AP US History Reading List
Top 10 AP US History Reading List
: The Jungle, A People's History of the United States, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Battle Cry of Freedom, Democracy in America, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation
| Author | Upton Sinclair |
| ISBN | 1884365302 |
For nearly a century, the original version of Upton Sinclair's classic novel has remained almost entirely unknown.
When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial...
A People's History of the United States
| Author | Howard Zinn |
| ISBN | 0060838655 |
Library Journal calls Howard Zinn’s iconic A People's History of the United States “a brilliant and moving history of the American people from the point of view of those…whose plight has been largely omitted from most histories.” Packed with vivid details and telling quotations, Zinn’s...
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
| Author | Dee Brown |
| ISBN | 0805066691 |
Now a special 30th-anniversary edition in both hardcover and paperback, the classic bestselling history The New York Times called "Original, remarkable, and finally heartbreaking...Impossible to put down."
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully documented account...
| Author | Harriet Beecher Stowe |
The narrative drive of Stowe's classic novel is often overlooked in the heat of the controversies surrounding its anti-slavery sentiments. In fact, it is a compelling adventure story with richly drawn characters and has earned a place in both literary and American history. Stowe's puritanical religious...
Filled with fresh interpretations and information, puncturing old myths and challenging new ones, Battle Cry of Freedom will unquestionably become the standard one-volume history of the Civil War.
James McPherson's fast-paced narrative fully integrates the political, social, and...
| Author | Alexis de Tocqueville |
| ISBN | 0140447601 |
Democracy in America has had the singular honor of being even to this day the work that political commentators of every stripe refer to when they seek to draw large conclusions about the society of the USA. Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat, came to the young nation to investigate the functioning...
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
| Author | Gary Gerstle |
| ISBN | 0691102775 |
This sweeping history of twentieth-century America follows the changing and often conflicting ideas about the fundamental nature of American society: Is the United States a social melting pot, as our civic creed warrants, or is full citizenship somehow reserved for those who are white and of the...
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Alternate cover for ISBN 9780345350688
Through a life of passion and struggle, Malcolm X became one of the most influential figures of the 20th Century. In this riveting account, he tells of his journey from a prison cell to Mecca, describing his transition from hoodlum to Muslim minister....
Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption
| Author | Laura Hillenbrand |
| ISBN | 1400064163 |
In her long-awaited new book, Laura Hillenbrand writes with the same rich and vivid narrative voice she displayed in Seabiscuit. Telling an unforgettable story of a man's journey into extremity, Unbroken is a testament to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.
On a May afternoon in 1943,...
American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation
| Author | Jon Meacham |
| ISBN | 1400065550 |
The American Gospel-literally, the good news about America-is that religion shapes our public life without controlling it. In this vivid book, New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham tells the human story of how the Founding Fathers viewed faith, and how they ultimately created a nation in...
| Author | Catherine Drinker Bowen |
| ISBN | 0316103985 |
A classic history of the Federal Convention at Philadelphia in 1787, the stormy, dramatic session that produced the most enduring of political documents: the Constitution of the United States.
From Catherine Drinker Bowen, noted American biographer and National Book Award winner, comes the...
| Author | Lorraine Hansberry |
| ISBN | 0375508333 |
"Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.
Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations...
The Strange Career of Jim Crow
| Author | C. Vann Woodward |
| ISBN | 0195146905 |
C. Vann Woodward, who died in 1999 at the age of 91, was America's most eminent Southern historian, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chestnut's Civil War and a Bancroft Prize for The Origins of the New South. Now, to honor his long and truly distinguished career, Oxford is pleased to publish this...
| Author | Peter Silver |
| ISBN | 0393062481 |
The colonial communities of eighteenth-century America were perhaps the most racially, ethnically, and religiously mixed societies on earth. Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics, and Covenentors, the Irish, the German, the French, the Welsh—groups that rarely intermingled...
| Author | Alan Trachtenberg |
| ISBN | 0809058286 |
A classic examination of the roots of corporate culture, newly revised and updated for the twenty first century
Alan Trachtenberg presents a balanced analysis of the expansion of capitalist power in the last third of the nineteenth century and the cultural changes it brought in its wake....
| Author | Christina Baker Kline |
| ISBN | 0061950726 |
The author of Bird in Hand and The Way Life Should Be delivers her most ambitious and powerful novel to date: a captivating story of two very different women who build an unexpected friendship: a 91-year-old woman with a hidden past as an orphan-train rider and the teenage girl whose own troubled adolescence...
The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride
| Author | Daniel James Brown |
| ISBN | 0061348104 |
In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of emigrants led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows...
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
| Author | Nathaniel Philbrick |
| ISBN | 0670037605 |
HOW DID AMERICA BEGIN?
This simple question launches acclaimed author Nathaniel Philbrick on an extraordinary journey to understand the truth behind our most sacred national myth: the voyage of the Mayflower and the settlement of Plymouth Colony. As Philbrick reveals in this electrifying...
| Author | Dumas Malone |
| ISBN | 0316544736 |
The second volume in this Pulitzer Prize-winning biography tells the story of the eventful middle years in the life of Thomas Jefferson: his ministry to France in the years just before the French Revolution and during the early stages of that conflict; his service as secretary of state in President...
| Author | Dumas Malone |
| ISBN | 0316544752 |
Volume III of Malone's exhaustive study of Thomas Jefferson. This book covers his last year as Secretary of State (1793) through his three year retirement to his home in Virginia, then his one term as Vice President (1797-1801) and concluding with his election to his first term as President in 1801 (yes,...
A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience
Beginning in January 1692, Salem Village in colonial Massachusetts witnessed the largest and most lethal outbreak of witchcraft in early America. Villagers--mainly young women--suffered from unseen torments that caused them to writhe, shriek, and contort their bodies, complaining of pins stuck...
| Author | Scott Weidensaul |
| ISBN | 0151015155 |
Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier—the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.
Here...
