Books on U.S. History
Explore national history with this collection of study guides for fiction and non-fiction texts covering events, key figures, and viewpoints that have shaped the United States over the centuries. A sampling of topics within this collection includes the Puritans, Indigenous peoples, the successes and failures of the country's founders, U.S. presidents, war, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, and more.
102 Minutes, by New York Times journalists Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, is a nonfiction account that chronicles 102 minutes inside and outside the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Published in 2005, it was a National Book Award finalist that year. The day begins like many others, with workers inside the buildings comprising over 220 vertical acres checking emails and sipping coffee at 8:30 a.m. Others arrive after dropping off their children at... Read 102 Minutes Summary
Published in 2005, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus was written by Charles C. Mann. The first chapter introduces many of the problems and inadequacies surrounding popular accounts of native societies. The author describes the tendency to minimize the cultures that existed prior to the arrival of Europeans. Native cultures are seen as simpler and less sophisticated than contemporary European societies. The reason for this, Mann believes, is as much cultural chauvinism and... Read 1491 Summary
1776 is a biography of the American Revolutionary War written by historian David McCullough. Published in 2006, the book is a companion piece to John Adams (2001), a biography McCullough wrote about the second US president. Though the Revolutionary War did not officially end until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, the text follows George Washington, King George III, Nathanael Greene, Henry Knox, and other key figures as it examines crucial military events.In... Read 1776 Summary
This study guide references the 1990 Oxford University Press edition of James M. McPherson’s Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution. The book is a collection of seven essays originally delivered as lectures, all on the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, and his role in the Civil War (1861-1865). The book calls the Civil War era the “Second American Revolution” because, with Lincoln’s help, it brought about a fundamental transformation in the... Read Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution Summary
Alas, Babylon is a 1959 novel by Pat Frank. Written during the Cold War, it is one of the earliest post-apocalyptic novels to deal with the potential consequences of nuclear war. It examines themes of nationalism, natural selection, deterrent force, and resilience.Plot SummaryAs the novel begins, Mark Bragg sends a telegram to his brother, Randy. The telegram includes the words, “Alas, Babylon,” their code for the onset of a nuclear attack. Mark is an officer... Read Alas, Babylon Summary
Alexander Hamilton is a 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, written by Ron Chernow. Beginning with Hamilton’s birth in the Caribbean, the book traces Hamilton’s story from his childhood, to his early years in America, to his rise as one of the most admired—and reviled—politicians and statesmen that the country would ever see. The popular music Hamilton is based on the story told in Chernow’s book, and shows the development of both America, and one of its... Read Alexander Hamilton Summary
Always Running is the autobiography of Luis J. Rodriguez, a Mexican-American former gang member who grew up in dangerous East Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s. Luis’ family moved to Los Angeles from Mexico after Luis’ father was accused of theft, and Luis spends his early years in Watts, a particularly crime-ridden LA neighborhood. Luis’ father struggles to find work, and the family struggles to find adequate shelter and food. After they are evicted... Read Always Running Summary
A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign, written by Edward A. Larson and published in 2007, documents the US presidential election of 1800, a highly-contested political drama, preceded by what is considered the first political campaign in American history. The front-runners in the contest were widely considered to be the then-current President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson. Although the two men were serving together in the Executive branch... Read A Magnificent Catastrophe Summary
American Colonies: The Settling of North America is the first volume of the five-part Penguin History of the United States series. In it, Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Alan Taylor surveys the history of the Americas before the formation of the United States.Taylor aims to expand, enrich, and complicate our understanding of this period. American Colonies covers a broader temporal and geographical range than most works of its kind, spanning from the earliest Paleolithic settlements in North America... Read American Colonies Summary
American Creation is a 2007 nonfiction book by Joseph Ellis that covers the successes and failures of the founders of the United States from 1775 to 1803. Ellis starts with the year and three months that set in motion the colonies’ declaration of independence and subsequent revolution. In this eventful year, the British played the worst possible hand they could, removing the possibility of reconciliation. The colonists included fiery and impetuous rebels such as Patrick... Read American Creation Summary
Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia was originally published in 1975 by W. W. Norton & Company Inc. This summary references the Norton paperback edition reissued in 2003. Morgan seeks to discover how America’s Founding Fathers came to advocate for freedom and equality when many of them owned slaves. Morgan chose to study Virginia’s Founding Fathers because they were among the most vocal in their opposition to the monarchy, because... Read American Slavery, American Freedom Summary
American Sniper is the autobiography of Chris Kyle, the single deadliest sniper in the history of the United States military. The narrative, co-written by Chris Kyle, Jim deFelice, Scott McEwen, and Chris’s wife Taya, opens with events that took place in 2003 in Iraq. At the time, Chris was providing protective fire for a group of Marines; a female insurgent attempted to attack the Marines with a grenade, but Chris shot her, registering his first... Read American Sniper Summary
A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich tells the story of an eighteenth-century midwife and healer living in Maine, the plot unraveling through her own diary entries, expanded upon by Ulrich. This intimate tale of historical fiction brings to light issues of religion, economics, sexuality and the common medical practices that defined the New England frontier.Ulrich begins each chapter transcribing some of Martha’s diary entries, listing the month and year in the chapter title. Following... Read A Midwife's Tale Summary
Published in 2003, Jim Murphy’s An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 is a historical nonfiction book for young adults that provides a detailed look into Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic of 1793. As Murphy documents how yellow fever emerged and spread throughout the city, he demonstrates how society operated in what was then the nation’s capital and largest city in the late 1700s. He focuses on urban... Read An American Plague Summary
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back is physician and journalist Elisabeth Rosenthal’s overview and critique of the American healthcare system. It was initially published in April 2017, arriving during a time in which healthcare reform became a prominent cornerstone of both Democratic and Republican political campaigns. The book offers a mixture of testimonials from a myriad of people impacted by the health industry, including medical professionals... Read An American Sickness Summary
Joy Harjo is a seminal voice in the US poetry canon, and she has long been an advocate for Native American women in the literary world. Her work has merited tremendous acclaim, such as a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the American... Read An American Sunrise Summary
An Army at Dawn is a nonfiction military history book published in 2002 by American author and journalist Rick Atkinson. Subtitled The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, the book chronicles the successful Allied invasion of North Africa during World War II. The first installment of Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for History.This study guide refers to the 2002 edition published by Henry Holt and Company.Plot SummaryOn September 1... Read An Army at Dawn Summary
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes by the American playwright Tony Kushner is an epic story that spans two plays – Millennium Approaches, first produced in 1991, and Perestroika, which debuted in 1992. The entire two-part work premiered on Broadway in 1993. Angels in America is Kushner’s most well-known work and is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most significant American plays of the 20th century. Angels in America... Read Angels in America Summary
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People is a 2019 adaptation of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s 2015 nonfiction book. Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese adapted the material for middle-grade audiences. The original publication received the American Book Award, and this version is a 2020 American Indian Youth Literature Young Adult Honor Book with recognition from the National Council for the Social Studies and the Children’s Book Council. This book tells the perspective of... Read An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People Summary
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States is one of the most famous American history books published in recent decades. It has sold over two million copies. First published in 1980, the book was nominated for the American Book Award and has gone through at least six major revisions. Although controversial when first published, the book has become comfortably mainstream. It is mentioned by name in the film Good Will Hunting and the... Read A People’s History of the United States Summary
Apex Hides the Hurt, a 2006 novel by American author Colson Whitehead, follows a nameless, emotionally muted nomenclature consultant, or an expert in creating brand names. The novel toggles between the protagonist’s memories of success at his company, and his current consulting assignment—renaming a town. The novel satirizes contemporary American consumer culture and features themes of race and identity. Whitehead uses humor and revelation as key narrative techniques in this story about a man who... Read Apex Hides the Hurt Summary
Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War is a historical account of the secession movement in the antebellum Southern US written by Charles B. Dew. Dew is a distinguished professor of history at Williams College specializing in the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras. Apostles of Disunion was published in 2001 by the University of Virginia Press and won the 2001 Fletcher Pratt Prize from the Civil War Round Table... Read Apostles of Disunion Summary
April Morning is a historical fiction work by Howard Fast, a prolific author whose writings spanned the bulk of the 20th century. Published in 1961, midway through Fast’s career, the novel is one of many he wrote on the Revolutionary War and the birth of America. Originally intended for a general audience, it came to be regarded as a young adult novel as many middle and high school English programs included it in their curriculum... Read April Morning Summary
Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice depicts the racial turmoil in Detroit in 1925 through the story of Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African-American physician who faces murder charges after trying to defend his home in an all-white neighborhood from mob violence. The grandson of a slave, Ossian moves northward during the Great Migration to get his education at Wilberforce and Howard Universities. After graduating Howard's medical school, Ossian sets up practice and residence in Black Bottom... Read Arc of Justice Summary
