Historical Monograph Recommendations

December 15, 2015 5:36 PM

Gifted late-adolescent bookworms are devouring my personal history library. Help me keep them fed. (details inside)

I teach a pair of AP classes at a local school and maintain a small classroom lending library made up primarily of my old undergraduate and graduate monographs with some small success. This year a pair of incredibly, ridiculously bright Juniors who took a cotton to history in my AP World Class last year and have proceeded to devour substantial section of the library. It's passively encouraged other students to start taking an interest in serious historical works...

This is a good problem to have! But, as the end of the semester approaches, they're already running up against the limits of where their interests and my studies overlap. Also: I've been out of the academia game for approaching 15 years now and I *clearly* haven't had time to keep abreast of the most recent scholarship.

SO, I'm interested in fishing for recommendations, particularly about the most recent scholarship. For my own purposes - personally and pedagogically - I'm more interested in historiographically significant texts than I am popular history : special kudos for recommendations that are foundational texts or that have defined or redefined the field.

The focus is primarily of American History, although that could be a function of my own long time interest in US. Cold War and post-war Society is particularly popular, as well as the more modern WWII works that focus on racial, social, political, and economic aspects of the conflict. Also, American Slavery is a topic about which all my students are interested in learning more.

These are by no means the only categories for which I'm seeking input, though. Jacksonian America and (surprisingly) economic and industrial history is a particular point of interest of one of them. Additionally, anything about the early Roman Republic would be appreciated.

Again, not an exhaustive list! Feel free to throw a wide net, but some other concentrations they've demonstrated anti-interest in: 20th Century Germany and Nazi Ideology; Early Modern and Modern Japan; History of Telecommunications

I'll include a list of what they've already read so far, as it might be illustrative of the sorts of things they're interested in and the level at which they're reading.

1. Armageddon Letters
2. Dead Hand
3. Command and Control
4. 1812 (Historical Fiction)
5. American Slavery, American Freedom
6. Many Thousands Gone
7. The Market Revolution (Sellers)
8. Telling The Truth About History (Appleby, et al)
9. Libery and Power
10. MITI - The Japanese Economic Miracle (Chalmers Johnson)
11. The Best War Ever
12. The End of Victory Culture
13. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War
14. War Without Mercy (Dower)
15. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels
16. Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (Lowen)
17. The Paranoid Style in American Politics
18. The Cold War: A New History
19. IBM and the Holocaust (Black)

That's all I could remember off of the top of my head.

posted by absalom to Education (21 answers total)

Best answer: Not my main areas of expertise, but on the early Roman Republic, I've just been reading Mary Beard's new SPQR, and she does a great job of telling the "official" later Roman line about the foundation, the era of kings, the conflict of the orders, the Latin and Samnite wars, etc., and then taking a critical look about how those stories were shaped by the conditions and interests of the late Republic. The style is approachable but serious. Not footnoted, but extensive lists of further reading for each chapter.

I'll also put in a plug for my emeritus colleague Leonard Richards's recent Who Freed the Slaves? (University of Chicago Press, 2015), about the legislative work leading up to the Thirteenth Amendment. Leo has also written succinct, punchy books on The Slave Power (Southern domination in pre-Civil War US politics), the Gold Rush, Shays's Rebellion, and several other subjects in late 18th- and 19th-century US history. Another emeritus colleague, Bruce Laurie, wrote Beyond Garrison (Cambridge University Press, 2005), which looks at popular support for abolition in Massachusetts.
posted by brianogilvie at 5:49 PM on December 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

"The Codebreakers" by David Kahn covers all of history from before the Romans up to just after World War II, concentrating on how codes and ciphers were used, and broken, and how it affected history. It's a vertical slice through the history of Western Civilization, and it's long but very well written. I can't recommend it highly enough.

The hard cover is the best version. There was a cut-down version in paperback but it's terrible. The Kindle version is the same as the hard cover.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 5:52 PM on December 15, 2015

Best answer: Well, given that we are entering the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, I can't resist recommending Eric Foner's Reconstruction or David Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Significant, foundational, and field-defining, though not particularly recent. I think certainly digestible for bright high school juniors.
posted by HonoriaGlossop at 5:56 PM on December 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin!
posted by gemutlichkeit at 6:01 PM on December 15, 2015

Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery is foundational primary source material.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:26 PM on December 15, 2015

Best answer: I'm not sure whether this counts as foundational primary source material, but I think it would fit in well with your interests and theirs, and it's an AMAZING book: The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson, about the Great Migration of African-Americans in the US.
posted by kristi at 7:08 PM on December 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

psst. bitorrent. "history book collection"
posted by telstar at 7:12 PM on December 15, 2015

Try throwing them the existing volumes of Caro's biography of LBJ.
posted by Automocar at 7:55 PM on December 15, 2015

On the Reconstruction theme, there is also, of course, WEB Du Bois' Black Reconstruction. This is seminal, was certainly foundational to scholars like Foner and Blight. It wholly redefined Reconstruction scholarship given the dominance of the racist Dunning School interpretation of the period. That said, far from new, obviously, and quite dense -- I think readable by smart older students, but popular history it is not.
posted by HonoriaGlossop at 8:06 PM on December 15, 2015

Best answer: You absolutely must get them Black Earth by Timothy Snyder; it came out this year and has some stunning and great arguments about Nazi Germany and statelessness. NPR did a great interview earlier this year.

