Reading List :: Resources
The following books are intended to be suggestive of the range and variety of
scholarship which has been associated with the American Studies movement of the
past five decades. Included among these volumes are some others which are
intended to illustrate the interdisciplinary approach or the promise of certain
sub-fields in American culture studies. This list is not proposed for canonical
status. Nevertheless, it may prove useful in preparing for the field examination
in American Studies.
Abrahams, Roger. Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore from the Streets of Philadelphia (1970)
Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People (1975)
Albanese, Catherine. Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (1990)
Axtell, James. The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985)
Bailyn, Bernard. Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984)
Baym, Nina. Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America, 1820-1870 (1980)
Bellah, Robert, et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1986)
Bender, Thomas. Community and Social Change in America (1978)
Bender, Thomas. New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1987)
Bercovitch, Sacvan. The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975)
Bledstein, Burton. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (1976)
Bluestone, Daniel. Constructing Chicago (1991)
Blumin, Stuart. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (1988)
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans (3 volumes) (1965)
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
Bordwell, Thompson, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger. Classical Hollywood Cinema (1985)
Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1984)
Boyer, Paul. When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (1992)
Brown, Richard D. Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865 (1989)
Browne, Ray B. Icons of America
Burke, Martin. The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (1995)
Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (1990)
Brunvand, Jan. The Study of American Folklore
Buhle, Paul. Popular Culture in America
Cawelti, John C. Apostles of the Self-Made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America (1974)
Cayton, Mary Cupiec, Elliot J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams. Encyclopedia of American Social History (1992)
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art
Commager, Henry Steele. The American Mind
Corben, Stanley and Lorben Ratner. Development of an American Culture
Corn, Wanda. "Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art," Art Bulletin 70 (June 1988)
Cott, Nancy. The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987)
Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983)
Cullen, Jim. The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States (1996)
Cullen, Jim. The Civil War in Popular Culture (1995)
Czitrom, Daniel J. Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan (1982)
Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986)
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990)
Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: The Archeology of Early American Life (1977)
Degler, Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family from the Revolution to the Present (1980)
Denning, Michael. "The Special American Conditions': Marxism and American Studies", American Quarterly 38 (1986)
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1997)
Dorson, Richard. America in Legend.
Dorson, Richard. The Birth of America Studies.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture (1978)
Douglas, Susan. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media (1994)
Elazar, Daniel J. Cities of the Prairie: The Metropolitan Frontier and American Politics (1984)
Esler, Anthony. The Conflict of Generations in Modern History
Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (1976)
Ferguson, Robert. Law and Letters in American Culture (1984)
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
(1989)
Fisher, Philip, ed. The New American Studies: Essays From Representations
(1991)
Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (1981)
Fox, Richard W. and James T. Kloppenberg. A Companion to American Thought (1995)
Fox, Richard W., and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds. The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American History (1993)
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. "Between Individualism and Fragmentation: American Culture and the New Literary Studies of Race and Gender, " American Quarterly 42 (1990)
Franklin, Wayne and Michael Steiner, eds. Mapping American Culture
Friedman, Estelle, and John D'Emilio. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (1988)
Friedman, Lawrence M. A History of American Law (1973)
Frisch, Michael. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (1990)
Gans, Herbert. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (1974)
Genovese, Eugene. Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1972)
Gilbert, James, et. al. The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)
Girgus, Sam B. The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea (1984)
Gleason, Philip. "World War II and the Development of American Studies," American Quarterly 36 (1984)
Graff, Gerald. Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (1992)
Grob, Gerald. Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-1940 (1983)
Guimond, James. American Photography and the American Dream (1991)
Guterriez, Ramon. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (1991)
Gutman, Herbert. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America: Essays in American Working-Class and Social History (1986)
Hackett, David G. Religion and American Culture
Hales, Peter Bacon. Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (1984)
Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1970 (1982)
Harrington, Michael. The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962; rev. 1981)
Harris, Neil. The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790-18660 (1966)
Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought (1955)
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989)
Hatch, Nathan. The Democratization of American Christianity (1989)
Hoffman, Daniel. Form and Fable in American Fiction (1965)
Hofstadter, Richard. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1954)
Hollinger, David. In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (1985)
Hollinger, David. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995)
Holloway, Jospeh, ed. Africanisms in American Culture (1991)
Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers (1983)
Huggins, Nathan. Harlem Renaissance (19771)
Hunter, James Davidson. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (1991)
Indian Historian Press. The American Indiana Reader: Literature
Jakle, John A. The American Small Town: Twentieth-Century Place Images (1982)
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991)
Jennings, Francis. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism and the Cant of Conquest (1976)
Johns, Elizabeth. American Genre Paining: The Politics of Everyday Life (1991)
Jones, Howard Mumford. A Strange New World! American Culture: The Formative Years (1982)
Jones, Leroi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963)
Kaestle, Carl F., et al. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880 (1991)
Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (1991)|
Kammen, Michael. People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (1980)
Kaplan, Amy, and Donald Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993)
Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Levine, eds. Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (1992)
Kelley, Robin D. G.. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994)
Kerber, Linda K. "Diversity and the Transformation of American Studies", American Quarterly 41 (1989)
Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (1980)
Kett, Joseph. The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750-1990 (1994)
Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (1984)
Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975)
Kouwenhoven, John. Made in America: The Arts in Modern American Civilization (1948 & 1975)
