Reading list
for 8th-grade United States History
1. Students understand the major events preceding the founding
of the nation and relate their significance to the development of
American constitutional democracy.
Brown, Kathleen M., Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs:
Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia
Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in
New World Slavery
2. Students analyze the political principles underlying the U.S.
Constitution and compare the enumerated and implied powers of the
federal government.
Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic , 1776-1787.
3. Students understand the foundation of the American political
system and the ways in which citizens participate in it.
Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance
in Colonial North Carolina
Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology
in Revolutionary America
John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American
North, 1730-1830
4. Students analyze the aspirations and ideals of the people of
the new nation.
Edmund Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” in Forging
the American Character, edited by John R.M. Wilson (Prentice
Hall, 2000).
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making
of the American Working Class
5. Students analyze U.S. foreign policy in the early Republic.
Roger S. Whitcomb, The American Approach to Foreign Affairs:
An Uncertain Tradition
6. Students analyze the divergent paths of the American people
from 1800 to the mid-1800s and the challenges they faced, with emphasis
on the Northeast.
Stuart Blumin. The Emergence of the Middle Class.
Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of
an Independent Women’s Movement in American, 1848-1869
Charles Sellers. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America,
1850-1846
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York:
1789-1860
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic
7. Students analyze the divergent paths of the American people
in the South from 1800 to the mid-1800s and the challenges they faced.
Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American
Society on British Mainland North America ” American
Historical Review 85 (1980): 44-78.
Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and
the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America.” The
William and Mary Quarterly 53 (1996): 251-88.
Ira Berlin. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of
Slavery in North America
Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday
Resistance in the Plantation South
Frederick Douglass, Life and times of Frederick Douglass written
by himself
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll;
the world the slaves made
Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the life of a slave girl [by]
Linda Brent.
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul
Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black
Lawrence Levine, Black culture and black consciousness:
Afro-American folk thought from slavery to freedom
Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: yeoman households,
gender relations, and the political culture of the Antebellum
South Carolina Low Country
8. Students analyze the divergent paths of the American people
in the West from 1800 to the mid-1800s and the challenges they faced.
Steven Aron, How the West was Lost: The Transformation of
Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis
Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of
American Racial Anglo-Saxonism
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: the Unbroken
Past of the American West
Tia Miles, Ties that Bind
Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: the eclipse
of manifest destiny and the coming of the Civil War
Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral
Authority in the American West
9. Students analyze the early and steady attempts to abolish slavery
and to realize the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.
Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor: the Ideology of the Republican
Party before the Civil War
Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (editors), The Abolitionist Sisterhood:
Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America
Sylvia Frey, Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary
Age
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles
in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
Jane Pease and William Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks’ Search
for Freedom, 1830-1861
10. Students analyze the multiple causes, key events, and complex
consequences of the Civil War.
David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and
the American Civil War
David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American
Memory
Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber Eds., Divided Houses: Gender
and the Civil War
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding
South in the American Civil War
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
11. Students analyze the character and lasting consequences of
Reconstruction.
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction
Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political
Culture of Reconstruction
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America ’s Unfinished Revolution,
1863-1877
George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind:
The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914
Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women
and the politics of white supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920
Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slave and Freedom, 1750-1925
Julie Saville, The work of Reconstruction: from slave to wage
laborer in South Carolina , 1860-1870
Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor,
Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation
Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations
in the American South since emancipation
12. Students analyze the transformation of the American economy
and the changing social and political conditions in the United States
in response to the Industrial Revolution.
Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History
of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917
Richard Butsch, The making of American audiences: from stage
to television, 1750-1990
George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and
the makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the millions: Gender and
commerce in the Ladies' home journal and the Saturday Evening
Post, 1880-1910
Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women,
Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth
Century
Lewis Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York nightlife and the transformation
of American culture, 1890-1930
Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and
the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s
John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the turn
of the century
William Leach, Land of Desire: merchants,
power, and the rise of a new American Culture
T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History
of Advertising in America
Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural
Hierarchy in America
Richard M. Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets,
and Class at the turn of the Century
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure
in Turn-of-the-Century New York
Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours For What We Will: Workers and
Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920
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