-down”: I’d like more social history and views outside presidential cabinets.
An excellent study of how the wartime federal state, unlike in World War I, garnered legitimacy through the language of rights and Americanism; the New Deal was a weak, liberal thing by comparison. The GI Bill deserves a full chapter it doesn’t get.
A decent study of German New York in the mid nineteenth century. Its real strength: treating Germans as a collection of peoples, defined more by religion or region than by German-ness as such, with a nice account of German socialism pulling Gompers’s AFL a bit further left.
An old-fashioned diplomatic history of interwar Franco-Italian relations, so dependent on diplomats and high politicians that it misses the crucial social factors; it still holds up, with nice coverage of Tunisia, which often is missed.
In a word, foundational: the starting point for all studies of Italian emigration. Choate takes the view from Rome, showing nation-state and diaspora inextricably linked and emigration and colonial expansion overseen by the same ministry; it left me with questions about my own great-grandfather’s arrival in 1921.
Social history at its best. Kruse takes segregationists seriously: they saw themselves fighting for “rights” (to choose their neighbors, to resist federal intrusion), producing the ideological framework of the New Right; what worked wasn’t massive resistance but leaving the cities for de facto segregation. I recognize my own family, white flight in Chicago, in it.
Widely respected, but hard for me to make sense of: mid-nineteenth-century New York politics were chaos, with too much going on to keep track of. Unlike the Paris Commune, there aren’t really any good guys in these riots; African Americans were wholly victims, poor whites largely instigators.
Such a good collection; Jesmyn Ward knocked it out of the park. “You Are My Dear Friend,” “Biology,” “The Rest of Us,” and “Paradise” stood out as excellent. I’m excited to read more of these collections.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The Death-Bed Edition. New York: Modern Library, 1993.
I stuck mostly to the 1855 poems plus a handful of later ones. My major takeaway: no person has ever loved anyone as much as Walt Whitman loves Walt Whitman (Lincoln a close second, in his view). Nice, refreshing poems that meander a great deal.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983.
Perhaps equally dark as The Scarlet Letter but it feels “light”: Hawthorne the mid-19th century Romantic, grasping at humanity’s sins in quasi-utopian projects (few institutions as American as utopian settlements). The story itself: thoroughly predictable, leaving much to be desired.
Erie argues the “Rainbow Theory” is bunk: urban machines really only brought Irish-Americans into the fold, and the pot of rewards was never large enough to turn political power into economic advancement. An illuminating study of a subject I didn’t know much about.
Leffler asks why Reagan and Gorbachev ended the Cold War when earlier chances failed: both sides truly believed, and both were strait-jacketed by historical memory and ideology. But that answer sits oddly with his own case for choice and contingency; ideology dies hard, and he under-plays it.
The key insight: Americanism as a political language (nationalism, democracy, progress, traditionalism) rather than an ideology, which let socialist Franco-Belgians and conservative French Canadians build one union in Woonsocket. It still maps onto how the American left and right marshal Americanism today. Highly recommend.
Katznelson pushes “affirmative action” back to the 1930s and shows that racial inequality grew between 1940 and 1960 because New Deal and GI Bill policies excluded African Americans by design. I really like it; I just wish he’d dived deeper, with more humanity beyond the role of the state.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden & Civil Disobedience. New York: Signet Classics, 2004.
Thoreau seems a bit naive, perhaps a bit of a neckbeard (literally and metaphorically), but he has good intentions, and his violent asides are hilarious. I liked “Civil Disobedience” more than Walden: all people within a state are culpable for its excesses, and votes don’t count.
Lehman, David and Tracy K. Smith, eds. The Best American Poetry 2021. New York: Scribner, 2021.
My first real foray into poetry beyond a few individual poems here and there (Bryant, the English Romantics, Poe). I am enamored and honestly want to read a lot more of it.
Atwan, Robert and Kathryn Schulz, eds. The Best American Essays 2021. New York: Mariner Books, 2021.