In A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837, historian Paul E. Johnson analyzes the social factors that led to Rochester’s religious revival in the 1830s. This guide follows the first edition of A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, which was first published in 1978. Rochester’s revival was part of a larger religious movement in 19th-century America, known as the Second Great Awakening, during which time numerous Americans joined evangelical Protestant churches. Rochester’s revival centered... Read A Shopkeeper's Millennium Summary
Ask the Dust is the second and most famous of the Arturo Bandini quartet, a series of autobiographical novels by Italian-American author John Fante. The novel follows the coming-of-age of the young writer, Arturo Bandini, who moves from Colorado to Los Angeles in the late 1930s, at the age of twenty, to launch his career as an author. At the beginning of the novel, Arturo is consumed by worries about his financial difficulties and his... Read Ask The Dust Summary
In At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, historian Danielle L. McGuire uncovers the untold history of many black, female civil rights activists. McGuire’s book is meant to serve as a correction to popular accounts of the civil rights era. While the movement has frequently been associated with its male leaders, such as Martin... Read At the Dark End of the Street Summary
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was written in pieces from 1771 to 1790. The work was first published in 1791 in Paris, France, after Franklin’s death as The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin. The autobiography was then published in London in 1793. In his writing, Franklin reflects upon his academic, professional, and philosophical pursuits. He examines how he advanced his economic and social standing during the formation of the United States, covering from... Read Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Summary
Rick Bragg’s Ava’s Man, published in 2001, is a work of creative nonfiction that centers around Charlie Bundrum, the author’s maternal grandfather. Although Bragg’s grandfather died before Bragg was born, the book is inspired by the innumerous stories, anecdotes, and memories of Charlie that the author heard from the people that knew and loved him. Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is known for his nonfiction works that center on family in the Alabama region. Ava’s... Read Ava's Man Summary
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects was written in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft. It is often referred to as one of the earliest feminist texts, and Wollstonecraft herself described it as proto-feminist. In it, Wollstonecraft explores the oppression of women by men, and argues that no society can be either virtuous or moral while half of the population are being subjugated by the other half. Ultimately, Wollstonecraft... Read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman Summary
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail is a 1998 travel book by American-British author Bill Bryson. The book was a New York Times bestseller, and a 2014 Cable News Network (CNN) poll named it the funniest travel book ever written. In addition, it inspired the 2015 film A Walk in the Woods starring Robert Redford as Bryson, Nick Nolte as Stephen Katz (his primary hiking companion), and Emma Thompson as... Read A Walk in the Woods Summary
A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of Virginia Hall, WWII’s Most Dangerous Spy is a 2019 biography by Sonia Purnell. It tells the story of Virginia Hall, an American spy whose efforts were critical to France’s success in World War II. Despite its larger-than-life nature and importance to the Allied forces’ success, Hall’s story has remained largely unknown until now.Plot SummaryVirginia was born into an affluent family. Her mother, Barbara, wanted her to... Read A Woman of No Importance Summary
Originally written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018) is the transcribed posthumous autobiography of the life of Oluale “Cudjo Lewis” Kossola (1841-1935), written by Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Known for her involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston was a writer, anthropologist, folklorist, and filmmaker. In all her work, she held a special appreciation for Black life and Black culture of the US South. Her works... Read Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" Summary
Becoming is a memoir by Michelle Obama, the former First Lady of the United States from 2008-2016, originally published in 2018. In addition to describing her time in the White House, Obama details her upbringing, her education, her work in community outreach, and her relationship with former president Barack Obama, all of which contribute to the process of becoming the woman she is today. Becoming was the bestselling book of the year in 2018 and... Read Becoming Summary
Becoming Mexican American is a nonfiction book published in 1993 by social historian George J. Sánchez. Sánchez examines the cultural adaptation of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles between 1900 and 1945 and its role in the formation of Chicano identity. The Mexican population of Los Angeles combined practices and beliefs from Mexico and the United States to form a unique ethnic form of Americanism, which was later mobilized by the second generation of American-born Chicanos... Read Becoming Mexican American Summary
Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own is a non-fiction book by Eddie S. Glaude Jr., a Princeton University professor specializing in race and religion in the US. The title gestures to a passage in James Baldwin’s last novel, Just Above My Head (1979), which stresses the importance of new beginnings in the quest to rebuild the US as a truly multiracial democracy. A New York Times bestseller, Begin Again... Read Begin Again Summary
Behind Rebel Lines: The Incredible Story of Emma Edmonds, Civil War Spy by Seymour Reit is a work of historical fiction and children’s literature based on the true story of a young woman who pretends to be a man so that she can join the Union army during the US Civil War. The book’s target audience is ages 10-14, and it uses a simple style to appeal to a young audience. It is categorized as... Read Behind Rebel Lines Summary
Peter Balakian’s Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir (1997) tells the story of the author’s path to embracing his Armenian identity and understanding the legacies of a dark history. Born into the comfortable and consumerist suburbs of mid-century American suburbia, Balakian experienced the vestibules of his family’s Armenian culture mostly through the influence of his maternal grandmother. As he grew up, he caught other glimpses of the family’s heritage; in particular, home rituals in their... Read Black Dog of Fate Summary
Black Elk Speaks (1932) is a book written by John G. Neihardt that relates the life of Black Elk, a member of the Ogalala band of the Lakota Native Americans. Though Neihardt is the book’s author, the book is based on a conversation between Black Elk and Neihardt and is presented as a transcript of Black Elk’s words, though Neihardt made some edits to the transcript. The book follows Black Elk from his boyhood to... Read Black Elk Speaks Summary
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War is a 1999 book by journalist Mark Bowden. It is a non-fiction account of the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, which resulted from US forces’ attempt to capture the two lieutenants of Mohamed Farrah Aidid, a warlord who oppressed the Somali people and stole their humanitarian aid. Bowden originally published a 29-part investigation of the failed mission in The Philadelphia Inquirer, later expanding it into Black Hawk... Read Black Hawk Down Summary
Black Like Me is a sociological memoir written by John Howard Griffin in 1960. It takes place in 1959 in the deep South of the United States during the end of the segregation era. Griffin, a white man, assumes the appearance and life of a Black man and records his experiences in an attempt to create understanding and bridge gaps between Black and white Americans. Black Like Me was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for... Read Black Like Me Summary
Black Rain is a 1965 historical novel by Japanese author Masuji Ibuse. The novel blends authentic accounts and information with a fictional plot to describe the aftermath of the destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima by an American atomic bomb in 1945. Black Rain was adapted into a film in 1989. This guide uses an eBook version of the 1979 edition of Black Rain, translated into English by John Bester.Plot SummaryShigematsu Shizuma is a... Read Black Rain Summary
Published in 2001, Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West is a narrative history of the turbulent period from the 1800s to the 1860s, the “settling” of the American West. It frames the transformation of America into a transcontinental power through the life story of Christopher “Kit” Carson, a larger-than-life frontiersman, guide, and army officer who assisted the conquest every step of the way. Blood and Thunder is not author Hampton Sides’s first... Read Blood and Thunder Summary
Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), by Timothy B. Tyson, is a nonfiction work of history centered on the racially motivated 1970 murder of Henry Marrow Jr. in Oxford, North Carolina. The killing occurred after Marrow, a 23-year-old Black Army veteran, husband, and father of two, allegedly made a flirtatious remark in the direction of a 19-year-old married white woman. The woman’s husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law chased Marrow down the street, shot him from behind... Read Blood Done Sign My Name Summary
Blood in the Water is a 2016 historical non-fiction book written by American historian Heather Ann Thompson. In it, she explores the uprising at Attica prison in New York State in 1971 and its bloody suppression by the state. As well as the causes of these events, Blood in the Water looks at their legal and political aftermath, in terms of both the state’s prosecution of prisoners and inmate efforts to find justice for violence... Read Blood in the Water Summary
Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982) is an autobiographical travelogue by American historian William Least Heat-Moon. The trip in question—a 13,000-mile circuit around the States—began in 1978, the book’s title deriving from out-of-the-way routes drawn in blue on an old road atlas. The author-narrator researches local history of the areas visited and interviews the many people he meets. Heat-Moon spent the subsequent years composing and revising the manuscript, and after a few rejections, it... Read Blue Highways: A Journey into America Summary
Burnt Shadows, first published in 2009, is the fifth novel by Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie. A political-historical novel, it was nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction, one of the UK’s most prestigious literary awards, and won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, which celebrates books that contribute to a greater understanding of racism and diversity. Shamsie has been shortlisted several times for a John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; she also received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literature... Read Burnt Shadows Summary
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, a nonfiction history by librarian and historian Dee Brown, was published in 1970 and became a widely influential bestseller. Dee Brown (full name Dorris Alexander Brown) was the author of more than 30 fiction and nonfiction books. As a librarian at the University of Illinois, he had access to the primary historical records from the late 19th century that became the main... Read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee Summary
Caleb’s Crossing (2011) is a historical fiction novel based on the real life figure of Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, the first Native American to graduate from Harvard University in 1665. Born into the Wampanoag tribe on an island near Cape Cod, the historical Cheeshahteaumuck converted to Christianity and attended a preparatory school before enrolling in Harvard. In her novel, Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks tells a fictionalized version of Caleb’s story in the form of a... Read Caleb's Crossing Summary
