Reading suggestions for graduate students in history programs

[Sigaba]

The purpose of this thread is for graduate students currently in M.A. and Ph.D. programs to suggest works that their peers may profit from reading. This thread aims to compliment the thread in which general guidance is offered but few, if any, specific titles are mentioned.

I respectfully request that all participants in this thread state clearly how far along you are in your program. This information can be as simple as "I'm in my second year of coursework," or "I'm taking my qualifying exams in two semesters."

I also respectfully request that participants differentiate between works they've read as a part of their general coursework and those works that are directly related to their fields of interest (i.e. areas that will form all or part of your qualifying exams) or one's master's report/thesis or one's dissertation.

I encourage participants to mention works that are off the beaten path. That is, works that are only tangentially related to your core interests but have influenced your views of the craft of history.

As historiography is about debate, please do mention works that offer viable alternatives/counterpoints to the suggestions of other graduate students. I do ask that you phrase recommendations in this category professionally. (That is, let's not re-enact the Maddox-Alperovitz brawl.)

[Riotbeard]

Ok, I am in my last semester of coursework of my PhD (2nd year).

General readings important to historiography:

Carlo Ginzburg- The Cheese and the Worms (I read this the summer before I started Grad School)

Michel Foucault- Discipline and Punish

E. P. Thompson- The Making of the English Work Class

Michael Sappol- A Traffic in Dead Bodies (is a great work of cultural history, but may be more applicable to Americanists)

Eugen Genovese- Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves made

John D'Emilio- Sexual Politics, Sexual Communites

Richard Hofstadter- The Age of Reform

David Brion Davis- The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution

Ivan Hannaford- Race: The History of an Idea in the West

For the most part, these are books I would suggest to anyone of any field, because they use interesting theory or have great prose, etc.

For Americanists:

Winthrop Jordan- White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812

C. Vann Woodward- Origins of the New South or Strange Career of Jim Crow

Lawrence Goodwyn- The Populist Moment

George Fredrickson- The Black Image in the White Mind or Racism: A Short history

Lizbeth Cohen- Making a New Deal

Ann Fabian- The Skull Collectors

Charles Rosenberg- The Cholera Years or The Care of Strangers

Eric Foner- Reconstruction

W. E. B. DuBois- The Souls of Black Folk

William Dusinberre- Them Dark Days (Great Challenge to Roll Jordan Roll)

Edmund Morgan- Slave Counterpoint

These were what came to mind from staring at my book shelf for 15 minutes

Edited March 30, 2012 by Riotbeard

[Riotbeard]

Also, anybody interested in Slavery needs to read Walter Johnson- Soul by Soul: Life in the Antebellum Slave Market

[Gene Parmesan]

3rd year MA in American Studies. Beginning PhD in Fall 2013.

Pivotal books I've read in courses and (somewhat) related to my interests:

Edmund Morgan- American Slavery, American Freedom

John Blassingame- The Slave Community

Raymond Williams- Culture and Society

Rhys Isaac- The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790

William Cronon- Changes in the Land

Robin Kelley- Freedom Dreams

George Lipsitz- Time Passages, Possesive Investment in Whiteness, and/or How Racism Takes Place

Benedict Anderson- Imagined Communities

[irvinchiva10]

For what it's worth, during one of my visits I was told not to read anything pertaining to history, but to instead focus on growing in other respects (e.g. practice a new language. travel abroad, etc.) However, since I was so insistent on wanting to read something, I was told I could do either one of two things: (1) figure out which first-semester course will be the most challenging by speaking to other grad students; obtain the course reading list from the appropriate instructor; beging chipping away at it. OR (2) Read a book that reviews the historiography of your field. For Americanists, American History Now by Lisa McGirr and Eric Foner was recommended.

[lafayette]

Also an Americanist here, so great choices above (esp. Soul by Soul -- yes.)

One should probably have some Foner and Gordon Wood, so A Short History of Reconstruction (or the not short version) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution. My Cronon recommendation is Nature's Metropolis. And finally, my personal favorite -- and the history I have found the most inspiring -- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary.

[Sigaba]

For Americanists, American History Now by Lisa McGirr and Eric Foner was recommended.