An incredible collection of essays from 2020, many dealing with the grief and pain of that year (which still continues). The crowning achievement is Jesmyn Ward’s “Witness and Respair”: what an incredible piece of writing.
I’m sorry, but this is just not a very good study: Williams never grasps Fascist propaganda’s contradictory aims, and her British-archive source base misses what Egyptian and French colonial archives could say about how it actually landed on colonized subjects. Since surpassed by Fascist Italy and the Middle East.
A really great monograph on workers’ lives outside the workplace: in Worcester, leisure was shared with the ethnic community rather than the class, and middle-class attempts to domesticate working-class recreation failed (only Prohibition stuck). It reshaped a lot of my thinking on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Snooze-fest: a superficial treatment of Manhattan’s immigrants between the opening of the Erie Canal and the Draft Riots. Maybe useful if you know absolutely nothing about the period; anyone with even surface-level knowledge will be better off reading something else.
Much harder to read than Making a New Deal, and the logic at times confused me, but the take-away holds: the citizen consumer and the purchasing consumer synthesized into the postwar purchaser as citizen, where all consumption serves the national interest. Worth reading to make sense of America’s idolization of consumerism.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 1999.
A love story set against the ethnic cleansing of Acadia; I read the whole poem aloud and found a sort of tranquility in reciting it. The tragic ending is still too optimistic: few Acadians ever returned home, and the truer ending is coming to terms with Louisiana and becoming Cajun.
What struck me is the asymmetry of depth: Douglass goes deep on how he became literate and deliberately shallow on how he found freedom, lest slaveholders crack down harder. His remark that freed people often lived in more wealth than the average slaveholder begs for a comparative socioeconomic study.
Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999.
A really rough book for me: really important to the development of feminism in the United States, but the meandering style made it much harder than it needed to be. Some really interesting passages on marriage, though.
By far the most depressing text in the Oxford History of the United States series: there is nobody to root for, as Reconstruction’s promise collapses into corruption, white terror, and bickering over the gold standard and tariffs. Harder to follow than its siblings, and too centered on Northern cities.
Bird, Robert Montgomery. Sheppard Lee: Written by Himself. New York: NYRB Classics, 2007.
Absolutely scathing satire of social class in Jacksonian America, somewhere between Candide and Mark Twain; I relate to Lee’s idleness on a visceral level. Probably my favorite nineteenth-century American novel, and likely one of my favorite novels of all time.
A sequel to Poverty and Progress that walks back its claims: Newburyport was exceptional, not representative, and Americans of 1880-1970 were far likelier to rise in class than to fall. Thernstrom shows me, a sociology skeptic, the importance of quantitative methods in doing history.
By now McGirr’s argument is received wisdom: Movement Conservatism gained respectability through grassroots suburbanites, marrying social conservatives to economic libertarians against Communism, seeking not a small state but a certain type of state. Still worth reading as the starting point of a whole wave of scholarship.
Dry, but historical sociology done well: little real social mobility in mid-19th-century Newburyport, yet workers’ modest gains felt like significant changes to them, and I see a bit of myself in that pride. Dated, but worth the read for those curious.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
Emerson is really hard for me; I’ve understood him a bit better since high school, but there’s still so much I feel like I don’t get. The writing on language and beauty is interesting, and even where Nature loses me, the man has quite the way with words.
A short little book on the transformation of Roosevelt’s foreign policy from hemispheric defense to globalism between Munich and Pearl Harbor. Illuminating, but I don’t know that Reynolds adds much to the scholarship; any other book on American involvement in the war would have covered the same ground.
Much more interesting than I expected: my interest waned on finding it was about Rhodes and the Dodecanese, but McGuire’s account of mediterreanità (“Una faccia, una razza”) and her thalassological approach to the Italian Mediterranean speak directly to my own writing on Tunisia.
The melting-pot-as-myth argument has its interest, but the second edition’s claim that black Americans racialized themselves, and only recently, is ahistorical mumbo-jumbo. An interesting look at ethnicity in midcentury New York with far too many oversights to be of much value in the 21st century.
