Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (105 page)

Desowitz, Robert S.
Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria? Torrid Diseases in a Temperate World.
New York: Norton, 1997. A history of disease in the Americas, including the exchange of diseases with Europe after Columbus’s arrival.

Diamond, Jared.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.
New York: Norton, 1998. Pulitzer Prize–winning examination of the origins of cultures and societies that provides a convincing explanation for the differences in development in different places. Excellent discussion of the peopling of the Americas and the clash between European and Native American civilizations.

Granzotto, Gianni.
Christopher Columbus.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985. By an Italian historian, a comprehensive and realistic portrait of America’s European discoverer.

Jennings, Francis.
The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. As the title implies, this book departs from the traditional view of a European “discovery” of America, calling it instead an “invasion.”

Klein, Herbert S.
The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978. A standard history of the slave trade.

Kurlansky, Mark.
Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.
New York: Walker, 1997. Why Europeans really sailed across the Atlantic, and what fed them along the way. A fascinating account of how dependent the settlement of North America was on the pursuit of this fish.

Lauber, Patricia.
Who Discovered America?
New York: Random House, 1970. A young-adult book that provides a very adequate introduction to the pre-Columbian history of the Americas.

Magnusson, Magnus, and Hermann Palsson.
The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America.
New York: Penguin, 1965.

McNeill, William H.
Plagues and Peoples.
New York: Anchor, 1977. How disease has affected and altered the course of history.

Morison, Samuel Eliot.
The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages.
London: Oxford University Press, 1971.

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The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages.
London: Oxford University Press, 1974. These two volumes have been abridged and combined by Morison in
The Great Explorers.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

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Christopher Columbus, Mariner.
New York: New American Library, 1985. Originally written in the 1940s, a rather admiring, and now dated, view of the explorer by a renowned naval historian.

Nash, Gary B.
Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974. A harsh revisionist view of the European arrival.

Parkman, Francis.
France and England in America
(2 vols.). New York: Library of America, 1983. Writing for the general public during the mid-nineteenth century, Parkman was one of America’s first great historian writers.

Philbrick, Nathaniel.
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War.
New York: Viking, 2006. A wonderful revision of the Pilgrim and Puritan founding myth, from the arrival through the Indian wars.

Quinn, David Beers.
England and the Discovery of America: 1481–1620.
New York: Knopf, 1974.

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Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584–1606.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Shorto, Russell.
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America.
New York: Doubleday, 2004. Brilliant narrative of the Dutch arrival in the future New York City.

Smith, John.
Captain John Smith’s History of Virginia.
New York: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1970. The legendary explorer-adventurer’s highly colorful and suspect account of his life and times.

Snell, Tee Loftin.
The Wild Shores: America’s Beginnings.
Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1974.

Stannard, David E.
American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. An unvarnished account of the mass destruction of entire societies and millions of people following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas.

CHAPTER 2. SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

Alden, John R.
George Washington: A Biography.
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970. A sound and readable one-volume biography.

Boatner, Mark M., III.
Encyclopedia of the American Revolution.
New York: McKay, 1996. A complete, authoritative, one-volume reference to the names, places, and events of the Revolution.

Brands, H. W.
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin.
New York: Doubleday, 2000. A thorough and lively account of America’s first international celebrity and probably the most interesting man of the eighteenth century.

Brookhiser, Richard.
Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington.
New York: Free Press, 1996. A laudatory “moral biography” that underscores Washington’s essential role in the creation of the country.

Butterfield, L. H., Marc Friedlander, and Mary-Jo Kline, eds.
The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family.
Boston: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Cohen, I. Bernard.
Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison.
New York: Norton, 1995. Intriguing look at the significance of the scientific knowledge of these four founding fathers and its impact on their politics, a subject overlooked in most histories.

Commager, Henry Steele.
The Empire of Reason: How Europe Imagined and America Realized the Enlightenment.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/
Anchor, 1977. A dean of American history contrasts the European experience of the Enlightenment with America’s more practical political experiment.

Cunliffe, Marcus.
George Washington: Man and Monument
(rev. ed.). Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. How Washington was viewed in his time versus his true biography.

Demos, John.
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England.
London: Oxford University Press, 1982.

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The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America.
New York: Knopf, 1994. A prizewinning account of life in colonial New England, this narrative focuses on the capture of a young girl who chose to remain with her Indian captors.

Draper, Theodore.
A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution.
New York: Times Books, 1996. A thorough and fascinating perspective on the years leading up to the Revolution.

Edgar, Walter.
Partisans and Redcoats: The Southern Conflict That Turned the Tide of the American Revolution.
New York: Morrow, 2001. A valuable history of the overlooked campaign in the Carolinas that ultimately led to the British surrender.

Ellis, Joseph J.
Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation.
New York: Knopf, 2001. A best-selling group portrait of the key founders—John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington—focusing on the crucial decade of the 1790s.

Fenn, Elizabeth A.
Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1782.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. A fascinating book exploring the overlooked role of disease in history—in this case a near-plague during the American Revolution that killed far more Americans than the war did.

Ferling, John.
Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A lively group biography that examines this trio: the “pen” (Jefferson), the “tongue” (Adams), and the “sword” (Washington) who ushered the United States into existence.

Fleming, Thomas.
Liberty! The American Revolution.
New York: Viking, 1997. Excellent companion book to a public television series tracing the American struggle for independence.

Flexner, James Thomas.
Washington: The Indispensable Man.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. This single volume reduces the material found in Flexner’s four-volume study, another standard among biographies of Washington.

Franklin, Benjamin.
The Autobiography and Other Writings.
New York: Signet, 1961.

Freeman, Douglas S.
George Washington: A Biography.
New York: Scribner, 1985. An abridgment of the seven volumes that constitute Freeman’s biography, considered the standard history of Washington.

Hawke, David Freeman.
Everyday Life in Early America.
New York: Harper and Row, 1988. One in a series of books looking at the daily lives of Americans during different eras.

Hill, Frances.
A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials.
New York: Doubleday, 1995. A fascinating account of the notorious 1691 witch hunts.

Hofstadter, Richard.
America at 1750: A Social Portrait.
New York: Knopf, 1971. A snapshot of everyday life in colonial America.

Isaacson, Walter.
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003. Entertaining biography of America’s first international celebrity and one of the key Founders.

Jennings, Francis.
The Creation of America: Through Revolution to Empire.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. An alternative history showing the colonists as conquerors and the Revolution as a rebellion over control of the conquered America.

Kerber, Linda K.
Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. A groundbreaking view of the Revolution through women’s eyes.

Ketchum, Richard M.
The Winter Soldiers.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. Military history of the months between the Declaration of Independence and the crucial Christmas victory at Trenton and later Princeton.

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Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War.
New York: Henry Holt, 1997. A stirring account of one of the most important battles in American history, the 1777 battle in upstate New York that prevented the British from controlling the Hudson River.