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (Young Adult Edition) is an abridged version of the original 2005 non-fiction historical account of the origin and evolution of hip-hop culture written by Jeff Chang and David “Davey D” Cook. Jeff Chang is an American journalist, music critic, and historian who, in 1993, co-founded the hip-hop label Solesides, which aided in the launching of artists like DJ Shadow and Blackalicious. Jeff Chang earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the... Read Can't Stop Won't Stop (Young Adult Edition) Summary
Celia, A Slave is Melton A. McLaurin’s book-length analysis of the trial and execution of Celia, a slave in Callaway County, Missouri who kills her master and burns his body in her fireplace. McLaurin, a historian, argues that Celia’s case offers us important insights into how together, gender and racial oppression render enslaved women completely powerless to protect themselves from sexual exploitation, and how the moral ambiguity caused by slavery is often reconciled in the... Read Celia, A Slave Summary
William Cronon wrote a scholarly assessment of the ecological changes in the land wrought by the arrival of New England’s European settlers from about 1620 to 1800 called Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983). Cronon examines both the Native American and European land usage during the pre-colonial time period, including farming, hunting, fishing, and the commercial harvesting of the fruits of the land. In particular, Cronon explores the... Read Changes in the Land Summary
Chasing Lincoln’s Killer is a YA novel adapted from the adult version, Manhunt, both by James L. Swanson. Manhunt is a meticulously researched nonfiction novel describing the hunt for John Wilkes Booth, and includes previously unpopularized transcripts, archives, and interviews. Published by Scholastic in 2009, Chasing Lincoln’s Killer makes these rare historical finds digestible for younger audiences and provides a rapid-fire, abridged version of the narrative of the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth. Those who... Read Chasing Lincoln's Killer Summary
Marilyn Nelson is part of a coterie of writers who published in the late-1970s and 1980s after the revolutionary fervor of the Black Arts Movement. Though the period during which Nelson wrote is less acknowledged than those aforementioned, it was a time when diverse Black poetic talents emerged. Nelson’s contemporaries included Afaa Michael Weaver, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Melvin Dixon, and Essex Hemphill. Their work grappled with the aftermath of the Vietnam War... Read Chosen Summary
Mike Davis’ City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, won the 1990 Social Science Association Best Book Award. Davis is a Marxist urban theorist, historian, and political commentator who, following the success of City of Quartz, has written monographs on other American cities, including San Diego and Las Vegas. In his writing for The New Left Review journal, he continues to be a prominent voice in Marxist politics and environmentalism. His acclaims include... Read City of Quartz Summary
Confederates in the Attic is a non-fiction book written by Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz. The book is a mixture of ethnography—the study of a specific group of people in a specific place—and travel writing, where Horwitz attempts to dive deeply into his childhood fascination for the American Civil War by traveling through the deep South, visiting Confederate battlefields, museums, and monuments, and interviewing the locals that he comes into contact with about their relationship to... Read Confederates In The Attic Summary
The Constitution of the United States is the oldest national constitution that’s still in use. The idea of founding a government on the basis of a written constitution was revolutionary when the US Constitution was drafted in 1787. The idea had two novel components: first, the document both establishes and limits the power of the government—no figurehead, ruler, or body of legislators stands above the Constitution. Second, it was written by representatives of the governed—55... Read Constitution of United States of America Summary
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto is a 1969 work of polemical non-fiction by the Native American author, theologian, and activist Vine Deloria, Jr. Deloria’s “manifesto” sets out the nature of white America’s oppression and exploitation of Native people, explores the history of Native resistance, and recommends a course of action for Native American activists. Extremely influential in the burgeoning Native American Movement and other Native American activist groups, Custer Died for Your... Read Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto Summary
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is a work of history and political philosophy published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840. Tocqueville embarked on his own political career in France but is best known for his contributions to history and political philosophy.The first volume is based on Tocqueville’s nearly yearlong sojourn in the United States, ostensibly to study its prisons and prison reform. In his introduction Tocqueville emphasizes that... Read Democracy in America Summary
Desert Exile tells the story of the author Yoshiko Uchida and the Uchida family’s experience as Japanese-Americans interned in concentration camps by the U.S. government after the Pearl Harbor attacks during World War II. The book follows a linear narrative arc that details the Uchidas’ experience, while Uchida often reflects discursively, using one point in her life as a vortex for connecting that moment to another memory and in turn creating a larger impression of... Read Desert Exile Summary
Destiny of the Republic, a nonfiction book written by Candice Millard in 2011, tells the story of President James Garfield’s death in 1881 after being shot by Charles Guiteau. The first section, entitled “Promise,” provides the necessary background of all the individuals who play a role in the story. The first chapter is about the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, introducing Garfield, Alexander Graham Bell, and Joseph Lister–three men whose lives would intersect years later... Read Destiny of the Republic Summary
Frances (Fanny) Trollope, today best known as the mother of the popular Victorian author Anthony Trollope, was herself an extraordinarily productive writer in many genres. Her literary career began in middle age when, out of financial desperation, she wrote a travelog describing her impressions of America, gathered on a three-year excursion there. Published in 1832 in two volumes, Domestic Manners of the Americans was a runaway bestseller and a wildly controversial takedown of what Trollope... Read Domestic Manners of the Americans Summary
Eaters of the Dead is a 1976 historical novel by Michael Crichton. Crichton (1942-2008) is known for his best-selling novels, many of which have been adapted into movies, as well as TV and filmmaking. His books include Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain, The Lost World, Prey, and Disclosure. Crichton also worked in filmmaking and in the TV industry, most notably on Westworld (writer, director), ER (creator), and on the Jurassic Park franchise based on his... Read Eaters Of The Dead Summary
Empire of Cotton is a nonfiction book published in 2014 by the German-American author and historian Sven Beckert. By chronicling the history of the global cotton trade and its vast network of growers, merchants, and manufacturers, the book explores the origins and evolution of modern capitalism. In a narrative spanning over two centuries, Beckett takes readers through the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the American Civil War, and the collapse of colonialism following World War... Read Empire of Cotton Summary
Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne, published in 2010, is a work of historical nonfiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. The book narrates a history of the Comanche Nation, and also follows the fates of the Parker family, from whom the book’s central figure, Quanah Parker, descends.The Comanches... Read Empire of the Summer Moon Summary
Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother is a best-selling nonfiction book by Sonia Nazario, an American journalist best known for her work on social justice. Originally published in 2006, the book is based on Nazario’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Enrique’s Journey” series, which was written in six parts and published in The Los Angeles Times.The book, which has been published in eight languages and adapted for young adults in... Read Enrique's Journey Summary
Escaping Salem, written by Richard Godbeer and published in 2004, is the true story, based on historical records, of a second, lesser-known set of witch trials that took place in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1692, the same year as the more famous Salem witch trials. The author’s aim is, in part, to undermine the commonly-held conception of New Englanders at the time as feverish, irrational witch hunters, which is based on the mass panic of the... Read Escaping Salem Summary
In his 2001 book Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, historian Daniel K. Richter presents an account of early U.S. history from a rarely seen perspective: that of the American Indians. Using primary sources and imaginative reconstruction, the book reorients us to see the arrival of the European settlers, the growth of the colonies, and the founding of the American Republic as Natives might have experienced them, exploring would happen... Read Facing East from Indian Country Summary
The poem “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa is a meditation on the first time Komunyakaa visited the US Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Komunyakaa served in the Vietnam War as an Army journalist for the military newspaper, Southern Cross, until he was discharged in 1966. He began writing about the war approximately 14 years after coming home from Vietnam.Prior to this, he had only written one poem about his experience in the war, and... Read Facing It Summary
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a 1971 novel by American author Hunter S. Thompson. The book chronicles the story of journalist Raoul Duke and his attorney Doctor Gonzo who drive to Las Vegas, ostensibly to cover an iconic off-road vehicle race. However, they are also looking to “find the American Dream” and take with them a car’s load of hard drugs. Duke is a fictionalized surrogate for Thompson, while Gonzo is based off... Read Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas Summary
For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War is a 1997 nonfiction book by James M. McPherson. McPherson has taught at Princeton since 1962 and written numerous books on the American Civil War, including Battle Cry of Freedom, which won the Pulitzer Prize in History. After several instances of visiting Civil War battlefields and finding himself unable to satisfactorily answer why so many men gave their lives in the war, McPherson sets out... Read For Cause and Comrades Summary
Published in 2004, Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation is a non-fiction, historical study of the role women played in establishing the United States as an independent nation. This study guide refers to the first edition of the text, published by William Morrow-HarperCollins in 2004. In her introduction, Roberts recalls her childhood delight at hearing tales of her ancestor William Claiborne, who met the Founding Fathers. However, she recognizes that she... Read Founding Mothers Summary
Ira Berlin’s Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003) is an analytical work of historical research and synthesis that traces the development of American slavery from the 17th century to national Emancipation. Berlin compares the development and conditions of slavery across regions including the North (usually New England and the Mid-Atlantic states), the coastal South (or sections of it most relevant to the corresponding timeline), and the Southern Interior, particularly in the Lower... Read Generations of Captivity Summary