Logevall shows the war was no fait accompli: through “the Long 1964,” commentators, experts, and the public warned that intervention was futile and would hurt American credibility, and the Johnson administration’s rigidity ignored them all. It’s virtually impossible to justify the Vietnam War, and he makes that abundantly clear.
Handlin’s first book, and his later work is much better: the case that Irish immigration turned Boston from sleepy North Atlantic town into modern metropolis convinces, but laying the ills of that transformation at Irish hands reads like victim-blaming. The origin of a historiographical tradition, not a good argument in itself.
The subject is wild but really important, and I am here for it: an unsolved murder (missionary Elsie Sigel, found in a trunk) becomes a study of how New Yorkers policed the space between Chinese men and white women, a boundary transgressed far more than commonly believed. Really nicely done.
A really admirable study of SNCC in Mississippi that recovers the community organizing tradition, the everyday people who transformed the South, from the shadow of the mobilizing tradition we remember (Birmingham, Selma, King). It made me think about the Civil Rights Movement in a very different way.
I only read the autobiographical essay, one of the first (if not the first) by a Native American. The genre then belonged to remarkably religious Christians sharing their testimony, and this is no exception: not what readers may expect, but worth taking at face value.
I mostly skipped the documents for the 50-page treatment of the trial’s major themes: Topp’s writing is good and the coverage as balanced as it can possibly be. Sacco and Vanzetti’s fates were tragic; this enormous miscarriage of justice during the first Red Scare should be remembered.
I don’t love labor history (a soup of union acronyms and Marxist mumbo-jumbo), yet I absolutely love this book: Cohen shows how the Depression collapsed ethnic community institutions and welfare capitalism, turning Chicago’s workers toward the New Deal and the CIO. Eminently readable; highly recommend.
An absolutely fascinating monograph: Tchen argues that Chinese things, ideas, and people fundamentally shaped modern America, tracing contacts real and imagined in New York from revolutionary-era admiration to the all-time low of 1882. I love it, highly recommend.
Why are students still reading The Last of the Mohicans when they could be reading this? A really transgressive book (the white savior narrative inverted, a strong witty heroine) that sadly reneges in the last chapters, acquiescing to segregationism. Still my favorite early American novel; I wish it were more widely recognized.
Asseraf, Arthur. Electric News in Colonial Algeria. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
I picked it up for dissertation help on the radio wars in Tunisia and found something much more significant: Asseraf rejects “ages” of media, arguing that different media exist alongside one another, piling up and mutually reinforcing. A must-read well beyond MENA and media history.
A book that doesn’t really know what it wants to be: environmental history one chapter, social the next, then race and labor. It’s really about the context before the 1913-14 Colorado coal war, but the shifting directions leave it disjointed; I can’t, in all honesty, recommend it.
Etulain, Richard W. César Chávez: A Brief Biography with Documents. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.
A nice little book that filled in my gaps on Chávez: Etulain’s case that he belongs in the same light as King and Gandhi for his commitment to nonviolence holds up, and his self-denial is one of the most inspiring parts. My criticism: it feels “thin”; the story deserves more detail and context.
McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press, 2003.
Dated, and really two books: the military history smothers the far more interesting political one, and social and cultural history barely appear. McPherson is clear that slavery is why the war started. For all my complaints it’s riveting, a real page turner, and I enjoyed it on those grounds.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
This is not a well-written novel; the story is quite garbage. But the way it responds to and participates in American racial formation, with Hawkeye bending the boundaries between Indian and European past recognition, makes it worth historicizing, best accompanied by Richard White’s The Middle Ground.
Beautifully written and of continuing relevance: the tragedy is that the Open Door Policy makes American talk of self-determination impossible to take seriously. He understates the Soviet share of fault for the Cold War, but every aspiring diplomat and policymaker should read this closely.
Dense and theory-heavy, with writing that needed another pass before publication, but important: Shah asks why San Francisco’s health officers blamed the Chinese themselves in 1876 and Chinatown’s infrastructure in 1939, answering with a history of American citizenship defined as “healthy” and “clean.” There’s a lot to his arguments.
