Associate Disclosure
What is our An Exhaustive, But Still Limited, Comprehensive Exam Reading List?
Our An Exhaustive, But Still Limited, Comprehensive Exam Reading List is a collection of articles and books The Life of a Historian compiled for our comprehensive exam preparation. As well as a few works discovered later on but that are, nonetheless, foundational to their respective historiographies.
This list will never be complete nor will it truly satisfy the needs of every graduate student. Therefore, The Life of a Historian will continue to add new works of meaningful scholarship to our reading list.
Start your comprehensive exam preparation off right.
An Exhaustive, But Still Limited, Comprehensive Exam Reading List is meant to provide you with an ideal starting point or foundation for your comprehensive exam preparation.
Peruse the titles. Think about how a historian’s article or book contributes to its respective historiography. What works of scholarship do you confidently know and understand? Which ones seem foreign or elude your working memory?
Be honest with yourself.
No historian has read everything
Start making a list of the historians and/or articles and books you need to familiarize yourself with. Take note of the history and literature that you comprehend well enough to teach to others. And begin identifying the gaps in your understanding of history and historiography.
Take the time to be detailed and thorough with your review and notetaking. Because these notes can be the ideal starting point for your comprehensive exam preparation.
Remember, our An Exhaustive, But Still Limited, Comprehensive Exam Reading List is designed to serve as a guide to your historical strengths and weaknesses. Use it as such.
A quick word of caution…
Be wary of giving yourself too much praise for what you already know. Do not rest on your laurels. This is just the beginning of your preparation. There is plenty of time to forget.
Contrarily, do not criticize yourself too harshly for what you do not know yet. This is just the beginning of your preparation. There is plenty of time to learn.
An Exhaustive, But Still Limited, Comprehensive Exam Reading List
*Reading list is in alphabetical order by author’s last name.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
(1983).
Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (2000).
Bailyn, Bernard. The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (1986).
Barr, Julianne. Peace came in the form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (2007).
Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001).
Breen, T.H. “An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690-1776” (1968).
Brekus, Catherine. Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelical Christianity in Early America (2013).
Brinkley, Alan. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (1995).
Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (2004).
Chavez, Thomas. Spain and the Independence of the United States: An Intrinsic Gift (2002).
Cronin, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983).
Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010).
Dudziak, Mary. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (2000).
Elliot, John. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830 (2007).
Estes, Steve. I am Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (2005).
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988).
Foner, Eric. The Story of American Freedom (1999).
Furstenberg, Francois. In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (2006).
Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974).
Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth-Century (2001).
Godbeer, Richard. The Overflowing of Friendship: Love Between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (2009).
Gutman, Herbert. “Work, Culture, and Society Industrializing America” (1973).
Hatch, Nathan. The Democratization of American Christianity (1991).
Herring, George. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (2002, 4th Edition).
Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (1998).
Issac, Rhys. The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (1982).
Jacoby, Karl. Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (2008).
Jennings, Francis. Empires of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years’ War in America (1988).
Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999).
Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (2005).
Lee, Wayne. Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (2001).
Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1998).
Lindsay, Lisa. Captives as Commodities: The Transatlantic Slave Trade (2008).
Maier, Pauline. American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997).
McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South (2010).
McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (2003).
McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (2001).
McPherson, James. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (2003).
McNeil, J.R. Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010).
Merrell, James. Into the American Woods: Negotiators on the Pennsylvania Frontier (1999).
Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor (1987).
Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, America Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975).
Nash, Gary. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (1974).
Olwell, Robert. Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (1998).
Parent, Anthony. Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1600-1740 (2003).
Raphael, Ray. A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence (2001).
Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seaman, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (1987).
Richter, Daniel. Facing East out of Indian Country (1999).
Roediger, David. Working towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (2005).
Rushworth, Brett. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (2012).
Said, Edward. Orientalism (1979).
Schlesinger, Arthur. The Age of Jackson (1945).
Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (1994).
Sexton, Jay. The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (2011).
Smith-Lentz, Adriane. Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (2001).
Sugrue, Thomas. Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (2008).
Thompson, E.P. Making of the English Working Class (1963).
Thompson, Peter. Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (1999).
Turner, Frederick Jackson. “Significance of the American Frontier” (1893).
White, Alisha. Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (2010).
White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985).
White, Deborah Gray. Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (1999).
Winthrop, Jordan. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968).
Wood, Gordon. The Radicalism of the American Revolution (2005).
Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955).