Other books I loved in grad school. I'm just copy/pasting the citations for some of them:
Jacobs, Margaret. White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Walker, Brett L. Toxic Archipelago: A History of Industrial Disease in Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. (One of my favorite history monographs ever because he is such a great writer, though it has nothing to do with American history.)

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. 1983. Reprint, New York: Hill and Wang, 2003. (Foundational for environmental history, though there are definitely some dry sections about property laws...)

Andrews, Thomas. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. (Another one of my favorite books; great writing, good environmental history.)

Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007. (Another foundational book; I was assigned it more than 3 times in grad school. Really great for APUSH if you have it, maybe also AP Euro. Also by one of the authors of Telling the Truth About History.)

Netz, Reviel. Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. (He's a classics professor who just up and wrote this book. Great examples of synthesis if you're using them for AP history classes as it's pretty sweeping. Also tends to be a bit more abstract in its arguments, but if they like it then they will love it. I lecture on barbed wire every year and my students always joke about it.)

This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust for the American Civil War. Good social/cultural history about how American views of death changed as a result of more modern warfare.

The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege is a good introduction to environmental history. It's aimed to be an overview of American history through an environmental lens.

Black Rice by Judith Carney is simply a great book, but would also be good for the APUSH exam as it's very much in-line with current scholarship on slavery and early American identity.

The Barbarous Years by Bernard Bailyn is also very well-written and (I think) an inherently interesting topic. Will do well to disabuse students of the Disney Pocahontas narrative.

I haven't read this one yet, but over the summer a medical historian recommended Devices and Desires as one of her favorite books ever. It's about contraception, though, so you maybe need to be careful.

Similarly, a civil rights historian recommended Trouble in Mind about the Civil Rights Movement as his favorite book ever. But that one sparked a debate... some people told me it was too relentlessly depressing to read, and the civil rights guy I was talking said "uh yeah that's the point." So, YMMV on that one as well.

Edited to add: the Margaret Jacobs, Bernard Bailyn, Drew Gilpin Faust, and probably the Leon Litwack books have probably the highest reading levels. The rest are all very approachable for AP high schoolers.
posted by lilac girl at 8:07 PM on December 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Seconding Foner and Blight. Some other suggestions:

• Pekka Hamalainen's The Comanche Empire: a relatively-recent revisionist history of what's now the American Southwest, arguing that one must read the region's history ca. 1700-1850 in terms of a dominant Comanche empire and concomitant world-system. Pays substantial attention to (what can be reconstructed of) economics, ecology, culture, and society, as well as political history.
• James C. Scott's Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is much more anthropology and theory than history (Scott's background is in anthropology and political science, and he works in the latter at Yale), but it puts so many things in a fascinating alternative perspective. I honestly don't know how to describe it succinctly; the Amazon description does a pretty good job.
• John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, a very good book on Japan, oh, 1944-1955. This is very much not American history, as it focuses on the Japanese experience and leaves the Americans looming in the background for the most part, but that's precisely why it's so interesting and so important. (I've also heard I need to read Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, on race, propaganda, and war crimes in the Pacific theatre of WWII, but I haven't gotten there yet.
• Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a detailed history of America's atomic bomb, from Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus on. I'm re-reading this for the first time after many years, and I'm impressed by Rhodes' ability to describe the experience of physics, as well as how it plays with and against the larger culture and politics. It feels dated (in somehow the same way that Battle Cry of Freedom, published not too long after, does) but it's still very much worth reading.

I assume your students have read Ta-Nehisi Coates' work ("The Case For Reparations" etc.)?
posted by golwengaud at 8:18 PM on December 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: American History:
Anything by Drew Gilpin Faust
Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870 by Karen Halttunen
The Alcoholic Republic: an American Tradition by by W. J. Rorabaugh
America's Geisha Ally by Naoko Shibusawa
The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes (omg 19th century cults, did you know Sojourner Truth was in a cult i did not)
Perfection Salad by Laura Shapiro (why did 20th century food suck so hard? here it is)
Reveille in Washington by Margaret Leech

Nazis, always the Nazis:
The Crisis of German Ideology by George Mosse (seminal)

Rome:
The Roman Triumph by Mary Beard -- they don't have to read all of this, they should skim for what's interesting.
I have just started Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones by Carlin Barton -- I've heard good things

Other Eras:
The English Reformation by A. G. Dickens (seminal) -- I read it because I am about to read Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars
The Thirty Years War by C. V. Wedgewood (seminal) -- recently reprinted by NYRB
Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus -- the history of punk, but also Situationalism
posted by Hypatia at 9:06 PM on December 15, 2015

Best answer: In terms of historiography, I loved History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism for interrogating the use of history from a feminist perspective. The author is a medievalist, and tends to use medieval examples, but doesn't assume any prior knowledge of the period, and should be accessible for high-schoolers.