A good study of British attempts to engineer colonial Indian society through epidemic medicine, very much in the vein of Foucault’s body politics; the writing style can be a bit difficult. I read it out of order: plague first, then smallpox, finally cholera.
Outstanding ethnography, one of the most fascinating anthropological works I’ve ever read; it holds up really well on a second reading, done while teaching it.
Probably the best introductory text I’ve come across on Japanese internment: a quick overview, then selections from five other pieces showing the field’s major debates. Not a lot here is new, but it’s a great way to familiarize (or refamiliarize) yourself with the subject as it stood in 2000.
McGerr’s progressives were radical not in policy but in their attempt to reform all “other” classes with Anglo-middle-class values, succeeding on every front by 1920, when the climax of Progressivism became its end. He overstates his case and it needs a grain of salt, but it’s good historical analysis.
Lee fills the “black hole” between the 1882 Exclusion Act and its 1943 repeal; the best chapters cover how Chinese migrants overcame enforcement through porous borders, fraudulent paperwork, and bribed officials. As always, I love Erika Lee’s work.
Hahn argues that rural black southerners built a new political country while constructing themselves as a new “nation,” moving from slaves to citizens to subjects without ever surrendering agency, even at the nadir. Historical writing of the highest order; it only adds to my fascination with Reconstruction.
Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow carry the collection (Rip Van Winkle is the better, IMHO): I love their sleepy, Hudson-Dutch atmosphere, an age that feels disappeared though it surely never existed. The British-oriented stories are nowhere near as magical.
Kerber’s subtle but necessary argument: all rights carry obligations, and through coverture women’s obligations (jury service, military risk, sometimes taxes) were held by their husbands. Women’s liberation requires the expansion of obligations too. A tough one to dissect, but it has made me think about citizenship differently.
Jacobson reframes immigration as dislocation and exile rather than settlement, with nationalism standing in for connection to home; the chapters on immigrant responses to the Spanish-American War are fascinating. But is nationalism a useful gauge of that connection? I’m skeptical of the whole premise: worth skimming, not more.
Cronon makes a strong case that the Great West built Chicago and Chicago built the Great West: cities and countryside cannot be cleanly delineated, which lands hard for someone from the suburbs, from a “world’s end” that isn’t. It seems obvious, but I hadn’t heard the case made in these terms, and the prose is beautiful.
Brown, Charles Brockden. Wieland: Or, the Transformation. New York: Modern Library, 2002.
I didn’t like it much but was determined to finish it: a transitional piece, an early American epistolary novel verging on Gothic psychological horror, whose characters are on rails rather than guiding the story. Glad I read it; I likely won’t ever come back.
Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
A really nice, readable work on Jewish women’s immigration: immigrant daughters combined Old World breadwinning with New World wage labor, modernizing without necessarily Americanizing. A bit dated now, but clearly argued, convincing, and readable; I can’t ask for much more than that.
Good and mostly comprehensive, but Howe folds social and cultural life into politics and religion in the age of Democrats and Whigs; Gordon Wood synthesizes the big snapshot better. Still essential reading for the early nineteenth century before the Sectional Crisis.
No period elicits my imagination like Reconstruction, the Second American Revolution; the problem wasn’t that the Radicals went too far, it’s that they didn’t go far enough. Foner’s narrative history does a damned good job of it, and the legacy of 1877’s collapse still haunts our present.
Super brief overview of Japanese American internment, mostly from a politico-legal perspective; I would have liked more social history, but the coverage of the surveys designed to determine “loyalty” was utterly fascinating, and the work on redress and reparations is really good.
Rowson, Susanna and Cathy N. Davidson. Charlotte Temple. Charles Ewer, 1794.
So melodramatic, and I love it: like watching a Colombian telenovela. Not the feminist novel some want it to be (Rowson maintains the status quo), but eminently readable in a way most eighteenth century novels are not.
Kwong, Peter. The New Chinatown. New York: Noonday Press, 1987.