Patrick Henry, widely considered a Founding Father of the United States, delivered his speech “Give me Liberty, or Give me Death” to the Second Virginia Convention in 1775. The goal of the convention was to decide how to handle Britain’s military threat. Henry believed in fighting for independence—the speech’s immediate goal was to convince Virginia to raise a militia—while others wanted to compromise with Britain. Although no manuscript of Henry’s speech exists, accounts from convention... Read Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death Summary
Russell Baker (b. August 14, 1925) is an American newspaper columnist, humorist, political satirist, and author. He earned a B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1947 and began his career at the Baltimore Sun as a police reporter. He was a columnist at the New York Times from 1962 to 1998 and host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre from 1992 to 2004.His Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir, Growing Up (1982), recounts his childhood and adolescence during the Great Depression... Read Growing Up Summary
Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad is a 1955 biography by American author Ann Petry. This book takes the reader on a journey through Harriet Tubman’s life, from her birth to enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation to her death as a free woman in New York in 1913. Tubman is a well-known figure in American history and is best known for her heroic actions as a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad. After escaping... Read Harriet Tubman Summary
Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (2000, revised 2011), authored by Juan Gonzalez, is a comprehensive account of the intersection of Latin-American history with United States history. Immigration is one of the biggest issues facing America, and the debate over immigration reform has suffered from relentless propaganda, mythologizing, and stereotyping, resulting in much fear, anxiety, and anger. Gonzalez seeks to reveal the story hidden behind many of these stereotypes as he explores... Read Harvest Of Empire Summary
James Michener’s sweeping, multi-generational saga Hawaii was published in 1959. Drawing on his experiences serving in the Pacific Theater in WWII and on his life on the islands afterwards, Michener created a sprawling epic that traced the history of Hawaii and its peoples from the creation of the volcanic islands through the 1950s. Michener’s novel combines well-researched and historically accurate framework with fictional or fictionalized characters and tells stories about the way new waves of... Read Hawaii Summary
Historian Joseph J. Ellis was fascinated by George Washington ever since Ellis’ boyhood in Alexandria, Virginia, where Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon, is located and his historical presence was strongly felt. By the time Ellis wrote His Excellency: George Washington in 2004, he had already produced several popular books about early American history. His Excellency is a more intimate biography of Washington than many previously written, focusing as much on the subject’s character as on his... Read His Excellency: George Washington Summary
How Does It Feel to Be A Problem: Being Young and Arab in America (2008) is a nonfiction text by Brooklyn College English professor and Arab-American Moustafa Bayoumi. The title comes from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 text, The Souls of Black Folk, wherein he directed this question toward the African-American experience. Following the stories of seven young ArabAmericans living in Brooklyn, and including their struggles after the 9/11 attacks, Bayoumi’s book suggests that present-day ArabAmericans absorb the... Read How Does It Feel to Be A Problem Summary
Published in 2013 by Tim Tingle, How I Became a Ghost is a work of middle grade fiction that follows a young boy in the Choctaw nation and his death on the Trail of Tears. The Choctaw Trail of Tears refers to The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the forced relocation of Choctaws from their homes in the deep south to areas further west. How I Became a Ghost has received an American Indian... Read How I Became a Ghost Summary
Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) is a photojournalistic account of New York City’s working class of the late 19th century and the tenements that housed them. Riis exposes the appalling and often inhumane conditions in and around the tenements. He attributes New York City’s squalor and degradation to sheer greed on the part of landlords who prioritize maximum profits over basic decency. More importantly, he documents these conditions with more than 40... Read How the Other Half Lives Summary
The memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is an account of the life of Harriet Ann Jacobs, who calls herself “Linda Brent” in the narrative. Written in the tradition 18th-century writer Olaudah Equiano, Jacobs’s work joins that of her American contemporaries and fellow anti-slavery activists Solomon Northrup and Frederick Douglass. It is a key text for understanding the conditions of the lives of the enslaved in the Southern United States in... Read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Summary
Published in 1988 and written by anthropologist Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World traces the substantial and often over-looked contributions of American Indians to modern society. Despite his lack of formal training as a historian of American native cultures, Weatherford’s anthropological rigor shines through: Indian Givers has been widely praised for its insight, though occasionally criticized for relying too heavily on secondary literature. This study guide refers to... Read Indian Givers Summary
While many know the story of the sinking of the Titanic, fewer have heard the story of the Essex, a whaling ship that was sunk after being repeatedly rammed by an enormous whale during a whaling expedition in 1820. At one time, however, the story of the Essex was the most famous story of maritime tragedy in the United States, even inspiring certain aspects of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. Nathaniel Philbrick’s account of the journey... Read In the Heart of the Sea Summary
Part memoir, part exhortation for much-needed reform to the American criminal justice system, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy is a heartrending and inspirational call to arms written by the activist lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based organization responsible for freeing or reducing the sentences of scores of wrongfully convicted individuals. Stevenson’s memoir weaves together personal stories from his years as a lawyer with strong statements against racial and legal injustice, drawing a clear... Read Just Mercy Summary
Cynthia Kadohata’s first novel, Kira-Kira (2004), is a historical coming-of-age novel for middle-grade readers. The novel tells the story of the Japanese American Takeshima family, who live in the Chesterfield, Georgia, in the 1950s. The protagonist and first-person narrator is the younger daughter, Katie. The narrative spans seven years, involving the family’s move from Iowa to the South, where Katie’s parents become workers in the poultry industry. The narrative follows Katie as she awakens to... Read Kira-Kira Summary
Lafayette in the Somewhat United States is a 2015 history of America written by Sarah Vowell. Vowell uses the perspective of the Marquis de Lafayette—a Frenchman who longed to fight with the Americans and win military glory—to give an irreverent, timely history of the United States, with relevant implications for America’s modern political situation.When Lafayette came to America, he was only 19. He was a wealthy, educated orphan who wanted to acquire personal honor and... Read Lafayette in the Somewhat United States Summary
Landscape with Invisible Hand is a satirical dystopian science fiction novel by M. T. Anderson, written for a young adult audience. A diverse author, Anderson writes both fiction and nonfiction for people of all ages. In 2023, Landscape with Invisible Hand was adapted for film, reflecting the novel’s popularity and relevance. The book depicts a future world in which an alien species, the vuvv, have sold their technology to humans, causing the collapse of the... Read Landscape with Invisible Hand Summary
Left for Dead is a work of military nonfiction for young adults by Pete Nelson. It tells the true story of what happened to the men whose ship, the USS Indianapolis, sank during World War II in July 1945. Hunter Scott, who wrote an introduction for the book, studied the incident for a school history fair project and became determined to discover the truth about what happened. Dismayed by the miscarriage of justice surrounding the... Read Left for Dead Summary
Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War is the third book by New York Times best-selling author Karen Abbott. Though Abbott has recently changed her publishing name to Abbott Kahler, because Liar Temptress, Soldier, Spy is still printed and published as authored by Karen Abbott, this guide will refer to the author by that name. Abbott often writes about American women’s history, focusing on overlooked stories, accomplishments, and contributions of women... Read Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy Summary
Life on the Mississippi is a powerful narrative concerning the past, present, and future of the Mississippi River, including its towns, peoples, and ways of life. The narrative is written by Mark Twain, whose real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Twain explains in the narrative how he “stole” this nickname from an old steamboat captain who was also a writer. Mark Twain is a nautical term and a pilot’s phrase that means “two fathoms.” Two... Read Life on the Mississippi Summary
The novel Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, published by Random House in 2017, offers a portrait of an American legend in mourning, surrounded by a poignant but funny cast of 166 characters. It is Saunders’s debut novel, though he has been a notable author of short story collections for decades. The novel won the prestigious Man Booker Prize and was a New York Times best seller.Set in 1862, Lincoln in the Bardo is... Read Lincoln in the Bardo Summary
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America is a work of nonfiction by James Forman Jr., an American lawyer and legal scholar specializing in racial inequities in criminal justice. Published in 2017, this critically acclaimed book examines the complex role Black leaders played in advancing tough-on-crime policies that ultimately contributed to the mass incarceration of Black people in the United States. Drawing on his experience as a public defender and his extensive... Read Locking Up Our Own Summary
Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and The Start of a New Nation (2003) is a narrative history of the English’s founding of Jamestown in 1606 written by David A. Price. Price is a journalist for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and other American publications. In his retelling of the story, Price seeks to puncture some of the romantic mythology surrounding the relationship between John Smith and Pocahontas, while placing their... Read Love and Hate in Jamestown Summary
Lyddie is a 1996 novel written by Katherine Paterson, winner of the National Book Award, the Newbury Medal, the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Astrid Lindgren Award, the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal. Lyddie was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, an ALA Notable Children’s Book, and an Honor Book of the International Board on Books for Young People. Some of her notable books include Bridge... Read Lyddie Summary
Manhunt: The Twelve-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer (2006) by James L. Swanson is a popular true-crime historical thriller about the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865 and the search for the assassin John Wilkes Booth. James Swanson has written several books about Abraham Lincoln and other events in American history including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The book won the Edgar Award, a literary award for fiction and non-fiction works... Read Manhunt Summary
Martin Eden is a 1909 novel by American author Jack London. Known for his stories of adventure and use of naturalism and realism, London authored more than 50 books, including Call of the Wild and White Fang, before his untimely death at age 40. London wrote Martin Eden at the height of his literary career, inspired by his own disillusionment with fame and literary critics. Although the protagonist’s individualist principles are at odds with London’s... Read Martin Eden Summary
