Not too long ago, I announced a little project called “Finding Hope in the Histories of the United States.” I set as a goal to begin with a series of general histories of the United States to see if understanding the full line of this country’s history can change how I understand the concept of “hope.” And now that project can finally begin!
For the past few weeks, I’ve been waiting on the books I selected for the project to arrive. More particularly, the first two books in the chronology (listed below and shown at the top of the image). All the others got here in record time, but for some reason, the books I needed to even begin took a little extra time. But now the wait is over. Here’s the magic reading list for the first phase of “Finding Hope”:
The list is as follows:
- American Colonies: The Settling of North America by Alan Taylor (Penguin)
- The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 by Robert Middlekauf (Oxford University Press)
- Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 by Gordon S. Wood (Oxford University Press)
- What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe (Oxford University Press)
- Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson (Oxford University Press)
- The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 by Richard White (Oxford University Press)
- Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy (Oxford University Press)
- Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 by James T. Patterson (Oxford University Press)
- Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore by James T. Patterson (Oxford University Press)
There’s a pattern here, of course. Most of the books are from the Oxford History of the United States. As I mentioned in the original post, I wanted to start from a solid foundation before moving to specific histories. There’s a reason for that. The biggest concern I have when reading history is the potential for manipulation, propaganda, or distortion. All history has some of this to a certain degree, but being able to suss out the more pernicious forms is, for me, crucial. I’m not a historian. But I am an academic who spends far too much time thinking about disinformation and its various cousins. It’s important to me to feel well-equipped to handle histories that might gloss over some aspects for others, even if the reason for that isn’t nefarious. And as I dug into academic readings lists and favored texts, the one group that came up over and over was the Oxford History of the United States. And so that’s where most of this project will start before bouncing off into the wild world of other non-general histories.
I hope you’ll follow along as I start to contemplate all this reading!