Dated, but it pulled me into a story I had no idea existed: the CCBA as a traditionalist shadow-government behind the “model minority” image. The whole thing seems a bit conspiratorial, and I’m skeptical the CCBA was quite so powerful, but Kwong gives names and explains exactly how it functions.
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Important to making sense of the life of Uncle Ben, with some good advice on cultivating habits, but it isn’t much in the way of a work of literature: it meanders, as if Franklin just wrote whatever came to mind. Given his stature, forgivable; from anyone else, a big no.
Remarkably illuminating seventy years on: the shift from Reconstruction to Jim Crow was slow, not overnight, and it was former Whigs who “redeemed” the South. I disagree heavily with Woodward’s later politics, but this is a really important work of scholarship.
A nice study of Mexican immigrants creating a hybrid culture in Los Angeles, with the Great Depression as the crux: where most immigration historians lean on social mobility, Sanchez’s subjects lacked it, and forged Chicano identity through unions and civil rights instead. Really interesting stuff here.
Considered the starting point for American literature, and it’s easy to see why: the exuberant American character, the first stirrings of the American dream, and the horror of slavery already in tension. Keep in mind it’s an idealization written for a European audience, a Platonic ideal type rather than a real account.
Sociology is just such a hard subject for me to read: Glenn’s interviews and analyses of how labor pushed Japanese women into subordinate positions are illuminating, but everything is pulled so far into abstraction that the “so what?” is tough to reach.
Dower, John. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
Dower’s intervention: the Pacific War, with all its brutality, can only be understood as a race war, each side seeing the other as inhuman, atrocity and racial hatred feeding each other. Still deeply impressive after 35 years; one chapter here is my favorite single history book chapter of all time.
Johnson works on two levels: slaveholders radicalized because cotton’s thinning margins made expansion existential, and antebellum expansion looked to Cuba and Nicaragua, not just the West (success would have meant a Caribbean hellscape). I really can’t speak highly enough about this one.
Cheney, Lynne. James Madison: A Life Reconsidered. New York: Viking, 2014.
Can’t say I loved this: it felt less like a biography of Madison than American history through the eyes of Madison, and Cheney never brings him to life the way other biographers do their subjects. I’d pass over this one and find something better.
This one blew me away. Faust recovers the lived experience of a war that killed 2% of all Americans: a nation forced to come together to mourn, to grieve, asking religious questions it couldn’t answer. Mandatory reading; given the universal nature of death, something here will resonate with everyone.
As much sociology as history: second-generation immigrants in Providence revised the meaning of what family is. I’m not convinced by assimilation as a social force, and Smith’s evidence leans that way; still, an important contribution that helps reshape how I think of family.
Basic examination of post-war Third World immigration, good for context before reading deeper elsewhere, though its strong Cold War outlook is mostly dated now. The sharpest insight: “refugee” as a Cold War concept, with asylum from right-wing dictatorships generally denied; that’s honestly pretty appalling.
One of those books that makes you feel smarter: democratization, fiery battles between Founding Fathers, slavery, the War of 1812, judicial supremacy, all here and beautifully written. A marked increase in quality from The Glorious Cause; the thematic breakdown made it worthwhile.
An American echo of The Making of the English Working Class: class as a dynamic social relation, artisanal craftsmen collapsing into capitalist entrepreneurship, republicanism redefined along the way. A good and important argument, but was this ever a slog for me.
Salerno, Reynolds M. Vital Crossroads. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002.
Salerno’s argument (discord over the Mediterranean set Europe on course for war in 1939) is pretty obvious, and his high-politics focus makes for old fashioned diplomatic history with massive blindspots around Tunisia and Palestine. Still an acceptable primer on late 1930s Mediterranean politics.
Imperial history at its finest. Pergher takes seriously the comparison between Libya and South Tyrol: Italy resolved both borderlands through demographic transformation, fusing nation-building and empire-building into a distinctive “nation-empire.” Simply astounding; I’ll be pulling a lot from this as I write.
Woof, a tough read: more historical sociology than history. Peasant-immigrants domesticated autocratic Johnstown to their own purposes, laboring not to “make it” but for family well-being and respect within their ethnic community, and were proletarianized into the American working class along the way.