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War is a historic nonfiction narrative by New York Times bestseller, Nathaniel Philbrick. The narrative outlines the reasons for the Mayflower’s historic voyage, before giving a realistic account of the Pilgrims in the New World during their first fifty-five years. Perhaps most important in Philbrick’s assessment is the tenuous relationship between the Pilgrims and their Native American neighbors; with this cooperative relationship in mind, Philbrick investigates several other, “superficial”... Read Mayflower Summary
Miracle at Philadelphia is a 1969 work of history by Catherine Drinker Bowen. It is a detailed account of the Constitutional Convention that took place from May to September 1787 in Philadelphia, resulting in the original drafting of the United States Constitution. It remains one of the most highly regarded popular accounts of the Convention, especially for its rich portraits of the delegates that provides a vivid sense of political debates and social life.This study... Read Miracle At Philadelphia Summary
Frederick Douglass’s memoir My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), published a decade after the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), is his revision of his original narrative. According to historian and Douglass scholar, David W. Blight, it may be the greatest slave narrative ever written. Written during a period after Douglass had attained freedom, it is more revealing than his first memoir and more politically sophisticated. Douglass was older and better educated when... Read My Bondage and My Freedom Summary
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an autobiography by Frederick Douglass that was first published in 1845. Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838 and became a prominent abolitionist, orator, and writer. His autobiography describes his experiences under slavery and his eventual freedom. The book was widely read and influenced public opinion in favor of the abolition of slavery. It remains one of the most read memoirs from the antebellum period. The autobiography includes... Read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Summary
In Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Erica Armstrong Dunbar traces the life of slave Ona Judge from shortly before her birth to just after her death. This tracing is bookended by details about the circumstances into which Judge was born and the effect her life had on her family after her passing. To highlight additional historical aspects of the narrative, Dunbar includes an Author’s Note explaining how she became acquainted... Read Never Caught Summary
In New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan, historian and writer Jill Lepore researches the little-known history of New York’s 1741 slave burnings. The book, published in 2005, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for History. Although slavery is typically associated with the southern United States, Lepore’s history reveals that New York also has a deep and dark history of engaging in the practice... Read New York Burning Summary
No Apparent Distress: A Doctor’s Coming of Age on the Front Lines of American Medicine is author Rachel Pearson’s 2017 account of her intensive medical education and the initial years of her career as a physician. She focuses on stories that illustrate her themes of medical ethics, regret, depression, bias against the poor, and racism. Rather than bogging the reader down in medical jargon, Pearson uses anecdotes to convey her experiences to a layman audience.Pearson... Read No Apparent Distress Summary
Published in 1930, near the end of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter is a coming-of-age narrative about James "Sandy" Rogers, an African-American boy from the small Kansas town of Stanton. Loosely based on Hughes's own childhood in Kansas, the novel traces the challenges of African-American life in the Midwest during the years leading up to World War I. The novel opens with a cyclone that rips the porch from the house of... Read Not Without Laughter Summary
Of Plymouth Plantation is a firsthand account of both the events leading up to the voyage of the Mayflower and the first twenty-five years of settlement in Plymouth, Massachusetts. It was written as a journal by William Bradford, a passenger on the Mayflower who also served multiple terms as Plymouth's governor. He appears in Of Plymouth Plantation both as a narrator and as a character in the story's events, which are told in retrospect. In... Read Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 Summary
Out of Darkness is a young adult historical novel written by Ashley Hope Pérez and published in 2015 by Holiday House of New York. Pérez holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Indiana University, where her research focused on Latin American literature. A professor of World Literatures at Ohio State University, she is also the author of What Can’t Wait (2011), The Knife and The Butterfly (2012), and Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions about... Read Out of Darkness Summary
Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust is a historical middle-grade novel in verse first published in 1997. Through 110 first-person free verse poems, the narrative tells the story of two years in the life of Billie Jo Kelby, young daughter of a struggling farming family in the Oklahoma Panhandle in the mid-1930s. After a tragic accident results in the death of Billie Jo’s mother and baby brother, she and her father must find a way... Read Out of the Dust Summary
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void is one of several bestselling nonfiction works by science writer and humorist Mary Roach. Published in 2010, the work focuses on the human side of space travel and offers behind-the-scenes accounts of peculiar and taboo topics such as sex, vomit, and toilets in space. Roach writes from a candid, outsider’s point of view and demystifies some of the grandeur of space travel by reporting... Read Packing for Mars Summary
Planet of Slums is a non-fiction book published in 2006 by American author and urban theorist Mike Davis. It chronicles the spread of poverty in cities around the world at a time when more than a billion people live in what the United Nations (UN) classifies as "slums."SummaryIn 1950, only 86 cities around the world had populations of one million people or more. When Davis wrote this book in 2005, he predicted that by 2015... Read Planet of Slums Summary
Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma (2004) is a history of Pocahontas’s role in the early stages of English colonialism in the Americas. Its author, Camilla Townsend, is a Professor of History at Rutgers University who has earned multiple awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, for her work. This guide refers to the 2005 Hill and Wang paperback edition.In Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, Townsend reconstructs a biography of Pocahontas, a figure so wrapped up in legends... Read Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma Summary
Praying for Sheetrock is a book of literary nonfiction by writer Melissa Fay Greene. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1991. A group of experts convened by New York University’s journalism department also included the book on its list of the best journalism of the 20th century. The book’s author, Greene, is a native of Georgia. She has published six nonfiction books and has written for many publications, including The... Read Praying for Sheetrock Summary
Pushing the Bear is a historical novel by Diane Glancy about the Trail of Tears and the Cherokee experience in 1838 and 1839 as they traveled from their native land to reservations in the west. Told from the perspective of a number of Cherokee Indians who are on the trail, the book is interspersed with real historical documents and the voices of Christian missionaries and soldiers who were tasked with leading the Cherokee toward their... Read Pushing the Bear Summary
Race and Reunion by David W. Blight was published in 2001. It is about the history of American Civil War memory, specifically focusing on the 50-year period (1865-1915) after the war’s conclusion. It centers the competing themes of racial equality and sectional reunion. The book won numerous awards, including the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Merle Curti Award, the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the James A. Rawley Prize.SummaryBlight uses a variety of... Read Race and Reunion Summary
Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power by linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky evaluates the rise of income inequality in the US over the last 40 years. It argues that the main consequence of neoliberalism, which has increased since the 1970s, is a dramatic concentration of wealth and power to the elite—at the expense of the lower and middle classes. Chomsky observes how rapid financialization since the... Read Requiem for the American Dream Summary
Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (2012) is the fifth work by American writer, critic, and anthropologist David Treuer, and his first work of non-fiction. Treuer would follow this work, seven years later, with the publication of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (2019), an in-depth study of Indigenous history and reservation life. Many of the historical events and themes that Treuer covers in this book are... Read Rez Life Summary
Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist (2018) is a biography of disavowed white nationalist Derek Black, authored by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow.Derek is a former white nationalist wunderkind. Derek is the son of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and Stormfront online hate group creator, Don Black, and the godson of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, white supremacist politician, and notorious public figure, David Duke. Derek’s parents remove... Read Rising Out of Hatred Summary
Separate Pasts: Growing Up White in the Segregated South (1998) is a memoir by the American author and historian Melton A. McLaurin, who describes coming of age as a white person in the segregated South. McLaurin was born in 1941 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and grows up in the nearby town of Wade. The memoir takes place in the small town of Wade during the 1950s and focuses on the racism he witnessed at both individual... Read Separate Pasts Summary
Scott O’Dell’s children’s novel Sing Down the Moon (1970) is a work of historical fiction focusing on a mid-19th-century Navajo teen girl who calls herself Bright Morning. She and her people live as shepherds and farmers in Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. Bright Morning faces a series of trials in the novel: First, she is taken captive and sold into slavery; after she escapes home, white soldiers force her people to leave their village and... Read Sing Down the Moon Summary
Written by journalist Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II is a searing and thorough account of the “new” form of slavery that continues throughout much of the South in the decades after the Civil War. Through a partnership of corporations, state governments, local sheriffs, farmers, and judges, black men throughout the South were routinely arrested on false or trivial charges like vagrancy—a... Read Slavery by Another Name Summary
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Joan Didion’s 1968 collection of essays that document her experiences living in California from 1961 to 1967. It is her first collection of nonfiction (many of the pieces originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post) and is hailed as a seminal document of culture and counterculture in 1960s California. Didion’s style was part of what Tom Wolfe called “New Journalism,” which emphasized the search for meaning over the reporting of facts... Read Slouching Towards Bethlehem Summary
Harvard history professor Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999) explicates the central role of the 19th century New Orleans slave market in supporting the Southern slave trade. Johnson’s main contention is that slavery was a tragic “byproduct” of the sugar, tobacco, and cotton industries. Johnson pairs primary sources, such as slave accounts, with bills of sale and slaveholder correspondence in his reconstruction of the antebellum slave trade. Johnson shows... Read Soul by Soul Summary