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Dimminishing Expectations (1978)
Lasch, Christopher. The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965)
Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (1993)
Lears, T.J. Jackson. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994)
Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (1981)
Levine, Lawrence. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (1977)
Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988)
Lewis, R.W.B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955)
Lieberson, Stanley. A Piece of the Pie: Blacks and White Immigrants Since 1880
Lipsitz, George. "Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies," American Quarterly 42 (1990)
Lipsitz, George. Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (1990)
Looby, Christopher. Voicing America: Language, Literary Forms, and the Origins of the U.S. (1996)
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993)
Lynd, Robert Staughton, and Helen Merrell Lynd. Middletown: A Study in American Culture (1959)
Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (1986)
Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music (1975)
Marx, Leo. "Some Thoughts on the Origin and Character of the American Studies Movement", American Quarterly 31 (1979)
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964)
McClay, Wilfred. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994)
McDannell, Colleen. Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (1995)
McLoughlin, William G. Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (1980)
Meinig, D. W. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 years of History (1986)
Miller, Perry. Errand into the Wilderness (1956)
Miller, Perry. The New England Mind (2 volumes) (1953)
Moore, R. Lawrence. Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (1986)
Norton, Anne. Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (1984)
Novak, Barbara. Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (1980)
Nye, Russell. The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (1970)
Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940 (1989)
Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought (3 volumes) (1927)
Pells, Richard W. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (1985)
Pells, Richard W. Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (1973)
Perry, Lewis. Boats Against the Current: American Culture Between Revolution and Modernity, 1820-1860 (1993)
Perry, Lewis. Intellectual Life in America: A History (1984)
Pessen, Edward. The Log Cabin Myth: The Social Backgrounds of the American Presidents (1984)
Potter, David. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954)
Pursell, Carroll. Technology in America
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984)
Ray, Robert. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (1985)
Reising, Russell. The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature (1986)
Reisman, David, Nathan Glazer, Reuel Denny. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1973)
Reynolds, David. Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (1995)
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society
Robertson, James Oliver. American Myth, American Reality (1980)
Roediger, David. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991)
Rosenberg, Charles, and Janet Golden, eds. Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History (1992)
Rosenberg, Charles, and Mossir Vogel, eds. The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine (1979)
Rosenberg, Emily S. Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890-1945 (1982)
Rosenberg, Rosalind. Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (1982)
Rosenzweig, Roy, and Elizabeth Blackmar. The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992)
Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (1989)
Rothenberg, Paula. Race Class and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study
Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middle/brow Culture (1992)
Rubin, Lillian Breslow. Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family (1976)
Sanchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (1993)
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Disuniting of America (1992)
Schmidt, Leigh E. Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Hollidays (1995)
Schudson, Michael. Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (1984)
Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (1978)
Scott, Anne. The American Woman: who was she?
Shi, David. The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (1985)
Shuy, Roger W. Discovering American Dialects
Simpson, David. The Politics of American English, 1776-1850 (1986)
Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (1976)
Slotkin, Richard. Fatal Enviroment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (1985)
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992)
Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (1973)
Smith, Henry Nash. "Can 'American Studies' Develop a Method?" American Quarterly 9 (1957)
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950)
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986)
Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (1992)
Spiller, Robert. Literary History of the United States.
Stange, Maren. Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950 (1989)
Steckmesser, Kent. Western Outlaws: The “Good Badman” in Fact, Film and Folklore.
Stein, Stephen J. Communities of Dissent: A History of Alternative Religions in America
Steinberg, Stephen. The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (1981)
Stewart, Edward. American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective
Stilgoe, John R. Common Landscape of America 1580-1845 (1982)
Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982)
Strasser, Susan. Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (1989)
Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993)
Susman, Warren. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the 20th Century (1985)
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America
(1993)
Tate, Cecil. The Search for a Method in American Studies (1973)
Tatum, Stephen. Inventing Billy the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881-1981 (1982)
Taylor, Charles, et al. Multiculturalism, Examining the Politics of Recognition (1994)
Taylor, Joshua C. America as Art (1979)
Taylor, William. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1979)
Thernstrom, Stephen. The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis (1973)
Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, and Culture in Modernist America (1987)
Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction (1985)
Trachtenberg, Alan. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965)
Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History: Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (1989)
Truettner, William, ed. The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920 (1991)
Tweed, Thomas, ed. Retelling U.S. Religious History (1997)
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 (1990)
Walzer, Michael. "What Does it Mean to Be an American?", Social Research 57 (1990)
Walzer, Michael. What It Means to Be an American (1992)
Watts, Steven. "The Idiocy of American Studies: Poststructuralism, Language, and Politics in an Age of Self-fulfillment," American Quarterly 43 (1991)
Weber, David. The Spanish Frontier in North America (1992)
Whisnant, David. All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region.
White, Richard. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1615-1815 (1991)
Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995)
Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984)
Wills, Garry. Explaining America: The Federalist (1981)
Wills, Garry. Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (1978)
Wilson, John F. Public Religion in American Culture (1979)
Wise, Gene. American Historical Explanations: A Strategy for Grounded Inquiry (1980)
Wise, Gene. "Paradigm Dramas' in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement", American Quarterly 31 (1979)
Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985)
Wyatt, David. The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (1986)
Zaretsky, Irving, and Mark Leone, eds. Religious Movements in Contemporary America (1974)
Zinn, Howard. A Peoples’ History of the United States.
Revised November 2003
