This list includes the books I am reading for comprehensive exams for my Ph.D. in twentieth-century U.S. history at Ohio University. I focus on cultural, intellectual, social, and political history, especially music and film history. Since these fields overlap with each other, I have organized the list into thematic and chronological categories for (hopefully) better reading comprehension, although the groupings are rough. Primary sources are mixed in with secondary ones, and most of the books are by American authors, except when a European intellectual’s influence must be addressed in an American context. Essentially, this list should broadly cover the history of ideas, music, film, art, politics, and social movements within the U.S. during the twentieth century.
Nighthawks (1942)
General Twentieth-Century World History
1994 - Eric Hobsbawm – Age of Extremes
2002 - Peter Watson – Modern Mind: Intellectual History of the 20th Century
2006 - William Duiker – Twentieth-Century World History
2007 - Alex Ross – Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
2014 - Jeremy Black – World in the Twentieth Century
General American History
1980 - Howard Zinn – People’s History of the United States
1999 - Michael Kammen – American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century
2006 - Thomas Bender – A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History
2012 - George Tindall – America: A Narrative History
2014 - Frank Ninkovich – Global Republic: America’s Inadvertent Rise to World Power
2019 - Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen – Ideas That Made America: A Brief History
General Cultural & Social Theory
1934 - George Mead – Mind, Self, and Society
1935 - Margaret Mead – Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies
1973 - Clifford Geertz – Interpretation of Cultures
1984 - Warren Susman – Culture as History
1989 - Lynn Hunt – New Cultural History
2004 - Immanuel Wallerstein – World-Systems Analysis
2006 - Simon Gunn – History and Cultural Theory
2016 - Terry Eagleton – Culture
Desert Mesa (1937)
American West
1893 - Frederick Jackson Turner – Significance of the Frontier in American History
1905 - Henry James – American Scene
1973 - Richard Slotkin – Regeneration Through Violence: Mythology of the American Frontier
1998 - Quintard Taylor – In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West
2000 - John Mack Faragher – American West: New Interpretive History
2002 - Donald Worster - A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell
2005 - Louis Warren – Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show
2008 - Donald Worster - A Passion for Nature: Life of John Muir
Indigenous Populations
1900 - Zitkala-Sa – Impressions of an Indian Childhood & School Days of an Indian Girl
1932 - Black Elk – Black Elk Speaks
1970 - Dee Alexander Brown – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
1972 - Rudolfo Anaya – Bless Me, Ultima
1988 - John Ehle – Trail of Tears: Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation
2011 - Zaragosa Vargas – Crucible of Struggle: History of Mexican Americans
2014 - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz – Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
2016 - Peter Cozzens – Earth Is Weeping: Story of the Indian Wars for the American West
America Today (1931)
Gilded Age
1849 - Henry David Thoreau – Resistance to Civil Government
1851 - Herman Melville – Moby Dick
1855 - Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass
1867 - Horatio Alger – Ragged Dick
1884 - Mark Twain – Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1890 - Emily Dickinson – Because I Could Not Stop Death
1892 - Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Yellow Wallpaper
1895 - Stephen Crane – Red Badge of Courage
1898 - Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Women and Economics
1899 - Kate Chopin – Awakening
1899 - Thorstein Veblen – Theory of the Leisure Class
1900 - Theodore Dreiser – Sister Carrie
1903 - Frank Norris – Responsibilities of the Novelist
1903 - Theodore Dreiser – True Art Speaks Plainly
1905 - Max Weber – Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
1955 - John Higham – Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925
1977 - Alfred Chandler – Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution
1978 - Paul Boyer – Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920
1982 - Alan Trachtenberg – Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
1992 - Edward Ayers – Promise of the New South
1998 - Matthew Jacobson – Whiteness of a Different Color
2002 - Amy Kaplan – Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture
2004 - Mae Ngai – Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
2006 - Rebecca Edwards – New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905
Progressive Era & World War I
1877 - Charles Peirce – Fixation of Belief
1901 - Booker T. Washington – Up from Slavery
1903 - W. E. B. Du Bois – Souls of Black Folk
1906 - Upton Sinclair – Jungle
1907 - Henry Adams – Education of Henry Adams