MOO, the essays in this work are helpful but the coverage is uneven if one's focus is military or naval history. YMMV.

One should probably have some Foner and Gordon Wood, so A Short History of Reconstruction (or the not short version) and The Radicalism of the American Revolution. My Cronon recommendation is Nature's Metropolis. And finally, my personal favorite -- and the history I have found the most inspiring -- Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary.

One of the more challenging phases of my coursework was a three-week sequence in which a professor assigned Roll, Jordan, Roll, Battle Cry of Freedom, and the full version of Reconstruction.

Nature's Metropolis is among the best works of history I've read on any topic.

[pudewen]

Nature's Metropolis is among the best works of history I've read on any topic.

This is absolutely the case; every historian should read it, no matter what they work on.

I'm not going to offer field-specific recommendations, since I don't think there are very many people working on China around (if I'm wrong, let me know and I'll be happy to add). But a couple of obvious omissions for the general list so far are Joan Scott's Gender and the Politics of History and James Scott's (unrelated) Seeing Like a State. Joan Scott gives the framework for many of the problems of the study of gender in history, which is something that every historian should be thinking about and trying to understand, no matter their topic. James Scott, though not a historian has become one of the most influential social scientists among academic historians; he's not as essential as Foucault, but he's definitely someone whose influence you will encounter (and who is well deserving of that influence).

I'm a first year PhD student, for what it's worth.

[Sigaba]

I'm not going to offer field-specific recommendations, since I don't think there are very many people working on China around (if I'm wrong, let me know and I'll be happy to add).

Pudwen--

With respect, I think you should post works in your areas of interest--if only ones that would appeal to a generalized audience of historians.

In my view, one of the big issues tripping up professional academic history is overspecialization. For me (and your YMMV), a way to address this issue is for more historians to have a working knowledge of what is going on in other wings of the House of Klio. This isn't to say I'm going to have the time nor inclination to sit down and read fifteen or twenty books in every field, but I do try to position myself so that I can direct myself--or someone else--to the right hall.

MOO, we do ourselves and each other a grave disservice if we're unable to relate to each other. If we put our hands in our pockets and behave indifferently--if not disrespectfully--to other disciplines within history, then why should members of the general public care what any of us say? I am not arguing that we should not discuss issues with concern with great intensity or that presenting a united front is even a partial solution to all of our issues. I am simply saying that we need to do a better job at holding fast the lines of our profession and having a working understanding of other fields may help us reach that goal.

Also, as a right of center moderate specializing in America naval/military/diplomatic history, I think there's a pressing need for those of us specializing in America's past to understand the complexity of other areas of specialization. In my view, despite the tremendous advances of the past fifty years, there remains among the general public--if not also some historians--an egocentric view of our past. I think we need to do a much better job at bringing the "margin" into the "mainstream" without further alienating Main Street, Anytown, Red/Blue State, USA. (And if you think I'm understating this dynamic, let me know either here or shoot me a PM.)

So please understand that while an objective of this thread is to give entering graduate students ideas for reading, this thread also seeks to advance our professional development.

My $0.02

[heyles]

Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom was the first history monograph that I enjoyed in a class -- it showed me that history could be engaging, funny, and impeccably researched. Same with David Kennedy's Freedom From Fear. Not as much primary research, but there are lines in there that made me laugh out loud. I learned a lot about writing and constructing a story from these books.

Pickett's Charge in History and Memory by Carol Reardon has some fascinating work about sources, memory, and reconstructing narrative. I second Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and would add Edward Said's Orientalism.

One of the best biographies I've ever read is Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver by Scott Stossel. It's a doorstopper at 600+ pages, but is a comprehensive examination of a person that includes an exhaustive perspective of the times he lived in. An amazing mid-twentieth US history text, and very well-written.

[Gene Parmesan]

Yea Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom is an interesting and worthy read.

Regarding something almost everyone reads in Theories and Methods: Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Found at:

http://www.mcgill.ca...ltern_speak.pdf

Thanks for the suggestion of Sarge, Heyles. Regarding biography, Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits is an excellent biography and I believe won the Bancroft prize(?).

