Progressive History Reading List
By Erik at Alterdestiny has tired of talking with leftists whose only knowledge of American history comes via Howard Zinn. Accordingly, he has put together a history reading list for progressives. He goes into detail on each book; here I just reproduce the titles:
1. Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America.
2. Gordon Wood, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.
3. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.
4. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West.
5. Jefferson Cowie, Capital Moves: RCA’s Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor.
6. Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left.
7. Rickie Solinger, Wake Up Little Susie: Single Pregnancy and Race before Roe v. Wade.
8. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
9. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
10. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and Rise of a New American Culture.
11. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War.
12. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815.
Following Erik’s example, maybe I’ll put something together on international politics in the next week or so.