A dated work I didn’t find particularly useful, though Saxton has good insights: anti-Chinese exclusion grew less from wage competition than from Jacksonian racial attitudes carried west. His narrative line keeps the argument a bit subtle; a decent starting point, not the last say.
A breath of fresh air after the flattened time of Roll, Jordan, Roll: Berlin treats American slavery as an institution in motion, five overlapping generations from Charter to Liberation, and takes slaves’ agency seriously. I love this book so much; my only regret is not having more time to spend with it.
McCoy traces Jefferson and Madison’s agricultural republic, where independence breeds virtue and manufactures breed corruption, to its collapse against European mercantilism: the ideal was elusive. The chapter-by-chapter repetition reads like a parakeet rather than a way to drive the point home, but it clarified their worldviews for me.
A brief case that liberal democracies need the humanities for citizenship: empathy, connecting abstract ideas to lived realities, pushing back against exclusion. I doubt it will convince anyone who doesn’t already believe these things, but it’s concise, still rings true, and the Tagore section is particularly interesting.
Halter, Marilyn. Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity. New York: Schocken Books, 2002.
Halter marries the ethnic revival to the shift from mass to segmented marketing: Americans increasingly attached identity to the products they consumed rather than to their communities. A lot of it seems obvious, but I don’t think it had ever been stated in these terms before.
Not so keen on this one: as a historian I’m incredibly skeptical of cliometrics, and Turchin’s quantifications seem imprecise to the point of (nearly) pseudoscience, with too much weight on material interests and too little on culture. His trends do line up with American politics, but I wouldn’t recommend it to historians.
Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983.
Holt argues the Second Party System collapsed not from too much conflict but from too much consensus: the Compromise of 1850 declared slavery settled, and the Whigs crumbled. Super illuminating, still a starting point for sectional-crisis scholarship; highest recommendation.
Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
I understand the importance of this piece, but it is far too narratively driven and inventive to be of much interest to me; I wish Gordon had come at the subject from a much more analytic angle than she does.
Interesting but not the most novel work on Asia: Khanna defines Asian societies (Turkey to Japan) by economic liberalism, social conservatism, and technocratic governance. The discussion of Singapore’s technocracy was good stuff; the rest felt thoroughly familiar and a bit too positive on Modi, Erdogan, etc.
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage Books, 1976.
Mixed views: undoubtedly important to American historiography, but the paternalism thesis doesn’t hold much water today. Where Genovese convinces me is religion, enslaved people building a world in which they could present themselves to God on their own terms; much of the rest is thoroughly dated.
Ostensibly about West Indian immigrants (hardworking, viewed positively, yet experiencing downward assimilation because America sees them as black first), it’s really an indictment of how thoroughly broken American racial structures are; nothing short of fundamentally transforming American race relations would resolve it.
Almost an extended footnote to DuBois’s Black Reconstruction, and foundational rather than definitive: Roediger rightly argues that race and class emerged in tandem, but he reads late twentieth-century conceptions of race backward (Jacobson is better on the Irish). Read it to make sense of the debates within whiteness studies.
Good but dated: at its best in the first third, on London’s America policy and its reception, taking Bailyn seriously. Half the book goes to a war that wasn’t really revolutionary, the Confederation and Constitution get 80 pages, and women, African Americans, and Native Americans barely appear.
Foner, Eric and Lisa McGirr, eds. American History Now. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011.
Though written only ten years ago, already a dated collection of essays on American historiography, thematic and chronological alike; I was especially interested in the essays on the American West, religious history, and cultural history.
I love Erika Lee’s writing: fresh, clear, fascinating. Her intervention is that xenophobia doesn’t come in waves but is a central part of American history, as much the norm as immigration itself; the material on the 1965 Act and the conflation of “Mexican” with “illegal” was really, really interesting.
So expansive I’m not sure I can do it justice: three phases of American whiteness, including its 1840-1924 breakdown into a cacophony of hierarchically divided white races. The core urging: stop applying late-twentieth-century racial terminology to decades that thought in Italic, Hebrew, Slavic, and Celtic terms.