Contributing some more Americanist lit:

Sterling Stuckey- Slave Culture

Mike Davis- City of Quartz (interesting story if I remember correctly, this book was his diss at UCLA but was rejected by faculty)

David Roediger- Wages of Whiteness

Dubois- Black Reconstruction

Barbara Fields- "Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America" and "Ideology and Race in American History"

http://www.solidarit...hool/fields.pdf

I'm starting to wonder if people can suspect where my fields lie.

Edited March 31, 2012 by Gene Parmesan

[Sigaba]

Thanks for the suggestion of Sarge, Heyles. Regarding biography, Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits is an excellent biography and I believe won the Bancroft prize(?).

Yes. FWIW, a list of Bancroft Prize winners is available here.

Mike Davis- City of Quartz (interesting story if I remember correctly, this book was his diss at UCLA but was rejected by faculty)

FYI, you might find that while there's a lot of overlap between American studies and history, established practitioners of the latter often have a different set of sensibilities when it comes to the writing of history.

Read what you want to read, think what you want to think. At the same time, when it comes to guys like Mike Davis, do not be surprised if a professor decides to pull your card and ask, "Is he a historian?" (I witnessed an occasion when such questions were put to Mike Davis by a room full of history professors. His answers did not inspire confidence.)

[kotov]

I'm finishing up my first year of my Ph.D. in Modern European History. I'm in a bit of a narrow field, but I can help with a few general things. If anyone is interested in Holocaust studies, I can provide a decent list for that too.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

Karl Marx, Das Kapital and Critique of the Gotha Program

Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours

Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

Leopold von Ranke, Ferdinand I and Maximillian II of Austria

Most of these are just kind of there to trace the origins of history and its methodological progress. It's the kind of stuff you'd have assigned in a historiography class of some sort, I'd figure. It's good to read foundational sort of books in a lot of different schools of thought (Marxist, modernist, postmodernist, etc.) to evaluate their approaches and figure out your own. I guess my approach is a bit more traditional than a lot of students' would be, but that's just me.

[Sigaba]

ALCON--

When recommending a translated work, please indicate which translation/edition you're recommending.

Edited April 6, 2012 by Sigaba

[annieca]

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

I would argue that you cannot understand nationalism movements without reading Imagined Communities. Great, great book.

[StrangeLight]

PhD, 3rd year (the year of comprehensive exams and dissertation prospectus, hopefully ABD by the end of the month).

these will mostly be useful to people who work on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, nationalism, and class (if you subscribe to the EP thompson version of "class" as relational rather than structural).

rogers brubaker and frederick cooper, "beyond 'identity'" (2000). i think this was in the journal of social history? easy enough to track down on J-STOR, and a must-read for anyone that has ever considered putting the word "identity" in their academic writing.

charles tilly, durable inequality (1998). his model for tracing "group difference" over time (be it through ethnicity, religion, race, gender, etc.) is one of my favourites, since it's one of the few theoretical models to consider difference both relational and a function of material resources and economic power.

peter berger, the sacred canopy (1967). old school. a theoretical text on the internal functioning of religious systems. at times a little opaque, but super useful to anyone interested in how systems of ideology function and persist. those ideologies could be religious, or could be applied to racism, sexism, science, etc. also some bizarrely entertaining forays into sadism and masochism (for real).

fredrik barth. ethnic groups and boundaries (1969). foundational. useful for anyone working on any type of "group," not just studies of ethnicity.

judith butler. undoing gender (2004). also foundational. the idea of norms are huge for gender analysis and queer theory, but also for pretty much anyone that is studying people who occupy the social margins.

[Solidarity]

Love this post and thanks to everyone for sharing. I am attending my first year of Graduate school this coming Fall, and would love to have suggestions on what to read. My interests include 20th Cent. U.S. History with a focus on labor, communism, and radicalism (from 1920 to present).

Any good suggestions?

Thanks a ton.

[crazedandinfused]

Love this post and thanks to everyone for sharing. I am attending my first year of Graduate school this coming Fall, and would love to have suggestions on what to read. My interests include 20th Cent. U.S. History with a focus on labor, communism, and radicalism (from 1920 to present).

Any good suggestions?

Thanks a ton.

