Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (108 page)

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Lincoln Steffens: A Biography.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974. A life of one of the most prominent muckrakers.

Karnow, Stanley.
In Our Image: America’s Experience in the Philippines.
New York: Random House, 1989. A fascinating study of America’s long entanglement in the Philippines, dating from the time of the Spanish-American War and the insurrection, and carrying through to events following the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship by Corazon Aquino.

Keegan, John.
The First World War.
New York: Knopf, 1999. A narrative history by one of America’s preeminent military historians.

Lewis, David Levering.
W. E. B. DuBois: A Biography of a Race, 1868–1919.
New York: Henry Holt, 1993. Winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize, a definitive biography of the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America.

Manchester, William.
The Arms of Krupp: 1587–1968.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. This history of the German munitions and armament family provides a fascinating account of the rise of militarism in Germany that played prominently in both world wars.

Marshall, S. L. A.
World War I.
New York: American Heritage, 1964. A military historian, the author concentrates on the armed confrontations, with far less emphasis on the causes and effects of the war or its long-term consequences.

McCullough, David.
The Great Bridge.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. The fascinating story of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

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The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977. The epic story of the creation of the canal.

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Mornings on Horseback.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981. An excellent biography of the young Teddy Roosevelt.

Menand, Louis.
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history, this fascinating “intellectual history” examines the impact of four people, including Oliver Wendell Holmes and William James, who changed the way Americans thought about education, democracy, and other philosophical notions.

Morris, Edmund.
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.
New York: Coward, McCann and Geohegan, 1979. An admiring yet balanced and excellent account of Roosevelt’s life, to his first inauguration.

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Theodore Rex.
New York: Random House, 2001. Excellent account of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidential years, a sequel to
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.

Painter, Nell Irvin.
Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919.
New York: Norton, 1987. A fascinating portrait of the country during this period of transition from minor power to empire.

Tuchman, Barbara W.
The Guns of August.
New York: Macmillan, 1962. The Pulitzer Prize–winning account of European events leading to World War I and the first fighting at the Battle of the Marne.

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The Zimmerman Telegram.
New York: Macmillan, 1966. An account of the diplomatic turmoil and conspiracy between Germany and Mexico that helped push America into World War I.

Williams, John Hoyt.
A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad.
New York: Times Books, 1988.

Woodward, C. Vann.
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
(3rd rev. ed.). London: Oxford University Press, 1974.

CHAPTER 6. BOOM TO BUST TO BIG BOOM

Ahamed, Liaquat.
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World.
New York: Penguin, 2009. Pulitzer Prize–winning history of the Great Depression, focusing on the small group of central bankers who were behind the meltdown in 1929. Great economic history with new relevance.

Allen, Frederick Lewis.
The Big Change: America Transforms Itself: 1900–1950.
New York: Harper and Row, 1952. A classic by one of the great journalist-historians of the first half of the twentieth century.

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Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s.
New York: Harper and Row, 1931.

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Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America.
New York: Harper and Row, 1939. A social and cultural history of life in the Depression years.

Armor, John, and Peter Wright.
Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams; Commentary by John Hersey.
New York: Times Books, 1988. A detailed chronicle of the Japanese-American internment camp, illustrated by Ansel Adams’s photo documentary of the camp.

Badger, Anthony J.
FDR: The First Hundred Days.
New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. A brief, very readable, balanced overview of the intense period of New Deal legislation introduced as Roosevelt battled the Great Depression.

Berg, A. Scott.
Lindbergh.
New York: Putnam, 1998. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, a definitive account of the dramatic life of the heroic, tragic, and later controversial aviator.

Blum, John Morton.
V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Excellent social history of life on the home front during World War II.

Brooks, John.
Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920–1938.
New York: Norton, 1969. Magazine journalist’s classic telling of Wall Street’s Great Crash and its aftermath; his story of easy credit, inflated egos, and greed has been repeated often.

Chang, Iris.
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
New York: Basic Books, 1997. A gripping account of one of the worst atrocities of World War II, the assault on the civilian population of Nanking, China, by the Japanese in 1937.

Collier, Peter, and David Horowitz.
The Fords: An American Epic.
New York: Summit, 1987. Well-told overview of the man who transformed America’s auto industry and with it the country, and his heirs.

Davis, Kenneth S.
FDR: The New York Years, 1928–1933.
New York: Random House, 1985.

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FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933–1937.
New York: Random House, 1986.

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FDR: The War President, 1940–1943.
New York: Random House, 2000. These three volumes (part of five total by the late historian [no relation to present author]) form a comprehensive overview of FDR’s rise to the presidency.

Egan, Timothy.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Excellent account of the toll taken on average Americans on the Great Plains by the great dust storms and drought that crushed the nation’s agricultural heart in the 1930s.

Flood, Charles Bracelen.
Hitler: The Path to Power.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. A biography that documents Hitler’s rise to unquestioned power in the aftermath of World War I and the Depression.

Fussell, Paul.
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War.
London: Oxford University Press, 1989. Intriguing social history by a World War II veteran and leading writer of military history.

Gentry, Curt.
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets.
New York: Norton, 1991. Detailed biography of America’s “top cop,” who held virtually unchecked public power for fifty years.

Galbraith, John Kenneth.
The Great Crash 1929.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955. The famous economist explains, in layman’s language, the speculative bubble that led to the crash (updated introduction added in 1997).

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A Life in Our Times: Memoirs.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. An autobiography by the economist, diplomat, and historian, especially interesting for Galbraith’s experiences as a member of the bombing survey team that toured both Germany and Japan after the war and concluded that American saturation bombing was inconclusive in both instances.

Goodwin, Doris Kearns.
No Ordinary Time—Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Everything a biography should be: the characters of history come to life vividly in this brilliantly written history of life inside the White House during World War II.

Hersey, John.
Hiroshima.
New York: Knopf, 1946. The classic account of the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Kazin, Alfred.
On Native Grounds.
New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1942. A fascinating and very readable collection of literary criticism, focusing on major American writers of the 1930s and 1940s.

Keegan, John.
The Second World War.
New York: Viking, 1989. With extensive illustrations and maps, a comprehensive account of the “largest single event in human history,” as the author calls it.

Ketchum, Richard M.
The Borrowed Years: 1938–1941, America on the Way to War.
New York: Random House, 1989. An excellent history of America as it waited to enter the war in Europe, concluding with a convincing re-creation of the days that led up to Pearl Harbor.

Kurzman, Dan.
Fatal Voyage: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis.
New York: Atheneum, 1990. The harrowing story of the fate of the Navy cruiser that carried the vital parts of the atomic bomb and was then torpedoed, with tremendous loss of American life.

Lash, Joseph P.
Eleanor and Franklin.
New York: Norton, 1971. Sympathetic, fascinating portrait by a family intimate.

Leckie, Robert.
Delivered from Evil: The Saga of World War II.
New York: Harper and Row, 1987. A massive updated single-volume history of the war.

Madigan, Tim.
The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
New York: St. Martin’s, 2001. A harrowing case study of the deadliest urban riot in American history.

Manchester, William.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1974. Brilliant narrative panorama of America from the Depression to the Watergate era.

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American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. This splendid biography of MacArthur is admiring but not blind to the general’s shortcomings. MacArthur’s life as a soldier—as well as his father’s before him—covers almost every facet of American military involvement from the Spanish-American War to the Korean War.