Cronon nearly single-handedly launched American environmental history with this short text, and its material is now so ingrained in the surveys that most readers will find little new. An overwhelming success at pulling the environment into history, but quite surface-level; I still would have loved a bit more detail.
A peculiar Bancroft winner that loses focus in its geopolitics, but the core is revelatory: Chickasaw and Creek slave raiders bound to English traders, more Native Americans exported from Charlestown than Africans imported, and a South I had never thought to see in continental terms.
Utterly fascinating history that vindicates gender history in its totality: Norton’s Filmerian versus Lockean power explains colonial society better than any non-gendered study could. Eye-opening that family-rich New England was the more Filmerian, top-down society; and her account of T Hall, a colonial non-binary person, is gripping.
I learned a ton about the Know Nothings: a secret anti-Catholic order that swelled to a million members on the collapse of the Second Party System, then factionalized over slavery until the Republicans swallowed it. Political history at its finest, but it lacks everything else.
An oldie but a goodie, probably the classic on xenophobia and nativism in the United States: Higham’s pendulum between nativism and democracy from the 1850s to the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, split into anti-Catholic, anti-radical, and racial strands. Engaging and thoughtful.
A social history of Virginia’s road to independence in which British merchants, Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and indebted smallholders push the gentry toward the Declaration. Surely surpassed since, but eye-opening on political pluralism and competing grievances before the Revolution; highly recommend.
A really tough read, legalistic and meandering, yet beautiful in an almost mathematical sense. Ngai shows the illegal immigrant as a caste created by the 1924 Johnson-Reed quotas, which did far more than limit immigration: they built new racial categories and hierarchies. Really solid scholarship.
A good comparative study of New York’s “old” (pre-1924) and “new” (post-1965) immigration: far more similarities than differences, and where they differ, newer immigrants are better off. The darker side is the Johnson-Reed Act, which effectively invented illegal immigration. A bit dense and slow at times, but a welcome contribution.
Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
An eminently readable case that the Revolution was a social revolution, a remaking of superior-subordinate relationships. But Wood overstates it and ignores women, African Americans, and Native Americans: a country one-third enslaved sounds less like revolution than plain old settler colonialism.
Honestly, I love this book: dated, surely surpassed, but the logic is tight and easy to follow. For Bailyn the real revolution wasn’t the war but the inversion of European values, and the fear of a conspiracy of power is what shifted settlers from protest to revolution.
Very legalistic and statistical take on recent immigration to the United States, with some weird chronology problems (jumping from the 1990s to a 1940s law without any transition); nevertheless, there are some great nuggets in here.
A solid work arguing that immigrants were a fundamentally modern group of people (against those who say they carried premodern traditions to the US), while accepting that they were rooted in their communities, families, and jobs.
Nash, Gary B. The Urban Crucible. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
The northern seaports (Boston, New York, Philadelphia) as the incubators of American capitalism, transforming a society of birth-given status into a competitive one and propelling colonists toward revolution. Class sits at the center without facile Marxist generalizations: social history at its best.
Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990.
Probably the best starting point on American immigration history: Handlin flattens the immigrant experience into thematic chapters to argue, through style, that all Americans are part of it. My primary criticism: his immigrants are all groups that had become “white” by 1951; Puerto Ricans, Chinese, Japanese, and Chicanos barely appear.
Not what I expected: not a cultural history of fin-de-siecle Paris but a study of historical memory, asking how the “Belle Epoque” emerged as a coherent era. Kalifa finds it didn’t exist until the summer of 1940, just after France fell. Fascinating, but academic; best for graduate students.
A scholar of the Cambodian Genocide asks whether white-power genocide can happen in the US: yes, but it isn’t a foregone conclusion; the setting and tinder exist, the spark never quite came. The teach-in framing is captivating, though the comparative-genocide jargon can overwhelm.
Rhodes, Ben. After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made. New York: Random House, 2021.