I'm also wondering if there were blogs that you could point them towards? All the history blogs I follow are medieval in focus, but they are written by the same academics that write the history books. I suspect that there are similar ones that focus on your students' areas of interest. For example, Guy Halsall is a medievalist, but I love his Historical Manifesto ("History is about never believing what you’re told – taking a stance of radical scepticism. Put another way, slightly flippantly, the question we are always asking is not ‘is this bastard lying to me, but why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ "), and he's written some great posts on the abuse of history in talking about recent terrorist attacks.

A fairly random list of generally great history books that I'm sure should be readable by bright high-schoolers:
Alan Bray, The Friend - this is probably my favourite history book ever. It examines same-sex relationships blessed by the church in Europe from the 11th to 19th centuries, and it just wonderful in its depth and subtlety of analysis.
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America is a classic for good reason
Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age because pirates (and examining the social, gender, economic and race issues around them)
David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art would be taking them into prehistory, which is woefully neglected in schools, and opens up a lot of interesting questions on consciousness and even what it means to be human.
And seconding anything by Mary Beard - I've loved everything that I've read by her!
posted by Vortisaur at 1:49 AM on December 16, 2015

Best answer: As a fellow educator (and someone with interests in history and history of philosophy in particular), how wonderful!

Along the lines of 17, look at Kevin Phillips' stuff. He called the shift rightward in 1969 with The Emerging Republican Majority. And after then he did amazing stuff. I think American Theocracy is particularly good.

David Halberstam --Best and the Brightest , for Vietnam era FUBARNess.

Todd Gitlin --The Sixties: Days of Rage , for the counterculture 1960s.

Have them take a look at Descartes' Meditations. There is an easiest version at Earlymoderntexts.com. They'll need to read it *slowly*. If you memail me I can give you my contact info if they have questions on it (I'm a college professor who spends a lot of time thinking about teaching, and teaching the Meditations in particular).
posted by persona au gratin at 1:49 AM on December 16, 2015

Best answer: I know you marked this answered, but:

Nixonland seems like it might be of interest. I haven't read it, but it's on my list.

When I was in college Gunfighter Nation did quite a lot for me. It's very large, but it's not difficult and a lot of it is about movies - any bright high school student should have no trouble.

Paul Fussell's books about war, particularly of course The Great War and Modern Memory, got me into reading about the early 20th century.

In terms of labor history, Detroit: I do Mind Dying is a classic and deals with race and radical labor politics.

The revised edition of Strike! seems like it would be useful for your students - even if they're familiar with the history, the book itself was massively influential and is worth a glance.

I was fortunate enough to take a class with David Roediger and I think that The Wages of Whiteness and some of his other work would be of interest - Wages is extremely influential and I think was a game-changer, field-wise.

This is a super-great thread and has massively expanded my reading list.
posted by Frowner at 6:21 AM on December 16, 2015

Also, I tend to keep an eye on particular favorite presses - for me that's Verso, PM Press and a couple of academic presses - to fish for new titles.
posted by Frowner at 6:23 AM on December 16, 2015

Best answer: Oh, two more (sorry for triple posting, but I think these may be worth it):

The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

African Americans Against The Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement

For me as a white reader, I feel like there's (relatively) a lot of histories about white radicals and artists and white bohemia in general, but not much about Black radicals and artists and bohemians, especially in the mid and late 20th century. There's movement-specific stuff, and there's books about, say, the Black Panthers, but the kind of books that describe a whole milieu seem rare, and also the kind of books that explain how these social movements fit in with broader social concerns.
posted by Frowner at 7:46 AM on December 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Coming back, I'm astonished no-one's suggested Edward Said's Orientalism---as far as expanding my conceptual toolkit and ability to understand what people are talking about goes, nothing else has provided anything like the same bang for my buck. It's not new (nor is it American history), but it's absolutely foundational. (It's also very Metafilter.) I read it summer after I finished high school---I was interested in Middle Eastern studies---and I'm so very, very glad I did.

Also maybe something by Frantz Fanon, perhaps The Wretched of the Earth? I haven't read Fanon, but I ought to. Along those same lines ("foundational books I really ought to have read, but haven't"), you might consider Foucault.
posted by golwengaud at 12:11 PM on December 16, 2015

Nixonland was quite good. Rick Perlstein has written a few others that were well-reviewed, but Nixonland is the only one I've read.

The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis is good. It's short - 100 pages, you can read it in a day. She was a past president of the American Historical Society, and served as a consultant to the film adaptation. She wrote about that, and it became pretty foundational to the concept of history and film.

The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam came recommended to me, and I enjoyed it. It's about Korea, which I had never studied before.

I didn't particularly like 1491 by Charles Mann, but it's an interesting topic.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:03 PM on December 16, 2015

Oh, and July 1914 by Sean McMeekin about the diplomatic events that led to WWI.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:05 PM on December 16, 2015

One more: Essence of Decision by Allison and Zelikow is not history per se, but it's about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it's foundational in the field of political psychology. It's a great read for anyone who wants to understand decision making.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:20 PM on December 16, 2015