Books on U.S. History

Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a 2015 nonfiction book by Kristen Green about the closing of public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia from 1959 to 1964, following the 1954 United States Supreme Court ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional. During the five years the public schools were closed, black students in Prince Edward County largely went uneducated while a new private school for whites, Prince Edward Academy, opened. The book... Read Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County Summary

Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) is American author Ken Kesey’s second novel. The plot revolves around the Stampers, a family of independent loggers who choose to continue working in opposition to a logging union’s dispute with company leadership. The novel uses an experimental structure, switching between first-person and omniscient narrators and telling the story from the perspectives of multiple characters.Kesey and his counterculture group, the “Merry Pranksters,” were the precursors to the hippies of the... Read Sometimes a Great Notion Summary

“Song of Myself” is a free verse poem by the American writer, journalist, and poet Walt Whitman. The poem is often classified as a work of transcendentalist literature. Originally self-published by Whitman himself in 1855, it was considerably revised and expanded over subsequent decades. In 1889, “Song of Myself” was released in its final form as part of the last edition of the collection Leaves of Grass. This final version—the version referenced in this guide—is... Read Song of Myself 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

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“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

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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 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Kendi has also collaborated author Jason Reynolds (Long Way Down, Ain't Burned All the Bright) on a young adult "remix" of Stamped from the Beginning titled Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, and is well known for his 2019 book, How to... Read Stamped From the Beginning Summary

Stoner (1965) by John Williams is a literary fiction novel that tells the story of an average man and highlights how beautiful an average life can be. It concerns a working-class man who becomes a professor in Missouri in post–WWI America. The novel was reissued in 1972, 2003, and 2006. Stoner is an American literary classic detailing the quiet life of an academic and his love of literature. Stoner is an example of the campus... Read Stoner Summary

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Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans is a 1989 book by American historian Ronald Takaki. Takaki analyzes the long and diverse history of Asians in America, explaining the personal and economic circumstances that prompted their immigration, and recounting their myriad experiences in their new country. Takaki argues that, traditionally, historians’ Eurocentric histories have neglected to analyze and explain Asian Americans’ role in American history. This has led to a distorted perception... Read Strangers from a Different Shore Summary

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016) is an in-depth exploration of the rise of the Tea Party movement in Louisiana by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. In an effort to understand the Tea Party and bolster her empathy for political opinions oppositional to her own, Hochschild spent five years getting to know residents and conducting interviews in and around Lake Charles, Louisiana. Hochschild argues that by understanding one another’s... Read Strangers in Their Own Land Summary

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In Mike Lupica’s Summer Ball, published in 2007, 13-year-old Danny Walker heads to an elite basketball summer camp called Right Way. Here, he will match his nationally-recognized skills against some of the best young basketball players in the country. The New York Times-bestselling novelpicks up where Lupica’s previous novel, Travel Team, leaves off: Walker, cut from his local Middletown basketball travel team because he’s too short, leads his new team to the seventh-grade national championship... Read Summer Ball Summary

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and academic Edward J. Larson is a work of historical non-fiction first published in 1997 that discusses the history of the Scopes trial, the events surrounding it, and the aftermath. The 2006 edition includes a new afterword by the author.Larson begins by describing the geopolitical environment in the United States at the time of the 1925... Read Summer for the Gods Summary

Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) is a play by Tennessee Williams about a male sex worker, Chance Wayne, who returns to his Gulf Coast hometown of St. Cloud, Florida, with an aging actress going by the alias of the Princess Kosmonopolis. She is fleeing what she believes is the flop of her last film. Chance hopes to use her money and connections to secure acting roles and a path to stardom for himself and his... Read Sweet Bird of Youth 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