“Spunk” is a short story by Zora Neale Hurston published in 1925. Set in the rural Southern United States, “Spunk” follows the conflict that ensues when one man pursues another man’s wife. The story’s publication helped establish Hurston as a significant literary voice during the Harlem Renaissance. In 1989, George C. Wolfe adapted the story, along with content from two others by Hurston, into a play by the same name. Citations in this guide correspond... Read Spunk Summary
Ibrahim Kendi’s comprehensive history of racial thought in the US, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, was published in 2016. Organized around the lifespans of five of the most influential or representative individuals in racial thought across American history, the text spans centuries, offering an overview of the enduring and evolving forms of racist ideology in America.Kendi’s book incorporates conversations in science, literature, visual and musical arts, politics, and... Read Stamped From the Beginning Summary
Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation is a 2017 non-fiction collection of 36 essays, poems, and short stories edited by former Granta editor John Freeman and including contributions by Rebecca Solnit, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Patchett, Annie Dillard, Roxane Gay, and more. The text crosses disciplinary boundaries, covering sociology, history, racial and ethnic studies, and gender studies.The personal essays, stories, and poetry in Tales... Read Tales of Two Americas Summary
Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership by R. David Edmunds is both a biography of the titular Shawnee war chief Tecumseh and an overview of the political movement he started in the early 19th century.From roughly 1805 until his death in October 1813, Tecumseh played a pivotal role in establishing relations between the United States and Native Americans in the Old Northwest Territory (now part of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota). Along... Read Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership Summary
The Alienist, by Caleb Carr, is a New York Times-bestselling historical thriller originally published in 1994 and adapted for television as a TNT series in 2018. A historian by trade, Carr applies his expertise to The Alienist as well as its sequels, The Angel of Darkness (1997) and Surrender, New York (2016). Set in New York City in 1896, The Alienist tells the story of Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist (“alienist,” in the parlance of... Read The Alienist Summary
Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis is a series of pamphlets published between 1776 to 1783 during the American Revolutionary War. Paine uses eloquent, emotional language to persuade the American people to support their states’ new union and contribute to the revolutionary cause. Paine idealizes Americans and their country’s origins to galvanize them to fight for independence, rather than submit themselves to the indignity of being British colonial subjects. Paine uses his platform to attack the... Read The American Crisis Summary
The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, originally published in 2003 by Oxford University Press, is a popular history book by American cultural historian Jim Cullen. As an overview and critical analysis of the American Dream, this book adds some meat to the bones of a traditionally ambiguous concept. Cullen maintains an optimistic outlook about the usefulness of the various American Dreams and about the promise of America, despite... Read The American Dream Summary
“The American Scholar” is a lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, transposed into an essay. The occasion for the lecture was an address that Emerson gave to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, on August 31, 1837.The subject of the lecture is the role of the American intellectual, as distinct from the European intellectual. Emerson calls for an intellectualism that is engaged, optimistic, and forward-thinking. He believes that American scholars have been overly dependent on... Read The American Scholar Summary
The Black Echo (1992) is Michael Connelly’s first novel and the first book in the long-running series featuring Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch. It won the 1993 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and is now a classic in the modern crime genre. Connelly, who worked as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times while starting his career as a novelist, has written over 37 novels, including 24 featuring Detective Bosch. His works... Read The Black Echo Summary
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics is a work of narrative nonfiction written by Daniel James Brown and published in 2013. The book became a New York Times bestseller and won several awards, including the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. The book also inspired a PBS documentary titled The Boys of ’36.Content Warning: The source material references the... Read The Boys in the Boat Summary
Julie Otsuka is a Japanese American writer who was born in 1962 in Palo Alto, California. Both The Buddha in the Attic (2011) and her 2002 novel, When the Emperor was Divine, portray the Japanese American experience of internment camps following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The subject is close to Otsuka’s heart; the FBI arrested her grandfather on suspicion of being an enemy spy, while her mother, uncle, and grandmother were... Read The Buddha in the Attic Summary
The Cider House Rules is the sixth novel by the American Canadian author John Irving. It was published in 1985 by William Morrow and Company. The novel was made into a movie directed by Lasse Hallstrom in 1999. This guide uses the 2012 William Morrow Kindle Edition of The Cider House Rules.Plot SummaryThe Cider House Rules is a Bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel; it is set in the 1930s through to the 1950s. Its protagonist... Read The Cider House Rules Summary
Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s book The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America is a nonfiction history published in 2010. Muhammad, an American historian specializing on race and public policy, studies the connections between Blackness, crime, and the makings of America’s urban North after the Civil War. The book has garnered significant accolade, winning awards such as the 2011 John Hope Franklin Publication Prize and landing on the Vera Institute of... Read The Condemnation of Blackness Summary
The Declaration of Independence is one of the founding documents of the United States of America. The text was written primarily by Thomas Jefferson in June of 1776 after the Second Continental Congress appointed him the chair of the Committee of Five (the others were John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman), a group designated to draft a statement declaring the American colonies independent from Great Britain. Jefferson based his draft on existing... Read The Declaration of Independence Summary
Luis Alberto Urrea’s book, The Devil’s Highway, tells the story of a disastrous border crossing between Mexico and The United States. The Devil’s Highway refers to a particularly brutal stretch of desert. In the past, it was not used as often as other routes, but as the story shows, the development and proliferation of the Border Patrol has made it necessary to use this dangerous route. The story is divided into four sections: “Cutting the... Read The Devil's Highway Summary
The Federalist Papers is a collection of 85 essays, most of which were published as serialized articles between October 1787 and April 1788, by the American statesmen Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. Released under the pseudonym Publius, a common name in ancient Rome derived from the word for “the people” or “of the people,” The Federalist Papers were written to persuade the voters of New York state to ratify the US Constitution. The... Read The Federalist Papers Summary
Betty Friedan’s 1963 The Feminine Mystique is considered a classic text of feminist non-fiction. It was enormously influential in kick-starting the second wave of feminism, a movement that began in the 1960s advocating increased rights and new social roles for women. By voicing the despair that many women felt, The Feminine Mystique galvanized readers across the US to join the feminist movement and prompted others to at least to take its criticisms of mid-century American... Read The Feminine Mystique Summary
Published in 2013, Denise Kiernan’s The Girls of Atomic City tells the stories of Oak Ridge, a secret town that grew around plutonium processing plants in Tennessee, and of the women who worked there during the Second World War. A New York Times bestseller within its first week of publication, the book went on to receive the 2014 APSA Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. Via the experiences of several new arrivals, the reader learns about Oak Ridge... Read The Girls of Atomic City Summary
The Good Nurse: A True Story of Medicine, Madness, and Murder by Charles Graeber is a true crime biography of the life of Charles Cullen, one of the most prolific serial killers in US history. Graeber is an American journalist who spent time as a medical student before moving on to journalism, writing for many prolific news outlets. His joint history in medicine and writing provides him with the necessary expertise to explain the intimacies... Read The Good Nurse Summary
“The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II was published in 1984 and received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction the following year. Written by Studs Terkel, the book is still considered a classic of oral history. Unlike traditional history, which tends to rely on written records and other material artifacts like works of art and literature or archaeological remains, oral histories collect information about past events through interviews with individuals who were... Read The Good War Summary
The Grapes of Wrath is a 1939 novel by American author John Steinbeck. It centers on the Joads, an Oklahoma family evicted from their farm following the 1930s dust storms which ruined local crops. Losing their land, the Joads travel to California to seek work. On their journey they encounter hardship, prejudice, and police intimidation. However, when they get there, things become worse. They must stay in squalid camps and discover that work for migrants... Read The Grapes of Wrath Summary
Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize and the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize, Edward E. Baptist’s 2014 book, The Half Has Never Been Told, challenges revisionist historical studies and presents slavery as a modern and modernizing institution that was central to the creation of American wealth and power. Drawing on slave narratives and other sources, it examines the development and growth of American slavery and the far-reaching effects it had on the nation from... Read The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Summary
Anthropologist David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (2019) revives Indigenous history and centers Indigenous people as subjects, not as mere victims of American avarice. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Treuer is a member of the Ojibwe tribe from the Leech Lake Reservation in north-central Minnesota. He has a doctorate in anthropology, teaches at the University of Southern California, and is the... Read The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee Summary
The Help is a 2009 novel by American novelist Kathryn Stockett. Set during the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi, it focuses on the lives of Black maids working in white households during the civil rights movement. Praised for its unflinching depiction of the lives of these women combined with a pointed sense of humor, The Help went on to be a massive bestseller, selling over five million copies and spending more than a hundred weeks... Read The Help Summary
