Book Review Guidelines
You should review the chosen book and relate it to materials discussed in class. Your review should be typed, with standard margins, font faces, and sizes. It should be analytical and critical, rather than descriptive. You should include descriptions and discussions from the book in the course of advancing an argument or thesis of your own. Articulate your own perspectives on the ideas expressed in the book. You will be graded on your ability to organize and support your own opinions.
Questions to consider in writing the review:
What is the book author's argument?
Does the author present sufficient evidence to support his/her argument?
Based on your knowledge of the subject matter derived from readings
and other sources for this class, do you agree with the substance of
the author's argument?
In what ways do you think the author might have done things differently?
For examples of book reviews that can help you in writing your own, check out Reviews in American History and Journal of American History
Recommended Books
I. 1920s - The Age of Prosperity
1919 and the Red Scare.
William M Tuttle, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970).
Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (President's Research Committee on Social Trends. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955).
Race and Immigration Restriction
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color : European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
The Klan
Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992).
Leonard J. Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
The Great Migration and African-American Culture
David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).
Nathan Irving Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1991).
The Rise of Big Business
Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993).
Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977).
The Mass Media and the Working Class
Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Steven J. Ross, Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Nathan Godfried, WCFL: Chicago's Voice of Labor, 1926-78 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
The Scopes Trial
Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).
The New Woman
Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman, 1976).
II. 1930s - The Great Depression
The Crash
Michael A. Bernstein, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939 (Cambridge, Cambridgeshire and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Anthony Badger, The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933-1940 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).
The Hundred Days
Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 (New York: Random House, 1984).
James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
The Dust Bowl
James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the American Presidency
William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1969. Reprint. New York: Harper Perennial, 1963).
FDR's Critics: Huey Long and Father Coughlin
Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage Books, 1982).
Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
The Second New Deal
Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
Labor Militancy and the CIO
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Janet C. Irons, Testing the New Deal: The General Textile Strike of 1934 in the American South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
The Popular Front
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1997).
Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American D