Rhodes argues that rather than remaking the world on the American model, the United States has become more Russian and more Chinese; Trump is the symbol of the transformation, not its start. He’s right about the post-1989 identity loss, but gives too little thought to the Cold War or the Obama administration’s own failings.
McMahon sifts the truth from the legend of the coffin ship: around 11% of famine emigrants died at sea (still ludicrously high, about the rate of nineteenth-century slave ships), mostly from typhus rather than shipwreck. The writing is dense and academic, but the information carries it for anyone interested in immigration history.
Hinton’s intervention is rebranding “riots” as rebellions against ham-fisted policing and white refusal to take black concerns seriously, with welcome attention to small cities like Cairo, Illinois. Part 1 carries too much material, but this is a must-read on the continuing rebellions.
Who is even the audience? Too disjointed for the undergraduate, not enough narrative for the general public, too little detail for the academic; some specific anecdotes are interesting, but I can’t honestly say this text would be of good use to anyone.
Emmerson, Charles. 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013.
A great work of popular scholarship homing in on the final year of the nineteenth century: solid reach beyond Europe, with plentiful sections on the Americas and the Middle East, less on East Asia, and lacking on the rest of the European empires.
Blair, John. The Anglo-Saxon Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
A decent starting point for early medieval Britain; any faults are more a problem of source base than text. When annals and archeology are all you have, you can’t get much more than a broad outline, and this is probably one of the shortest.
Goldman’s three myths of American nationhood (Covenant, Crucible, Creed) all fail to define the American people, and he argues that failure need not mean divisiveness: the way forward is local institutions where contestation doesn’t spiral into polarization. I’m not wholly convinced, but it’s worth thinking about closely.
It took me forever to finish, with Adamson so bogged down in details, and I nearly gave it three stars; but that would be unjust, since the point is a history of philosophy without any gaps, and on this he performs admirably.
Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
Deserves to be on reading lists for comparative empire, but I’ve never seen it on one: the Comanches earn a label usually reserved for Eurasian, multi-national polities, here in the American southwest and southern plains.
Judis on populism, nationalism, and socialism: the populism section is the best (his dyadic/triadic distinction is useful but suspect), the nationalism section the worst, socialism middling. His claim that populism is an inherently American creation is absolute nonsense; the Boulanger Affair came first.
The topic (conversion and conquest in Ottoman Europe) is interesting, but it’s nothing compared to the unintentionally funny introduction: “Alo fetva” translated as “Hello Islamic Legal Opinion” instead of “Hello Fatwa.” This is the glorious content we need.
I spent far more time with this than I normally do with scholarly monographs: endlessly fascinating and suddenly relevant again. Wright doesn’t lean right, as some claim; he’s a traditional liberal democrat who takes the “Patriot” movement seriously enough to take adherents at their word.
Cilliers, Jakkie. Africa First!: Igniting a Growth Revolution. Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2020.
Best suited to readers in public policy and development studies: Cilliers’s optimism about the continent’s potential is infectious, but nearly all his solutions come from policy and state-building (community is a major blindspot), and the text feels a bit thin, statistics and data with very little human component.
Dimont, Max I. Jews, God, and History. New York: Signet Classics, 2004.
One of the weirdest history books I’ve ever read: Dimont comes at the topic from the angle of Jewish exceptionalism, which I can understand even if I don’t share it, but the book is riddled with statements that are factually or analytically false. Better to read something else.
Kurlansky, Mark. 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005.
Kurlansky doing what Kurlansky does, taking a topic he loves and popularizing it; but it feels a bit weak, and just about all of the countless books on the Global 60s are better than this.
Adamson, Peter. Philosophy in the Islamic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
A much harder read than earlier volumes, whether because the characters and ideas are less familiar or because this is Adamson’s specialization and he assumes a baseline that isn’t there (for me, at least). Still a very welcome contribution; the Andalusian portion simply fascinated me.
Pleased to report that the most important historical practice, making things up as you go, is not listed as a fallacy in this text. I write history by making it up and hoping I don’t get called out, and apparently I’ve violated nothing. Praise God for that.