The Heretic’s Daughter (2008) is the debut novel of author Kathleen Kent. Upon publication, it immediately made the New York Times bestseller list. Kent followed this title with two other best-selling historical fiction works: The Traitor’s Wife (2010) and The Outcasts (2013). She also wrote a crime fiction trilogy that was nominated for an Edgar Award. A resident of Texas, Kent was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2020 for her contribution to... Read The Heretic's Daughter Summary
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot is a non-fiction book that tells the story of Lacks and her HeLa cells, or the immortal cell line that doctors retrieved from her cervical cancer cells. Crown Publishing Group published the book in 2010, and it won a National Academies Communication Award the following year. This guide refers to the Crown 2010 first edition. Henrietta Lacks was a black American woman who died of cancer... Read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks Summary
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America is a 2012 nonfiction book by Thomas King about the history of Indian-White relations. King is a novelist of Cherokee descent, and The Inconvenient Indian is his first book of nonfiction. The book was awarded the CBA Libris Award for Best Non-Fiction Book in 2013. This guide follows the first edition of the book.In the Prologue, “Warm Toast and Porcupines,” King explains how... Read The Inconvenient Indian Summary
American author and historian David McCullough’s debut book, The Johnstown Flood (1968), is a work of social history that chronicles the Johnstown Flood of 1889, a deluge of water and debris that tore through a steel community in Central Pennsylvania, killing more than 2,000 people and causing millions of dollars in damage. The flood resulted from a dam bursting in the mountains above Johnstown. The dam had been somewhat hurriedly built to create a lake... Read The Johnstown Flood Summary
The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th Century America is a work of non-fiction published in 1994 by Oxford University Press. Historians Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz tell the little-known story of Matthias the Prophet in a dramatic and well-documented account that blends biography with true crime. The authors recount events that occurred during the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant religious revival in the United States that reached its peak... Read The Kingdom Of Matthias Summary
Joseph M. Marshall III, who is from the Sicangu Oglala tribe, grew up on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, who told him stories about Lakota traditions and culture. These stories transmit the virtues of Lakota culture, including humility, perseverance, respect, honor, love, sacrifice, truth, compassion, bravery, fortitude, generosity, and wisdom. He dedicates a chapter to each of these virtues, which are at the foundation of Lakota culture. The... Read The Lakota Way Summary
Susan Orlean, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and best-selling author of The Orchid Thief, returned to narrative nonfiction with The Library Book (2018). Through the story of the Los Angeles Central Library, Orlean provides a history of libraries, examining what we stand to lose as the world’s base of knowledge transitions into the digital realm. Orlean received a Goodreads Choice Awards nomination for Best Nonfiction and a place on Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine... Read The Library Book Summary
The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story is a New York Times best-selling nonfiction book written by journalist and novelist Douglas Preston and published by Grand Central Publishing in 2017. Preston’s book follows the history of various expeditions in search of the legendary Lost City of the Monkey God in the La Mosquitia region of Honduras. Most of the book covers an aerial lidar survey and a ground expedition organized and led... Read The Lost City of the Monkey God Summary
Recognized for its depth of research into history’s most powerful device of war, historian Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987) documents the development of the atomic bomb in the 1930s and 1940s, from its conception to its deployment as part of an atrocity committed by the United States against Japan. Rhodes provides extensive background on the personal histories and scientific achievements of the group of international scientists who collectively brought the atomic... Read The Making of the Atomic Bomb Summary
The Minutemen and their World is a history of 18th-century Concord, a Massachusetts town located approximately twenty miles west of Boston. The town is famous for the Transcendentalist writers who produced their works there, but it is perhaps even more famous as the site of the first battle of the American Revolution, when the famed “shot heard round the world” was fired at the town’s North Bridge (xvi). The book’s author, Robert A. Gross, describes... Read The Minutemen and Their World Summary
The Name of War, by Harvard historian Jill Lepore, tells the story of King Philip’s War, the first major battle between American colonists and Native Americans, and its aftermath in historical commentary. It is a conflict the settlers barely win on the ground, but one in which they prevail decisively on the battlefield of the written word. Published in 1998, The Name of War gathers multiple awards, including the Bancroft Prize. After decades of peace... Read The Name of War Summary
In The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, author Jeffrey Toobin begins the Prologue near the end of the story with the funeral of Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 2005. This is a nonfiction book about the transformation of the Supreme Court from liberal to conservative over a period of roughly 35 years, and the transformation was complete upon the death of Rehnquist. Toobin, an American lawyer and legal analyst, published The... Read The Nine Summary
The Notorious Benedict Arnold: A True Story of Adventure, Heroism and Treachery, written by Steven Sheinkin and published in 2010, is a biography for young readers about one of America's notable war heroes who was also her most famous traitor—Benedict Arnold. How this startling reversal came about is traced in the book, which is rigorously researched yet presented in the manner of an adventure novel. Sheinkin confronts the moral ambiguities that lie at the heart... Read The Notorious Benedict Arnold Summary
The Other Side of the Sky is the memoir of Farah Ahmedi, written with Tamim Ansary. The following summary and analysis is based on the 2005 paperback edition published by Simon Spotlight Entertainment, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Ahmedi was born in Afghanistan in 1987 at the height of the war with the Soviet Union. She came to the US in 2002, when she was 14. She had only been in the US a... Read The Other Side of the Sky Summary
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (First Mariners Books edition 2017) by Andrés Reséndez, a Mexican historian working at the University of California Davis, won the 2017 Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. In this book, Reséndez dispels the myth that only African slaves faced enslavement in the Americas. He focuses on Indigenous slaves in the Caribbean, central and northern Mexico, and the American Southwest... Read The Other Slavery Summary
The Radical and the Republican is a nonfiction book written by James Oakes and published in 2007. While many nonfiction works are centered around a central thesis, hypothesis, or argument, The Radical and the Republican does not follow this pattern; instead, Oakes’s approach is one of compare-and-contrast. He sets up Abraham Lincoln (the Republican) and Frederick Douglass (the Radical) as foils, which allows him to move back and forth from the two historical figures as... Read The Radical and the Republican Summary
The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) is a non-fiction book written by American historian and Brown University professor Gordon S. Wood. Most revolutions are an act of violence that result in deaths, property destruction, and a world turned upside down. Americans do not see the American Revolution this way. The American founding fathers were educated men who wrote pamphlets and spoke openly in legislative halls. As the story goes, they were gentlemen, not radicals... Read The Radicalism of the American Revolution Summary
The Red Badge of Courage was written in 1895 by Stephen Crane, a novelist, poet, and journalist well known for his naturalist style and for incorporating the inner lives of common and marginalized people. The novel won wide acclaim for Crane, though his life after the book’s publication was distinguished by scandal and money troubles. Its themes reframe the concept of military duty as a rite of passage, detailing a highly individual and self-searching act... Read The Red Badge of Courage Summary
Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) is one of the 18th-century’s most influential political treatises. It offers a spirited defense of the ongoing French Revolution and calls for dramatic reforms in Britain. Paine wrote Rights of Man as a direct response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a conservative critique that professes skepticism and even horror at the course of events in France since the Revolution began in 1789. Rights of... Read The Rights of Man Summary
The Right Stuff is a lively account of the early American space program and its roots in the subculture of military test pilots that developed after World War II. Wolfe’s eclectic, wide-ranging narrative combines numerous elements: technological advancements in mid-20th-century flight; the generation of daring pilots who pushed innovations to their limits; and reflections on the moral, cultural, and political significance of the first astronauts at the height of the Cold War. Taken together, these... Read The Right Stuff Summary
The Secret History of Wonder Woman is a nonfiction book by Jill Lepore, published in 2014. It falls into the categories of history, comics, women’s studies, and biography, and won the American History Book Prize from the New York Historical Society. Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University and a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. This guide was written from the hardcover first edition.SummaryThe first section, called “Veritas,” includes nine... Read The Secret History of Wonder Woman Summary
Published in 1983, The Sign of the Beaver is a historical adventure novel for middle grade readers written by Elizabeth George Speare. Based on a true story that took place in 1760s Colonial America, the book follows the adventures of a young English boy who, while living alone in the Maine wilderness, befriends a local Penobscot boy who teaches him how to survive. The experience changes his views of himself, his family and fellow colonists... Read The Sign of the Beaver Summary
The Sisters Brothers is a 2011 novel by Canadian writer Patrick DeWitt. Set in 1851, it traces the journey of Charlie and Eli Sisters, two hired killers traveling from Oregon to San Francisco to find a man called Warm, who allegedly stole something from their boss, the Commodore. The darkly comic Western is in the picaresque genre, as the brothers’ episodic misadventures explore different communities populating the American West.The Sisters Brothers is divided into 64... Read The Sisters Brothers Summary
Published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk is an important contribution to African-American literature, American literature, and sociology. A collection of 14 essays, the work is Du Bois’s description of the state of the South and African Americans’ lives at the turn of the 20th century. This guide is based on the Amazon Classics Kindle book edition.In “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois describes the psychological struggles of African Americans as... Read The Souls of Black Folk Summary
“The Tradition” by Jericho Brown is written from the perspective of a collective “we.” This group planted colorful perennial flowers, including aster, nasturtium, and delphinium (Line 1); filmed the flowers they planted blooming; then watched this video on fast forward (“Sped the video to see blossoms / brought in seconds,” Lines 11-12). At the end of the poem, the reader discovers that the collective “we” narrating the poem are Black men, and the sped-up video... Read The Tradition Summary
