HIST 1301 SE Davis: Recommended Books & Articles

Chapters 1-10

U.S. History is a free online history textbook considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

Using a wide variety of source materials, Mr. Wood brings to life the experiences of the black majority in colonial South Carolina. He demonstrates that the role of these early southerners was active, not passive: that their familiarity with rice culture made them an attractive, skilled labor force; that the sickle-cell trait may have been a positive influence in the warding-off of malaria, while a variety of acquired immunities served as protection from other diseases; that their African experiences enabled them to cope, often more effectively than Europeans, with the demands of the New World.

It is impossible to understand America without understanding the history of African Americans. In nearly seven hundred entries, the Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895 documents the full range of the African American experience.

Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave

From 1629 to 1775, North America was settled by four great waves of English-speaking immigrants. These four groups differed in many ways--in religion, rank, generation, and place of origin. They brought to America different folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the United States. Albion's Seed describes those differences in detail and discusses the continuing importance of their transference to America. Albion's Seed also argues that the four British folkways created an expansive cultural pluralism that has proved to the more libertarian than any single culture alone could be.

Paul Revere's midnight ride looms as an almost mythical event in American history--yet it has been largely ignored by scholars and left to patriotic writers and debunkers. Now one of the foremost American historians offers the first serious look at the events of the night of April 18,1775--what led up to it, what really happened, and what followed--uncovering a truth far more remarkable than the myths of tradition.

Chapter 5: Becoming an American (pp. 201-246)

Chapter 5: “Commodities of the Hunt” (pp. 82-107)

Chapter 2: “A Survey of Economic Interests in 1787” (pp. 19-51). The link to the HeinOnline Legal Classic version of this book has unlimited access.

Chapter 3: Herding (pp.51-9)

Naval History 28(2):16-21

These readings offer a broad overview of indigenous peoples of North America from first contact to the present, showing how Indians relied on their cultural strengths and determination to retain their independent identities. These essays trace the ever changing situations of Indians as both tribes and individuals. They bring readers through Native victory and military defeat, relocation, mandatory acculturation, and militant protests to the present era of self-determination, when the meaning of Native identity is sometimes hotly debated.

Twenty-five original essays by leading scholars in the field bring an exciting modern perspective to Native American histories that were at one time related exclusively by Euro-American settlers.

Indian Slavery in Colonial America, edited by Alan Gallay, examines the complicated dynamics of Indian enslavement. How and why Indians became both slaves of the Europeans and suppliers of slavery's victims is the subject of this book. The essays in this collection use Indian slavery as a lens through which to explore both Indian and European societies and their interactions, as well as relations between and among Native groups.

Although some have attributed the success of the Lewis and Clark expedition primarily to gunpowder and gumption, historian William R. Swagerty demonstrates that adopting Native American ways of procuring, processing, and transporting food and gear was crucial to the survival of the Corps of Discovery.

Chapters 1-8

At the heart of this story is the unlikely friendship and political alliance of Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief and charismatic leader of the native confederacy, and Major-General Isaac Brock, defender and protector of the British Crown. Together, these two towering figures secured what would become the nation of Canada.

Tennessee soldier and politician David Crockett played a significant role in his home state's history, but it is his legendary skill as a frontiersman and hunter that earned him an outsized reputation, eventually landing him a spot in the pantheon of American folk heroes. This engaging volume combines a factual account of Crockett's life along with some of the tall tales and over-the-top adventures with which he is credited.

In Regeneration Through Violence, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West, Richard Slotkin shows how the attitudes and traditions that shape American culture evolved from the social and psychological anxieties of European settlers struggling in a strange new world to claim the land and displace the Native Americans. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries-including captivity narratives, the Daniel Boone tales, and the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville-Slotkin traces the full development of this myth.

Chapter 4: Havoc (pp. 91-118)

Abraham Lincoln's faith has commanded more broad-based attention than that of any other American president. A singular key to Lincoln's personality, especially during the presidential years, rests with his evolving faith perspective. After surveying Lincoln's early childhood as a Hard-Shell Baptist, the authors chronicle his move from skepticism to participation in Episcopal circles during his years in Springfield, and, finally, after the death of son Eddie, to Presbyterianism. Finally, they evaluate Lincoln's legacy as the central figure of America's civil religion, an image sharpened by his prominent position in American currency.

Ware explores the major transformations in women's history, with attention to a wide range of themes from political activism to popular culture, the workforce and the family. From Anne Bradstreet to Ida B. Wells to Eleanor Roosevelt, this Very Short Introduction recognizes women as a force in American history and, more importantly, tells women's history as American history.

Chapter 1: From Seneca Falls to Suffrage (pp. 15-38)