Penguin History of the United States of America (131 page)

Beyond Washington, with its curious mixture of grand and parochial visions, the American people had to grapple, inconclusively as ever, with problems old or new or both. There was tension between sections, between
states and the federal government, between cities and suburbs, country and town. If anxiety about race relations was a little reduced, anxiety about immigration was much increased; the problem of crime, the future of the family, the question of addictive drugs (including alcohol and nicotine), the uneven performance of the economy were among many other preoccupying problems. The women’s movement, environmentalism and religious fundamentalism still made themselves felt. There were far too many guns distributed among the population, and as a result there were far too many murders. In short, there were plenty of issues for the tried procedures of American democracy to resolve, and whenever one was more or less settled another would arise to take its place. The ship’s voyage was indeed endless; but in 1999, looking back, the American people could reasonably feel that they had survived its most dangerous passage; looking forward, they could expect to find themselves equal to whatever challenges a new century and a new millennium might throw at them.

A full-scale bibliography would be out of place in a history of this nature: it could do nothing that is not better done elsewhere, for instance in the
Harvard Guide to American History
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, revised edn, 1974), available in paperback in Britain and an indispensable tool to anyone seriously interested in the subject. Two other books which ought to be in every school or college library where American history is studied are H. S. Commager,
Documents of American History
(Englewood Cliffs,
NJ,
Prentice-Hall, 9th edn, 2 vols., 1974), and
The Statistical History of the United States
(New York, Basic Books, 1976). I have also found the
Reader’s Companion to American History
, edited by Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1981) mostuseful. With these volumes at hand anyone can start the study of American history unaided, even by me.

Yet it is only decent for me to list some of the books which I have found especially valuable in preparing this history, particularly those which are lively in thought or style, or both, and which are thus likely to be of special appeal to beginners. It is always as well to start with entertaining works when launching a programme of historical study: before it is over you are certain to have to plough through many boring ones, and it takes time to find out how nevertheless to enjoy them. As Samuel Butler said, always eat a bunch of grapes from the top. Experts will be amazed at my omissions and eccentric emphases, but the list is not meant for them. It is not even meant primarily for examination candidates, but for those capable of enjoying the subject of American history for its own sake.

I have arranged these titles in rough chronological order of subject. Several of them belong to multi-volume works. Readers must not be put off. The art of dipping into such books is well worth acquiring: the most random sampling is likely to bring up pearls. I have given the full details of publisher, place of publication and date, in all cases except that of works so famous that they exist in a multiplicity of acceptable editions;
only occasionally has it seemed worthwhile to indicate a preferred version,

ALVIN M. JOSEPHY
(ed.) and
WILLIAM BRANDON
,
The American Heritage Book of Indians
(New York, Simon & Schuster, 1961).

D. B. QUINN
,
England and the Discovery of America 1481–1620
(London, George Allen & Unwin, 1974).

WALLACE NOTESTEIN,
The English People on the Eve of Colonisation
(New York, Harper & Row, 1954).
¹

CHARLES M. ANDREWS,
The Colonial Period of American History
(New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 4 vols., paperback edn, 1964).

JOHN SMLTH
,
The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles
.

ROBIN BLACKBURN,
The Making of New World Slavery
(London, Verso, 1997).

WILLIAM BRADFORD,
Of Plymouth Plantation
, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York, Alfred Knopf, 1966).

PERRY MILLER,
Errand into the Wilderness
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1956).

DANIEL BOORSTIN,
The Americans: The Colonial Experience
(New York, Random House, 1958).

JOSEPH E. ILLICK,
Colonial Pennsylvania
(New York, Scribner’s, 1976).

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER,
‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, in
Frontier and Section: Selected Essays
, ed. R. A. Billington (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ,
Prentice-Hall, 1961).

R. A. BILLINGTON,
Westward Expansion
(New York, Macmillan, 1949).

WINTHROP JORDAN
,
White over Black
(Chapel Hill,
NC
, University of North Carolina Press, 1968).

L. H. GIPSON
,
The British Empire Before the American Revolution
(New York, Knopf, 15 vols., 1939–70).

C. M. ANDREWS
,
The Colonial Background to the American Revolution
(New Haven, Conn.; London, Yale University Press, revised edn, 1931).

R. R. PALMER,
The Age of the Democratic Revolution
(London, Oxford University Press, 2 vols., 1959–64).

H. S. COMMAGER,
The Empire of Reason
(London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978).

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
,
Autobiography
.

DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN,
George Washington: A Biography
(New York, Scribner’s, 7 vols., 1948–57).

MERRILL D. PETERSON,
Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1970).

BERNARD BAILYN,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1967).

BERNHARD KNOLLENBERG,
The Origins of the American Revolution
(New York and London, Macmillan, 1960).

E. S. AND H. M. MORGAN
,
The Stamp Act Crisis
(Chapel Hill,
NC,
University of North Carolina Press, 1953).

IAN CHRISTIE,
Crisis Of Empire
(London, Edward Arnold, 1966).

JOHN SHY,
Toward Lexington
(Princeton,
NJ,
Princeton University Press, 1965).

