The Wall Street Journal asked Gordon Wood, one of America’s leading historians, to pick his favorite works of US history, and here is what he had to say.
1) The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It – Richard Hofstadter
2) The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution – Bernard Bailyn
3) White Over Black – Winthrop D. Jordan
4) Mothers of Invention – Drew Gilpin Faust
5) Grand Expectations – James T. Patterson
As a quick side note, if you live in the SF Bay Area, you can catch Gordon Wood teaching at Stanford this spring along with two other Pulitzer Prize Winning historians. The course, The American Founders and Their World, comes out of the Continuing Studies program and is open to the public. Get details here.
via Harvard University Press Twitter Feed (also see Open Culture’s Twitter Feed here)
Mr. Wood is much too modest. His Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 and The Radicalism of the American Revolution both belong on this list.
What about _A People’s History of the United States_, Howard Zinn?
And also
Open Vein of Latin America