“The Undefeated” (2019) is a free verse children’s poem by poet and novelist Kwame Alexander. The poem, published as a picture book, celebrates Black Americans, highlighting the struggles the Black community has endured and overcome throughout America’s history, with particular attention on great figures from history, including artists, athletes, and civil rights activists. While the poem’s target audience is children, Alexander and the book’s illustrator, Kadir Nelson, address serious topics like slavery and police brutality... Read The Undefeated Summary
The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America is a work of narrative, historical non-fiction written by John Demos, a professor of history at Yale University. Published in 1995, it won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Set in 18th-century New England, The Unredeemed Captive explores the historical events surrounding a Mohawk raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts on February 29, 1704. The... Read The Unredeemed Captive Summary
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America is a 2013 work of contemporary political science and history by the American journalist George Packer. It won the National Book Award in 2013 and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award. The book explores the trajectory of the United States from 1978 to 2012 and argues that those years saw a diminishing of the institutions, promises, and social connections that had... Read The Unwinding Summary
Published in 2010, The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping ethnography of the Great Migration—the mass exodus of African-Americans from the South to Northern and Western US cities dating from approximately 1914-1970. The book traces the history of racism in the Jim Crow South as well as the reasons, successes, and failures of those African-Americans who left the place of their birth in order to seek better economic and social opportunities elsewhere in the... Read The Warmth Of Other Suns Summary
Published in 1995, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis is a realistic middle grade novel told from the point of view of 10-year-old Kenneth Watson. The Watson family lives in Flint, Michigan, in 1963. The early chapters of the book detail Kenny’s family life, school days, classmates, and older brother Byron’s exploits. When Byron takes one of his “adventures” too far, Kenny’s parents decide a family road trip to Birmingham, Alabama, is... Read The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 Summary
The Way to Rainy Mountain by Navarre Scott Momaday was first published in 1969. Momaday is a member of the Kiowa nation, a PhD-holding literary scholar, and a prominent American writer largely credited with initiating the Native American Literary Renaissance. On his father’s side, Momaday traces his family to Guipahgo (Lone Wolf), the last Principal Chief of the Kiowas, and this lineage features prominently in the book’s storytelling. The book is a work of creative... Read The Way to Rainy Mountain Summary
The essay begins as Poor Richard addresses his audience, “Courteous Reader,” and admits that few “other learned authors” have quoted him, despite his being “an eminent author of almanacs annually now a full quarter of a century” (1). Poor Richard does take solace in the fact that “[his] writings produce [him] some solid pudding” (1) thanks to the people who buy his work, whom he describes as “the best judges of [his] merit” (2). Because... Read The Way To Wealth Summary
Gary Schmidt’s middle-grade novel, The Wednesday Wars, follows seventh grader Holling Hoodhood as he navigates the difficulties of junior high in the late 1960s. Published in 2007, Schmidt’s novel blends historical fiction with a coming-of-age theme, and was given the Newbery Medal in 2008. This guide refers to the Clarion Books 2009 reprint edition. Plot SummaryHolling begins his seventh-grade school year at Camillo Junior High in Long Island, New York. From day one, Holling can... Read The Wednesday Wars Summary
Essayist and commentator Sarah Vowell published her historical and social commentary The Wordy Shipmates in 2008. A humorous but seriously critical examination of the Puritan emigrants that traveled with the flagship Arbella from England to Massachusetts in 1630, the book revisits leading Puritan figures and the colonial events and ideologies they created while trying to establish the “city upon a hill” that defined their Christian mission in, what was to them, a New World.Though colonial... Read The Wordy Shipmates Summary
The Worst Hard Time, written by New York Times journalist Timothy Egan, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2006) and the Washington State Book Award (2006). Egan chronicles the history of the Dust Bowl from the late 1800s to 1939, unfolding the tragedy of errors that led to the environmental and economic disasters of the 1930s. Readers experience historical events through stories of survivors: farmers, cowboys, ranchers, merchants, investors and professionals. Egan chooses survivors... Read The Worst Hard Time Summary
They Called Us Enemy is a 2019 graphic memoir written by author, actor, and activist George Takei and illustrated by Harmony Becker. The story chronicles Takei’s childhood experience in the Japanese internment camps in America during World War II. Takei frames the narrative with a modern-day talk he gives at the home of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who presided over the country during the internment period. During the talk, Takei tells his family’s story while... Read They Called Us Enemy Summary
The Yellow House is a nonfiction memoir published in 2019 by the American author Sarah M. Broom. In a narrative centered around her childhood home, “The Yellow House,” Broom chronicles the history of New Orleans through three generations of her family. The Yellow House won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for best debut book.Plot SummaryIn 1961, Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, becomes a widow at the... Read The Yellow House Summary
Through My Eyes is the autobiography of Ruby Bridges. In 1960, Bridges became the first African American child to integrate an elementary school in New Orleans, Louisiana following a court mandate for the state to desegregate its public school system. Louisiana trailed segregation effort in neighboring states, such as the nine Black high school students known as the “Little Rock Nine” who integrated a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957.Bridges’s autobiography, published in... Read Through My Eyes Summary
To Be a Slave is a nonfiction children’s book written by Julius Lester and published in 1968. In 1969, the book was named a John Newbery Honor Book in recognition of its important contribution to children’s literature.The book focuses on the history of enslavement in the United States. Julius Lester compiled slave narratives and wrote his own historical commentary to accompany them. Lester was writing in the context of the civil rights movement of the... Read To Be a Slave Summary
Published in 1997, Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War is a history of working-class African-American women’s lives in Atlanta, Georgia, from Emancipation to World War I. The text examines the interplay between the racial repression African-American women faced during this time and the resistance they enacted as they sought to exercise their freedom as laborers. The book is winner of several awards, including: the... Read To 'Joy My Freedom Summary
In 2003, Jon Krakauer, nonfiction author and journalist, published Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. Now the inspiration for a television series of the same title on Hulu, the story sent shockwaves as it explored religious extremism on American soil that closely resembled the Taliban-style extremism that had captured the country’s attention following the September 11 attacks. This guide refers to the 2004 paperback edition published by First Anchor Books.Content warning:... Read Under the Banner of Heaven Summary
Up From Slavery is an autobiography written by Booker T. Washington in 1901. Washington is most famous as the founder and first principal of the Tuskegee Institute, later Tuskegee University, a school for Black students in rural Tuskegee, Alabama. As the school became famous world-wide, Washington also became known as a public speaker, addressing diverse audiences around the world to promote his philosophy of industrial education. Historically, Washington is remembered as the first major Black... Read Up From Slavery Summary
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John Lewis’s 1998 memoir, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, written with Mike D’Orso, is an intimate firsthand account of the US Civil Rights Movement (CRM). Lewis, the child of sharecroppers, grew up in Pike County, Alabama, during the heyday of segregation in the American South. From a young age, Lewis questioned the injustices of segregation, yet never imagined that he would become one of the key leaders of the civil rights... Read Walking with the Wind Summary
Originally published in 1994, Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals primarily focuses on the 1957-58 school year at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, during which Beals was a member of the Little Rock Nine—the first group of Black students to attend the formerly all-white high school of 2,000 white students. Beals’s book, written for young-adult readers, speaks of her early life and her many adult accomplishments. Encouraged by school administrators and local... Read Warriors Don't Cry Summary
In his 1986 nonfiction work War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian John W. Dower investigates the racism between the United States and the Empire of Japan, as it existed before, during, and after the Second World War. The very nature and understanding of who the enemy was, for both the Anglo-Americans and the Japanese, presented in many forms. On the American side, there was an important... Read War Without Mercy Summary
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by American historian Daniel Walker Howe, explores the changes the United States underwent in the early 19th century. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History, the book was published in 2007 as part of The Oxford History of the United States. Howe’s work explores the political, military, social, economic, and cultural developments that shaped the nation. Howe does not shy away from the complexities and contradictions of... Read What Hath God Wrought Summary
In “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”, otherwise known as “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” Frederick Douglass outlines a careful argument against the institution of slavery and more specifically the Fugitive Slave Act. Weaving together ethical, religious, and sociopolitical threads of argument, Douglass points out the ironies of American values, particularly regarding the existence of an economic system based on slavery. Originally drafted and given as a speech in... Read What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? Summary
IntroductionIn White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg documents the historical and contemporary disdain of the upper and middle classes in America for the white poor and the resultant staying power of a class hierarchy. Isenberg, an award-winning historian, uses her expertise to contribute this non-fictional work to the academic literature on social class. Originally published in 2016, the book became a New York Times bestseller and was a finalist... Read White Trash Summary
Why We Can’t Wait is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s history of the Birmingham protests that took place in 1963 and his effort to explain the aims and goals of the Civil Rights Movement to a national audience. King explores the background of the protests in Birmingham, the importance of nonviolence as the primary approach to protest, how this approach played out in Birmingham, and the aftermath of the protests in an introduction and eight chapters... Read Why We Can't Wait Summary
Weiland (1798), by Charles Brockden Brown, is one of the first Gothic horror novels printed in America and one of the earliest works in American literature to be influenced by European Romanticism. The narrative appears to have been based on newspaper accounts of the James Yates murders, in which a New York native murdered his wife and four children, claiming that the Holy Spirit told him to do so. Brown often fused history and fiction... Read Wieland Summary