The UPS guy just brought me Glenda Gilmore's Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights 1919-1950. It looks friggin fantastic and she's just a wonderful scholar.

Oh, and I enthusiastically second StrangeLight's recommendation of Berger's The Sacred Canopy. It will profoundly change the way you think about religion and, as SL said, pretty much everything else. Tilly also is great, even if the book itself, to put it bluntly, is huge pain in the ass to get through...

Now I have to go re-read Brubaker and Cooper. That went right over my head the 1st time. Parenthetically, it was published in Theory and Society.

Edited April 7, 2012 by crazedandinfused

[Katzenmusik]

I'm a second-year MA student.

I would second or third Nature's Metropolis, Roll Jordan Roll, The Wages of Whiteness, and City of Quartz (not the usual "academic" type of history but an interesting work and a fun read -- and it's good to read something beyond the norm).

Aside from those favorites, a few that I've really enjoyed have been Downtown America by Alison Isenberg, The Murder of Helen Jewett by Patricia Cline Cohen, Gay New York by George Chauncey, and This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust.

[Riotbeard]

Love this post and thanks to everyone for sharing. I am attending my first year of Graduate school this coming Fall, and would love to have suggestions on what to read. My interests include 20th Cent. U.S. History with a focus on labor, communism, and radicalism (from 1920 to present).

Any good suggestions?

Thanks a ton.

Lisbeth Cohen, Making a New Deal. Great book about the CIO in Chicago.

Defying Dixie by Glenda Gilmore definitely has some interesting stuff about Southern labor activism, but is probably not necessary unless you are interested in the South.

John D'Emilio's essay "capitalism and gay identity" is really interesting. Should be pretty findable.

Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Working Class in American History) by Nick Salvatore has been on my personal reading list for a while, but I haven't gotten to it.

It also might be worth watching the movie made by hollywood blacklist filmmakers "The Salt of the Earth." Last time I checked it is on Netflix instant. If you can be more specific about other types of "radicalism" you are interested in, it could be easier to suggest some books.

[Riotbeard]

You should also read the political scientist, Adolph Reed. His works Stirrings in the Jug and Class Notes are essential for thinking about labor politics. He provides a very good challenge to the identity oriented left of contemporary society and academia. Plus he is a really nice person and too brilliant.

[Gene Parmesan]

Love this post and thanks to everyone for sharing. I am attending my first year of Graduate school this coming Fall, and would love to have suggestions on what to read. My interests include 20th Cent. U.S. History with a focus on labor, communism, and radicalism (from 1920 to present).

Any good suggestions?

Thanks a ton.

Some quick suggestions of books that have cropped up for me, by no means exhaustive or definitive, and in no order than what I could conjure in my brain in the moment. Many of these books might be considered American Studies, FYI.

George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place or Rainbow at Midnight

Robin Kelley, Race Rebels and Freedom Dreams and Hammer and Hoe

Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country

Herbert Gutman, "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919"

Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression

Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity

Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935-46

James Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism

Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929-41

David Montogomery, The Fall of the House of Labor

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front

Danny Widener, Black Arts West

Edited April 8, 2012 by Gene Parmesan

[Gene Parmesan]

Oh those interested in labor, radicalism, and political economy should read whatever they can on neoliberalism, in my opinion. I'm still working on devising a list for myself on neoliberalism and I'll share that once I do

Edited April 8, 2012 by Gene Parmesan

[Safferz]

Some quick suggestions of books that have cropped up for me, by no means exhaustive or definitive, and in no order than what I could conjure in my brain in the moment. Many of these books might be considered American Studies, FYI.

George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place or Rainbow at Midnight

Robin Kelley, Race Rebels and Freedom Dreams and Hammer and Hoe

Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country

Herbert Gutman, "Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919"

Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression

Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity

Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935-46

James Barrett, William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism

Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in US Proletarian Fiction, 1929-41

David Montogomery, The Fall of the House of Labor

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front

Danny Widener, Black Arts West

Great list, I've read quite a few of these. Robin Kelley may just be my favourite historian

[annieca]

Anyone have any recommendations for social history (particularly nationalism movements) and Cold War/Post-Cold War Eastern Europe?