1907 - William James – Pragmatism
1909 - Charles Cooley – Social Organization
1909 - Herbert Croly – Promise of American Life
1909 - Jack London – Martin Eden
1910 - Jane Addams – Twenty Years at Hull House
1911 - Frederick Taylor – Principles of Scientific Management
1914 - Gertrude Stein – Tender Buttons
1915 - Van Wyck Brooks – America’s Coming of Age
1916 - Eugene Debs – Labor and Freedom
1916 - Robert Frost – Road Not Taken
1917 - H. L. Mencken – Puritanism as Literary Force
1918 - Randolph Bourne – Radical Will
1919 - John Dewey – Philosophy and Democracy
1926 - Lewis Mumford – Golden Day: A Study in American Literature and Culture
1928 - Edward Bernays – Propaganda
1929 - Robert and Helen Lynd – Middleton
1929 - Waldo Frank – Rediscovery of America
1931 - Constance Rourke – American Humor: A Study of the National Character
1939 - Dalton Trumbo – Johnny Got His Gun
1955 - Richard Hofstadter – Age of Reform
1975 - Paul Fussell – Great War and Modern Memory
1980 - John Chambers – Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era
1986 - James Kloppenberg – Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism
1987 - Casey Blake – Beloved Community: Cultural Criticism of Bourne, Brooks, Frank, Mumford
1987 - David Montgomery – Fall of the House of Labor
1991 - Steve Fraser – Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor
1992 - Robert McMath – American Populism: A Social History
1995 - Michael Kazin – Populist Persuasion: An American History
2001 - Louis Menand – Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
2003 - Michael McGerr – Fierce Discontent: Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement
2007 - Charles Postel – Populist Vision
2008 - Christopher Capozzola – Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and Modern American Citizen
2008 - Nell Painter – Standing at Armageddon: Grassroots History of the Progressive Era
2008 - Thomas Andrews – Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War
2009 - Jackson Lears – Rebirth of a Nation: Making of Modern America, 1877–1920
Empress of the Blues (1974)
Roaring Twenties & Harlem Renaissance
1920 - Sinclair Lewis – Main Street
1922 - T. S. Eliot – Waste Land
1922 - Walter Lippman – Public Opinion
1925 - Langston Hughes – Weary Blues
1925 - F. Scott Fitzgerald – Great Gatsby
1926 - Ernest Hemingway – Sun Also Rises
1928 - Eugene O’Neill – Strange Interlude
1931 - Frederick Allen – Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s
1937 - Zora Neale Hurston – Their Eyes Were Watching God
1940 - Richard Wright – Native Son
1945 - Gwendolyn Brooks – Street in Bronzeville
1951 - Malcolm Cowley – Exile’s Return
1958 - William Leuchtenburg – Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932
1963 - Leroi Jones – Blues People: Negro Experience in White America
1971 - Nathan Huggins – Harlem Renaissance
1972 - Ishmael Reed – Mumbo Jumbo
1981 - David Lewis – When Harlem Was in Vogue
1981 - Robert Palmer – Deep Blues: Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta
1987 - Nancy Cott – Grounding of Modern Feminism
1994 - Jackson Lears – Fables of Abundance: Cultural History of Advertising in America
1995 - Lynn Dumenil – Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s
2000 - Christine Stansell – American Moderns: Bohemian New York and Creation of a New Century
2004 - Kevin Boyle – Arc of Justice: Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
1997 - Ted Gioia – History of Jazz
2010 - Isabel Wilkerson – Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
Chicago: Epoch of a Great City (1935)
Great Depression
1930 - Mike Gold – Jews Without Money
1930 - William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying
1935 - Clifford Odets – Waiting for Lefty
1937 - Thurman Arnold – Folklore of Capitalism
1939 - John Steinbeck – Grapes of Wrath
1939 - Nathaniel West – Day of the Locust
1941 - Henry Luce – American Century
1941 - James Agee – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
1941 - James Burnham – Managerial Revolution
1942 - Henry Wallace – Century of the Common Man
1963 - William Leuchtenburg – Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940
1972 - Farrell Dobbs – Teamster Rebellion
1973 - Richard Pells – Radical Visions and American Dreams
1985 - Roland Marchand – Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940
1996 - Michael Denning – Cultural Front: Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
1999 - David Kennedy – Freedom from Fear: American People in Depression and War
2005 - Elizabeth Borgwardt – A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights
2009 - Morris Dickstein – Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
2010 - Dorian Lynskey – 33 Revolutions Per Minute: A History of Protest Songs
World War II
1976 - John Blum – V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II
1984 - Maureen Honey – Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda
1986 - John Dower – War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