BENJAMIN WOODS LABAREE,
The Boston Tea Party
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1964).

PIERS MACKESY,
The War for America
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1965).

THOMAS JEFFERSON,
Notes on Virginia
.

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN,
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans
(New York, Knopf, 5th edn, 1980).

MAX FARRAND
(ed.),
The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787
(New Haven and London, Yale University Press, paperback edn, 4 vols., 1966).

ALEXANDER HAMILTON, JAMES MADISON,
and
JOHN JAY
,
The Federalist
, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, Conn., Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
²

CARL VAN DOREN,
The Great Rehearsal
(New York, Viking Press, 1948).

RICHARD HOFSTADTER,
The American Political Tradition
(New York, Knopf, 1948).

DANIEL BOORSTIN,
The Americans: The National Experience
(New York, Random House, 1965).

DOUGLASS C. NORTH,
The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860
(Englewood Cliffs,
NJ
, Prentice-Hall, 1961).

THOMAS C. COCHRAN
and
WILLIAM MILLER,
The Age of Enterprise: A Social History of Industrial America
(New York, Harper & Row, revised edn, 1961).

GEORGE R. TAYLOR,
The Transportation Revolution 1815–1860
(New York and London, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1951).

MARCUS CUNLIFFE,
The Nation Takes Shape, 1789–1837
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1959).

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER JR,
The Age of Jackson
(Boston, Little, Brown, 1945).

ROBERT V. REMINI,
The Election of Andrew Jackson
(Philadelphia and New York, J. B. Lippincott, 1963).

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE,
Democracy in America
, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York, Knopf, 2 vols., 1945).

STANLEY P. HIRSHSON
,
The Lion of the Lord: A Biography of Brigham Young
(New York, Knopf, 1969).

BERNARD DE VOTO
,
The Course of Empire
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1952).
Across the Wide Missouri
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1947).
1846: The Year of Decision
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1943).

W. W. FREEHLING,
Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Crisis in South Carolina, 1816–1836
(New York, Harper & Row, 1966).

KENNETH M. STAMPP
,
The Peculiar Institution
(New York, Random House, 1956).

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN,
The Militant South
(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1956).

EUGENE GENOVESE,
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
(New York, Pantheon Books, 1974).

D. L. DUMOND,
Anti-Slavery
(Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1961).

MERTON L. DILLON,
The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissident Minority
(New York and London, W. W. Norton, 1974).

W. R. BROCK,
Conflict and Transformation: The United States, 1844–1877
(Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1973).

MARK TWAIN,
Tom Sawyer
.

MARK TWAIN,
Huckleberry Finn
.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.

BRUCE COLLINS,
The Origins of America’s Civil War
(London, Arnold, 1981).

ERIC FONER,
Free Soil, Free Labour, Free Men
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1970).

DAVID M. POTTER,
The Impending Crisis
(New York and London, Harper &Row, 1976).

STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT,
John Brown’s Body
(New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1928).

STEPHEN B.OATES,
With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln
(London, Allen & Unwin, 1978).

PETER J. PARISH,
The American Civil War
(London, Eyre Methuen, 1975).

JAMES M. MCPHERSON
,
Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1988).

EDMUND WILSON
,
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1962).

KENNETH M. STAMPP,
The Era of Reconstruction
(London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965).

E. L. MCKITRICK,
Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction
(Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1960).

W. E. B. DU BOIS,
Black Reconstruction in America
(London, Frank Cass, 1966).

C. VANN WOODWARD,
The Origins of the New South
(Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Louisiana State University Press and the University of Texas Press, 1951).

W. J. CASH,
The Mind of the South
(New York, Knopf, 1941).

E. C. KIRKLAND,
Industry Comes of Age
(New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1951).

HENRY JAMES
,
Washington Square
.

OSCAR HANDLIN,
Immigration as a Factor in American History
(Englewood Cliffs,
NJ,
Prentice-Hall, 1959).

MALDWYN A. JONES,
American Immigration
(Chicago and London, University of Chicago, 1960).

PHILIP TAYLOR,
The Distant Magnet
(London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971).

JOHN HIGHAM,
Strangersin the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925
(New York, Atheneum, 1963).

STEPHAN THERNSTROM
(ed.),
Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups
(Cambridge, Mass.; London, Harvard University Press, 1980).

JAMES BRYCE,
The American Commonwealth
. Edited with an Introduction by Terrence J. McDonald (Bedford Books, 1994).

WILLIAM L. O’RIORDAN
,
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall
.

DANIEL BOORSTIN,
The Americans: The Democratic Experience
(New York, Random House, 1973).

HENRY PELLING,
American Labor
(Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1960).

ROBERT H. WIEBE,
The Search for Order, 1877–1920
(New York and London, Macmillan, 1967).

JOHN D. HICKS,
The Populist Revolt
(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1931).

LAWRENCE GOODWYN,
The Populist Movement
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1978).

MARK SULLIVAN,
Our Times
(New York, Scribner’s, 6 vols., 1926–35).

GEORGE B. TINDALL,
The Emergence of the New South
(Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University and University of Texas, 1967).