notes, documents, and dates from a lifetime of reading about the United States
The Shelf
People kept asking what to read, so here is the shelf by the desk, honestly rated. The starred ones I would lend you, which in my house is the unit of measurement. A half-star means I argued with myself.
A word on the ratings before the hate mail arrives. Five stars does not mean "correct." It means the book did what it set out to do and I have pushed it into people's hands within a week of finishing it. Some of the most important books here get four, because importance and pleasure are different axes, and a reading list that pretends otherwise is lying to you twice. Also, I read slowly. A book takes me a week at best; the pile never shrinks; it only reorganizes.
Assigned every year, until the very end
★★★★★James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988). One volume on the whole era, and it is somehow also the best single book about the war. This is the one I put in the syllabus every fall for twenty years, and the one former students write to me about from their own classrooms now. If you read one book off this page, this is it.
★★★★★Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (1988). The book that rearranged the field, and it reads like a novel where the country is the main character and keeps making the wrong decision. Long. Do not be scared of the length; it earns it.
★★★★☆Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980). I taught it every year as a counterweight, and I mean counterweight, not scripture: the book is at its best when it is making you uncomfortable and at its worst when it is making everything simple again. A class reads three chapters and argues for an hour, which is worth four stars at minimum.
★★★★☆Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (1948). An essay apiece on the founders through FDR, every one with a needle in it. Hofstadter was the sharpest eyebrow in the business. Students found him mean; I found him tonic.
★★★★★David W. Blight, Race and Reunion (2001). How the country chose reunion over justice after 1865, and paid for it in the twentieth century. The book that made me rewrite my whole Reconstruction lecture, twice.
The ones I love, no syllabus required
★★★★★Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885-86). Written dying, against a deadline that was his own pulse, to leave his family solvent; published by Mark Twain's press; and it is good, lucid, modest, quietly funny about everything including himself. The prose does the work of a whole shelf of biographies. America's greatest book by a president, and it is not close.
★★★★★Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (1953). The third of the Army of the Potomac trilogy, and the one that won the Pulitzer. Catton wrote about armies as communities of tired men, and nobody has done it better since. My copy was my father's; the spine is gone; I keep it in a rubber band, which is how you rate a book in this house.
★★★★☆David McCullough, John Adams (2001). Marvelous on Adams and Abigail (the letters!), generous to a fault about everything else. McCullough loves his subjects too much to cross-examine them, and you should know that going in, and then go in anyway.
★★★★★Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979). The first volume, up to the White House; read the second too, if you must, but the first is the symphony. Also the book I have given away most often as a gift, which tells you it has the two qualities a biography needs: it moves, and it is about a person who would have exhausted me in an afternoon.
★★★★★David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis (1976). Finished by a colleague after Potter's death, and still the 1850s (see the essay). If McPherson is the one-volume war, this is the one-volume road to it, and it contains my single favorite sentence in the historiography of the whole period, about compromise being the tool of politics and the enemy of the issue. I will not spoil which page.
★★★★☆Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1962). Not American history, and no, I do not care, it is on the shelf anyway. How a continent walked into a war everyone thought would be short. Kennedy read it during the Cuban missile crisis and ordered his generals to read it, which is the most a book has ever been asked to do.
★★★★☆Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals (2005). The cabinet-as-cast-of-characters device works, Seward and Chase and Bates hate-mailing their way toward a cabinet that saved the country. Pop history at a very high standard.
★★★★☆Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought (2007). The Oxford volume for 1815-1848, and the best case I know that the communications revolution (canals, telegraph, presses, railroads) is the story of the era, not the presidents. Heavy, and worth the shoulder ache.
Recent reads and the pile
★★★★☆Ron Chernow, Grant (2017). Chernow does the rehabilitation of Grant's military reputation and the drinking question, both fairly. You still finish it and think: read the Memoirs.
★★★★★Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (2010). The Great Migration as three lives over decades. The best book on this list that is not about white guys, and frankly the best book on this list, full stop, and it took me until this spring to get to it, for which I apologize to everyone who recommended it to me since 2010.
★★★★☆Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands (2017). The Oxford volume for Reconstruction through 1896. So heavy it is basically furniture, and it has been worth every square inch of nightstand.
★★★☆☆Bill O'Reilly, Killing Lincoln (2011). A student left it on my desk with a sticky note that said "you'll hate this." I did not hate it. I winced eleven times, counted, and the notes in my margins are mostly about the footnotes. It is on the list because it is the only book on this shelf a nineteen-year-old has ever thanked me for, which counts for something that a doctorate does not.
The reference shelf, no stars because you do not read it, you consult it
Historical Statistics of the United States, the five-volume Cambridge edition. Where the numbers on my other pages come from.
The World Almanac, current year, kept by the chair. I use it more than any grown man should admit; it settles bar bets and half my lecture dates.
The Oxford History of the United States series, whichever volumes exist, per above.
A 1962 Britannica, inherited. Margaret wants it gone; I have negotiated a détente. Its entry on "Negro" is a time capsule of what the country thought it knew, and I keep it for exactly that reason; every so often a student reads it and understands historiography better than I could ever explain it.
Yes, there is a "to-read" pile; no, you may not see it; it is load-bearing. Write me your arguments, care of the about page. The reader in Texas (see the glossary) and I have a standing dispute about whether Grant's memoirs count as "literature." They do.