1987 - Gregory Black – Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profit Shaped World War II Movies
1989 - John Keegan – Second World War
1993 - Michael Adams – Best War Ever: America and World War II
2000 - Ronald Takaki – Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II
2010 - Neil Wynn – African American Experience During World War II
Cold War Politics
1944 - Reinhold Niebuhr – Children of Light and Children of Darkness
1946 - George Kennan – Long Telegram
1952 - Whittaker Chambers – Witness
1958 - John Kenneth Galbraith – Affluent Society
1959 - William Appleman Williams – Tragedy of American Diplomacy
1967 - Walter LaFeber – America, Russia and the Cold War, 1945–2006
1982 - Fred Greenstein – Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader
1985 - Paul Boyer – By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age
1990 - Richard Fried – Nightmare in Red: McCarthy Era in Perspective
1991 - Chester Pach – Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower
1991 - James Giglio – Presidency of John F. Kennedy
1996 - James Patterson – Grand Expectations: United States, 1945–1974
2002 - William Stueck – Rethinking the Korean War: New Diplomatic and Strategic History
2003 - Jeremi Sumi – Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente
2004 - Gary Reichard – Politics as Usual: Age of Truman and Eisenhower
2005 - John Gaddis – Cold War: A New History
2005 - Odd Westad – Global Cold War
2007 - Melvyn Leffler – For the Soul of Mankind: U.S., the Soviet Union, and the Cold War
2010 - Nick Cullather – Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia
2011 - Frank Costigliola – Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War
2012 - Fredrik Logevall – Embers of War: Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam
2012 - Stephen Rabe – Killing Zone: United States Wages Cold War in Latin America
2018 - William Hitchcock – Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s
New York Intellectuals & Frankfurt School
1934 - Sidney Hook – Communism Without Dogmas
1947 - Theodor Adorno – Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
1950 - Lionel Trilling – Liberal Imagination
1956 - C. Wright Mills – Power Elite
1957 - Dwight Macdonald – Responsibilities of Peoples
1960 - Daniel Bell – End of Ideology
1962 - Thomas Khun – Structure of Scientific Revolutions
1964 - Herbert Marcuse – One-Dimensional Man
1967 - Noam Chomsky – Responsibility of Intellectuals
1973 - Martin Jay – Dialectical Imagination
1976 - Daniel Bell – Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
1982 - James Miller – History and Human Existence: From Marx to Merleau-Ponty
1983 - Perry Anderson – In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
1987 - Alan Wald – New York Intellectuals: Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left
2007 - Neil Jumonville – New York Intellectuals Reader
2016 - Stuart Jeffries – Grand Hotel Abyss: Lives of the Frankfurt School
Babysitter (1947)
Postwar Culture
1944 - Robert Lindner – Rebel Without a Cause: Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath
1946 - Raymond Chandler – Big Sleep
1946 - Robert Warshow – Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre, and Popular Culture
1947 - Tennessee Williams – Streetcar Named Desire
1948 - Alfred Kinsey – Sexual Behavior in the Human Male & Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
1948 - Norman Mailer – Naked and the Dead
1949 - Arthur Miller – Death of a Salesman
1950 - David Riesman – Lonely Crowd
1950 - Erik Erikson – Childhood and Society
1950 - Raymond Chandler – Simple Art of Murder
1951 - C. Wright Mills – White Collar: American Middle Class
1951 - J. D. Salinger – Catcher in the Rye
1952 - Flannery O'Connor – Wise Blood
1952 - Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man
1954 - Fredric Wertham – Seduction of the Innocent
1955 - James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son
1955 - Norman Mailer – Deer Park
1956 - Allen Ginsberg – Howl
1956 - William H. Whyte – Organization Man
1957 - Jack Kerouac – On the Road
1959 - Terry Southern – Magic Christian
1959 - William S. Burroughs – Naked Lunch
1960 - Paul Goodman – Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
1961 - Joseph Heller – Catch-22
1962 - Ken Kesey – One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
1976 - George Nash – Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945
1977 - Steve Chapple – Rock ‘n’ Roll Is Here to Pay: History and Politics of the Music Industry
1985 - Kenneth Jackson – Crabgrass Frontier: Suburbanization of the United States
1988 - Elaine May – Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
1988 - Elia Kazan – A Life
1991 - Jackie Byars – All That Hollywood Allows: Re-Reading Gender in 1950s Melodrama
1991 - Stephen Whitfield – Culture of the Cold War
1992 - Stephanie Coontz – Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap
1995 - Nina C. Leibman – Living Room Lectures: Fifties Family in Film and Television
1997 - Gary Donaldson – Abundance and Anxiety: America, 1945–1960
