Further Reading
Your textbook is an excellent secondary source about the American past. In addition, at the end of each chapter is a list of other books by historians about the time period (“Additional Reading”). However, if you really want to get closer to one of the time periods we study in this course, you might be interested in reading a book from that era (a primary source).
Each of the books listed below is either mentioned in your text or recommended by me as worth reading. This list will stay up long after the course is over, so you could return here anytime you’re looking for a good book to enhance your knowledge of American history. Some of these works are old enough to be in the public domain and so I have provided links to full text online if they were available (as of summer 2011).
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). This one isn’t a book, but a lengthy essay arguing that the presence of the frontier (which Turner claimed was disappearing in the 1890s, using census data) had been essential in forming the Anglo-American national character. Turner was blind or indifferent to some of the historical realities of his era and some of his conclusions are quite problematic given newer evidence, but nonetheless his thesis has had incredible staying power as an explanation for the development of American politics and culture. Turner delivered this paper at the American Historical Association meeting during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor, (1881). A powerful indictment of failed and corrupt U.S. government policy towards Native Americans in the late 19th century, written by an eloquent American poet who was deeply sympathetic to Indian causes.
Zitkala-Sa (aka Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, Vol 89 (1900), later incorporated into her book American Indian Stories (1921). Zitkala-Sa (“Red Bird” in Dakota) was a Yankton Sioux Indian teacher, writer and activist whose memoir of Indian boarding school as a young girl is a compelling illustration of the devastating effects of the acculturation policy–and of the resilience of Native American culture. During the 1920s she was one of the co-founders and longtime president of the National Council of American Indians.
Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902). This novel, written from the perspective of a “tenderfoot” easterner, chronicles the cattle wars of Montana in the 1880s. It creates some of the most memorable and beloved Western literary characters and establishes the pattern for Western novels (and films, radio programs, and television shows) in the 20th century.
Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains (2009, written in 1936). Rachel Calof was a Russian mail-order bride who homesteaded in North Dakota in the 1890s. Her memoir is unflinchingly frank about how difficult homesteading was, and her story–especially as a Jewish woman–helps burst stereotypes about pioneer women. As the publisher notes, “Never sentimental, Calof’s memoir is a vital historical and personal record.”
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day (1873). This novel gave a name to the entire era of the 1870s-1890s with its striving businessmen and scheming politicians, theater of gendered manners, and extravagant display of wealth by the upper classes. The novel tells the story of land speculation and fortune-seeking, set in Washington DC and is an excellent example of 19th century satire.
Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward (1888). In this utopian Socialist novel, the fictional Julian West falls asleep in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to find that the nation has been transformed into an efficient and benevolent cooperative society. “By 1892 Bellamy’s philosophy had spawned over 160 clubs in 27 states with followers demanding redistribution of wealth, civil service reform, and nationalization of railroads and utilities” (Davidson, Experience History, 523).
Muckrakers:
Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879) – land speculation and greed (advocates a single tax)
Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904) – urban political corruption
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (1890) – tenement and slum life in turn-of-century New York
Frank Norris on corporate monopolies, see for example McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903).
Ida B. Wells Barnett, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in America (1892-1894) – anti-lynching – see here for one of her pamphlets from this era
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906) – Chicago meatpacking plants and immigrant unionism
Ida Tarbell, History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) – oil monopolies
Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (1910). In this memoir, the settlement house reformer, writer and peace activist reflects on her career at Chicago’s Hull House. For a parallel memoir of a Hull House resident, see Hilda Satt Polachek, I Came a Stranger: Memories of a Hull House Girl, written in the 1950s and published posthumously by the University of Illinois Press.
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900). In this moving realist novel, Dreiser traces the moral decline of a young woman who migrates to the big city of Gilded Age Chicago.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1890). This book, by a Norwegian-American sociologist at the University of Chicago, coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to refer to the pattern of extravagant display by the wealthy classes (still much in evidence today).
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920). Wharton’s novel won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for its portrayal of Gilded Age New York manners, economy and culture. It’s the fictional representation of Veblen’s leisure class with a memorable gentleman narrator, Newland Archer.
Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901). Part autobiography, part motivational text, this book was authored by an African American educational reformer and founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). DuBois, a passionate Harvard-educated African American activist, took issue at almost every point with Washington’s philosophy of constructive accommodation to Jim Crow segregation. His prophetic remark that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line” proved more than true.
Sarah Orne Jewett, Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). A finely written example of the “regionalism” genre in American literature, evocatively portraying a Maine coastal fishing village. For another wonderful example of this genre but set in Depression-era rural Florida, try Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek (1942). In both texts, female authors narrate a series of sketches that capture local color, cuisine, language, and a deep affection for the places they live and the people they live among.
Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890). Mahan’s historical theory of navalism “was so persuasive and the profits to be reaped from foreign trade so great that in the 1880s Congress launched a program to rebuild” the US Navy, which contributed to American imperialism at the end of the 19th century (see Experience History, p. 582).
You already know Theodore Roosevelt as military man, outdoorsman, conservationist and president, but he was also a prolific author – see a list of books he authored here, including The Rough Riders (1899) and The Strenuous Life (1900).
Louis Brandeis, “Brief in the case of Muller v. Oregon” (1908). The 100-page “Brandeis Brief” was the first legal brief in a Supreme Court case to amass scientific and sociological data as legal evidence. Lawyer Louis Brandeis (later a Supreme Court justice himself) was hired by the National Consumer’s League to defend a group of Oregon laundresses seeking to uphold a state law limiting their strenuous work to 10 hours a day. Their victory in court meant a win for collective worker’s rights, but at the cost of the Supreme Court’s declaration that women, because of their unalterable biology, deserved special protective legislation–which in the long term was a blow for women’s equality. The legal document is exceptional in part because it does not seem to advance a legal argument, but “simply” recounts in detail the damaging effects of long hard hours on women and their families, a clever strategy that proved successful in court. It offers invaluable documentary evidence of workers’ lives in the early 20th century.
Israel Zangwill, “The Melting Pot” (1905). This play, first staged in New York City, coined the famous phrase for the American immigrant experience. Its broader historical context is the debate over assimilation and Americanization of the waves of “new immigrants” from Eastern and Southern Europe. The story itself, a Romeo-and-Juliet type romance between children of Russian immigrants, illustrates both the hopes and fears of the nation about the influx of newcomers to American shores at the turn of the century.