1999 - Frances Saunders – Cultural Cold War: CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
2000 - Eugenia Kaledin – Daily Life in the United States, 1940–1959: Shifting Worlds
2000 - Laura McEnaney – Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties
2002 - M. Keith Booker – Post-Utopian Imagination: American Culture in the Long 1950s
2002 - Paul Buhle – Radical Hollywood: Untold Story Behind America’s Favorite Movies
2003 - George Cotkin – Existential America
2003 - J. Hoberman – Dream Life
2003 - Lizabeth Cohen – Consumer’s Republic: Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
2004 - Penny Von Eschen – Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
2005 - Douglas Field – American Cold War Culture
2006 - Andrew Dunar – America in the Fifties
2007 - James Baughman – Same Time, Same Station
2007 - Martin Halliwell – American Culture in the 1950s
2008 - David Hajdu – Ten-Cent Plague: Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
2008 - Kevin Mattson – Rebels All: Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America
2010 - Grace Hale – Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion
2011 - Jennifer Frost – Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism
2017 - Joel Dinerstein – Origins of Cool in Postwar America
Civil Rights & Feminism
1962 - Michael Harrington – Other America: Poverty in the United States
1963 - Betty Friedan – Feminine Mystique
1963 - Martin Luther King – Letter from Birmingham Jail
1963 - Sylvia Plath – Bell Jar
1964 - Malcolm X – Ballot or the Bullet
1976 - Audre Lorde – Coal
1979 - Sara Evans – Personal Politics: Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement
1980 - Richard Polenberg – One Nation Divisible: Class, Race, and Ethnicity in the US since 1938
1986 - David Garrow – Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC
1988 - Beth Bailey – From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America
1990 - Henry Hampton – Voices of Freedom: Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1950s–1980s
1990 - Judith Butler – Gender Trouble
1991 - Alan Dawley – Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State
1998 - Daniel Horowitz – Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique
2001 - Alice Kessler-Harris – In Pursuit of Equity
2001 - Thomas Borstelmann – Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations
2004 - Michael Klarman – From Jim Crow to Civil Rights
2005 - Donald Critchlow – Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism
2006 - Raymond Arsenault – Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice
2007 - Michael Klarman – Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement
2007 - Thomas Jackson – From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Struggle for Economic Justice
2007 - Wendy Wall – Inventing the American Way: Politics of Consensus from New Deal to Civil Rights
2008 - Thomas Sugrue – Sweet Land of Liberty: Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
2013 - Gary May – Bending Toward Justice: Voting Rights Act and Transformation of American Democracy
2014 - Clay Risen – Bill of the Century: Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act
2017 - Steven Levingston – Kennedy and King: President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights
CIA v UFO (1967)
Sixties Liberalism & Counterculture
1959 - Norman O. Brown – Life Against Death: Psychoanalytical Meaning of History
1960 - C. Wright Mills – Letter to the New Left
1965 - Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
1966 - Susan Sontag – Against Interpretation
1966 - Thomas Pynchon – Crying Lot of 49
1967 - Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle
1968 - Joan Didion – Slouching Towards Bethlehem
1968 - Phillip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
1968 - Tom Wolfe – Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
1969 - Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five
1969 - Theodore Roszak – Making of a Counter Culture
1971 - Hunter S. Thompson – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1974 - P. Adams Sitney – Visionary Film: American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000
1986 - Allen Matusow – Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s
1987 - James Miller – Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago
1993 - Todd Gitlin – Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
1994 - David Farber – Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s
1994 - David Farber – Chicago ’68
1994 - David Farber – Sixties: From Memory to History
1994 - Martin Lee – Acid Dreams: Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond
1995 - Dan Carter – Politics of Rage: George Wallace, Origins of the New Conservatism
1995 - Kevin Boyle – UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945–1968
1997 - Howard Brick – Age of Contradictions: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s
1999 - Beth Bailey – Sex in the Heartland
1999 - James Miller – Flowers in the Dustbin: Rise of Rock and Roll, 1947–1977
1999 - Maurice Isserman – America Divided: Civil War of the 1960s
1999 - Robert Dallek – Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973
2000 - Alice Echols – Scars of Sweet Paradise: Life and Times of Janis Joplin
2000 - Michael Hicks – Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions
2001 - George Herring – America’s Longest War: United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975
2001 - Jonathan Schoenwald – Time for Choosing: Rise of Modern American Conservatism
2001 - Lisa McGirr – Suburban Warriors: Origins of the New American Right
2002 - Kevin Mattson – Intellectuals in Action: Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism
2002 - Max Elbaum – Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che
2002 - Melvin Small – Antiwarriors: Vietnam War and the Battle for America’s Hearts and Minds
2002 - W. J. Rorabaugh – Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties
2005 - Marc Weingarten – Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: New Journalism Revolution
2005 - Michael Flamm – Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and Crisis of Liberalism in 1960s
2012 - James Patterson – Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America
2014 - Susan Sontag – Susan Sontag Reader
2015 - George Cotkin – Feast of Excess: Cultural History of the New Sensibility
2017 - Michael Hogan – Afterlife of John F. Kennedy
2018 - Kyle Longley – LBJ’s 1968: Power, Politics, and the Presidency in America's Year of Upheaval
Seventies Malaise
1974 - Harry Braverman – Labor and Monopoly Capital
1976 - Maxine Hong Kingston – Woman Warrior
1976 - Tom Wolfe – Me Decade
1979 - Christopher Lasch – Culture of Narcissism
1979 - Jimmy Carter – Crisis of Confidence
1980 - Robert Kokler – Cinema of Loneliness
1987 - Lester Bangs – Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung: Work of a Legendary Critic
1988 - Kim Moody – An Injury to All: Decline of American Unionism
1989 - Greil Marcus – Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century
1996 - Gillian McCain – Please Kill Me: Uncensored Oral History of Punk
1996 - Rickey Vincent – Funk: Music, The People, and The Rhythm of The One
1998 - Peter Biskind – Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
2000 - David Frum – How We Got Here: 70s
2001 - Bruce Schulman – Seventies: Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
2001 - Fredrik Logevall – Choosing War: Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam
2002 - Pierre Asselin – A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement
2004 - Mark Feeney – Nixon at the Movies
2007 - Kathryn Statler – Replacing France: Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam
2008 - Mark Harris – Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
2008 - Rick Perlstein – Nixonland: Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
2010 - Aaron Brenner – Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below
2010 - Dan Berger – Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism
2010 - Jefferson Cowie – Stayin’ Alive: 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class
2010 - Judith Stein – Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the 1970s
2012 - Joshua Bloom – Black Against Empire: History and Politics of the Black Panther Party
2012 - Lien-Hang Nguyen – Hanoi's War: International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam
2012 - Paul Chamberlin – Global Offensive: US, PLO, and the Making of the Post-Cold War Order
2013 - Thomas Borstelmann – 1970s: New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality
2014 - Michael Nelson – Resilient America: Nixon in 1968, Dissent, and Dividing Government
2015 - Christian Appy – American Reckoning: Vietnam War and Our National Identity
2017 - Joseph Ewoodzie – Break Beats in the Bronx: Rediscovering Hip-Hop's Early Years
2017 - M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska – History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s
2018 - Robert Brigham – Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam
Dustheads (1982)
Reaganism & Neoconservatism
1981 - Ronald Reagan – First Inaugural Address
1984 - Sandra Cisneros – House on Mango Street
1985 - Don DeLillo – White Noise
1986 - Mike Davis – Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the US Working Class
1988 - Michael Rogin – Ronald Reagan, the Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology
1991 - Edward Berkowitz – America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan
1994 - Tricia Rose – Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America
2001 - Bradford Martin – Other Eighties: Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan
2001 - Michael Azerrad – Our Band Could Be Your Life
2003 - Daniel Rodgers – Age of Fracture
2005 - Andrew Busch – Reagan’s Victory: Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right
2005 - David Harvey – Brief History of Neoliberalism
2005 - Gil Troy – Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s
2005 - Jeff Chang – Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: History of the Hip-Hop Generation
2006 - Matthew Lassiter – Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South
2006 - Philip Jenkins – Decade of Nightmares: End of the Sixties and Making of Eighties America
2008 - Sean Wilentz – Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008
2011 - Mark Yarm – Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge
2013 - James Wilson – Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement
2013 - Michael Foley – Front Porch Politics: Forgotten Heyday of American Activism in 70s and 80s
2014 - Malcolm Byrne – Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power
2015 - Andrew Hartman – War for the Soul of America: History of the Culture Wars
2015 - Doug Rossinow – Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s
2016 - Elizabeth Hinton – From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime
2019 - Beth Fischer – Myth of Triumphalism: Rethinking President Reagan’s Cold War Legacy
2019 - David Farber – Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed
Nineties Culture & Globalization
1987 - Allan Bloom – Closing of the American Mind
1989 - David Harvey – Condition of Postmodernity: Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
1991 - Arthur Schlesinger – Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society
1991 - Christopher Lasch – True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
1991 - Fredric Jameson – Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
1991 - James Hunter – Culture Wars: Struggle to Define America
1992 - Francis Fukuyama – End of History and the Last Man
1992 - Pat Buchanan – Culture War
1993 - Bill Clinton – North American Free Trade Act
1993 - Sherman Alexie – Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
1995 - Benjamin Barber – Jihad vs. McWorld
1995 - John Pierson – Spike, Mike, Slackers, & Dykes: Decade of American Independent Cinema
1996 - Samuel Huntington – Clash of Civilizations
1997 - David Foster Wallace – A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
1998 - Perry Anderson – Origins of Postmodernity
2001 - Barbara Ehrenreich – Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
2001 - Jonathan Franzen – Corrections
2006 - David Hollinger – Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism
2010 - Michelle Alexander – New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
2017 - Jeffrey Engel – When the World Seemed New: George H. W. Bush and the End of the Cold War
Film Theory
1963 - Jean Mitry – Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema
1967 - André Bazin – What Is Cinema
1969 - Peter Wollen – Signs and Meaning in the Cinema
1971 - Manny Farber – Negative Space
1971 - Stanley Cavell – World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film
1972 - Louis Giannetti – Understanding Movies
1974 - David Bordwell – Film Art: An Introduction
1974 - Leo Braudy – Film Theory and Criticism
1977 - James Monaco – How to Read a Film
1983 - Gilles Deleuze – Cinema 1: Movement Image & Cinema 2: Time Image
Film History & Genres
1947 - Siegfried Kracauer – From Caligari to Hitler: Psychological History of the German Film
1959 - Donald Richie – Japanese Film: Art and Industry
1960 - Jay Leyda – Kino: History of the Russian and Soviet Cinema
1968 - Kevin Brownlow – Parade’s Gone By
1974 - Amos Vogel – Film as a Subversive Art
1978 - I.C. Jarvie – Movies as Social Criticism: Aspects of Their Social Psychology
1993 - Jeanine Basinger – A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960
1996 - Geoffrey Nowell-Smith – Oxford History of World Cinema
1997 - Jonathan Rosenbaum – Movies as Politics
1999 - Wheeler Dixon – Disaster and Memory: Celebrity Culture and the Crisis of Hollywood Cinema
2000 - E. Ann Kaplan – Feminism and Film
2000 - Neal Gabler – Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality
2004 - Mark Cousins – Story of Film
2006 - Michael Richardson – Surrealism and Cinema
2011 - Ernest Mathijs – Cult Cinema: An Introduction
Auteurs & Critics
1965 - Pauline Kael – I Lost It at the Movies
1965 - Robin Wood – Hitchcock’s Films Revisited
1966 - François Truffaut – Hitchcock
1968 - Jean-Luc Godard – Godard on Godard
1971 - Peter Bogdanovich – John Ford
1974 - Jean Renoir – My Life and My Films
1975 - Robert Bresson – Notes on the Cinematographer
1986 - Andrei Tarkovsky – Sculpting in Time
1986 - Michael Powell – A Life in Movies
1988 - David Bordwell – Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema
1989 - Stephen Harvey – Directed by Vincente Minnelli
1992 - Paul Schrader – Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings
1995 - Federico Fellini – I, Fellini
2000 - Alexander Walker – Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis
2000 - James Agee – Agee on Film
2003 - Jesse Kalin – Films of Ingmar Bergman
Television
1964 - Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Media: Extensions of Man
1972 - John Berger – Ways of Seeing
1996 - Vivian Sobchack – Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event
2007 - Gary Edgarton – Columbia History of American Television