USA: History and society
*James Baldwin No Name on the Street, The Fire Next Time, Evidence of Things Not Seen , and many others. The most brilliant prose stylist of twentieth-century America. Stunningly incisive accounts of the black experience in the cities of the USA, although Baldwin was such a powerful polemicist that he was occasionally swept away by his own rhetoric.John Berendt Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil . Voodoo, transvestism and murder; best-selling true-life tales of life and death in contemporary Savannah.
Center of the American West Atlas of the New West . Admirable, well-illustrated volume, full of quirky facts, figures and personal essays that reveal the true colors of one of the most mythologized, rapidly changing regions in the nation.
Dee Brown Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee . A quarter of a century on from its first publication, this remains the best narrative of the impact of white settlement and expansion on Native Americans across the continent.
Bill Bryson Made in America . A compulsively readable history of the American language, packed with bizarre snippets, which does much to illuminate the history of the nation.
Peter Carroll and David Noble The Free and the Unfree: a New History of the USA . A good interpretive history of American political development, focusing on the wide gap between those who hold power and those who are disadvantaged on grounds of race, sex or class.
Jill Ker Conway (ed) Written by Herself . Splendid anthology of women's autobiographies from the mid-1800s to the present, including sections on African Americans, scientists, artists and pioneers.
*Mike Davis City of Quartz . City politics, neighborhood gangs, unions, film noir and religion are drawn together in this award-winning, leftist, hyperbolic history of Los Angeles.
Joan Didion The White Album, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Miami and others. Essays on the American way of life, drawing heavily on the late Sixties. A respected social commentator, Didion spoils the act at times by dropping too many names.
Frederick Douglass et al The Classic Slave Narratives . Compilation of ex-slaves' autobiographies, ranging from Olaudah Equíano's kidnapping in Africa and global wanderings to Frederick Douglass' eloquent denunciation of slavery. Includes Harriet Jacobs' story of her escape from Edenton, North Carolina.
*W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folk . Seminal collection of largely autobiographical essays examining the separation of the races in American society at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Brian Fagan Ancient North America . Archeological history of America's native peoples, from the first hunters to cross the Bering Strait up to European contact.
Frances Fitzgerald Cities on a Hill . Intelligent, sympathetic exploration of four of the odder corners of American culture, including San Francisco's gay Castro district and the Rajneeshi community in eastern Oregon.
Shelby Foote The Civil War: a Narrative . Epic, three-volume account containing anything you could possibly want to know about the "War Between the States."
*U.S. Grant Personal Memoirs . Encouraged by Mark Twain, the Union general and subsequent president wrote his autobiography just before his death, in a (successful) bid to recoup his horrendous debts. At first the book feels oddly downbeat, but the man's down-to-earth modesty grows on you.
James R. Grossman Land of Hope . Scholarly yet moving account of the exodus of Southern blacks to Northern cities, specifically Chicago, during the early twentieth century. Though it focuses on the broader social and economic issues, it also manages to bring to life the individual stories involved.
Tony Horwitz Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War . Strange meld of past and present, as journalist Horwitz explores the places in the South where die-hards keep the Civil War very much alive.
Frederick Hoxie (ed) Indians in American History . Eye-opening collection of essays focusing on the role of Native Americans in US history, presenting them as active and aware (if hopelessly outgunned) players rather than passive victims. Filled with illustrations and extensive quotes from journals and contemporary accounts of Native Americans from across the US.
J.B. Jackson American Space . Engagingly written work that traces the transition of America from a rural to an urban and industrialized nation in the crucial decade immediately after the Civil War.
William Loren Katz The Black West . Fascinating, scholarly and long-overdue exploration of the African-American experience of the opening of the West.
Roger G. Kennedy Rediscovering America . Collected essays by one of America's most readable historians, appointed by Clinton to run the National Park Service. Kennedy looks behind the gloss of conventional tellings to reveal something of the real story of how America came to be.
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark The Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806 . Eight volumes of meticulous jottings by the Northwest's first inland explorers, scrupulously following President Jefferson's orders to record every detail of flora, fauna and native inhabitant.
Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor and Martha A. Sandweiss , The Oxford History of the American West . Fascinating collection of essays on Western history, covering topics ranging from myths and movies to art and religion.
James M. McPherson Battle Cry of Freedom . Extremely readable history of the Civil War, which integrates and explains the complex social, economic, political and military factors in one concise volume. Highly recommended.
James Mooney The Ghost Dance Religion and The Sioux Outbreak of 1890 . An extraordinary Bureau of Ethnology report, first published in 1890 but still available in paperback. Mooney persuaded his Washington superiors to allow him to roam the West in search of first-hand evidence, and even interviewed Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, in person.
Roderick Frazier Nash Wilderness and the American Mind . Classic book, just recently reissued, which examines the American take on environmental and conservation issues over the past couple of hundred years. Especially good sections on John Muir and his battles to preserve Yosemite.
Stephen Plog Ancient Peoples of the Southwest . Much the best single-volume history of the pre-Hispanic Southwest, packed with diagrams and color photographs.
Marc Reisner Cadillac Desert . Concise but engaging account of the environmental and political impact on the West of the twentieth cen-tury's mania for dam-building and large-scale irrigation projects.
Witold Rybczynski A Clearing in the Distance: Olmsted and America . Well-told study of America's favorite landscape architect (responsible for NYC's Central Park, among many other accomplishments) that gets beyond Olmsted's green spaces and views him more as a historical and cultural touchstone.
Hunter S. Thompson The Great Shark Hunt and Songs of the Doomed . Accessible and varied collections of the maverick Dr Gonzo's journalistic rantings on contemporary American life and politics. Spiced up by tales of his own anarchic love of good times, guns and gambling.
Sun Tracks & University of Arizona Press Between Sacred Mountains . Superb overview of Navajo history, culture and politics, written by Navajo teachers and parents as a sourcebook for Navajo students.
Stephen Trimble The People . Excellent introduction to all the Native American groups of the Southwest, bringing the history up to date with contemporary interviews.
*Mark Twain Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi , and many others. Mark Twain was by far the funniest and most vivid chronicler of nineteenth-century America. Roughing It , which covers his early wanderings across the continent, all the way to Hawaii, is absolutely compelling.
John Unruh The Plains Across . A history of the wagon trains, drawing heavily on pioneer journals.
Mariann Voller Ghosts in Mississippi . This horrific account of the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and quite why it took thirty years to convict his self-proclaimed assassin, provides fascinating insights into how the Deep South has and has not changed.
Geoffrey C. Ward, with Ric and Ken Burns The Civil War . Marvelous illustrated history of the Civil War, designed to accompany the TV series and using hundreds of the same photographs.
Richard White It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own . Dense, authori tative and all-embracing history of the American West, that debunks the notion of the rugged pioneer by stressing the role of the federal government.
Juan Williams Eyes on the Prize . Informative and detailed accompaniment to the excellent TV series, covering the Civil Rights years from the early 1950s up to 1966, with lots of rare and some very familiar photos.
Edmund Wilson Patriotic Gore . Fascinating eight-hundred-page survey of the literature of the American Civil War, which in its own right serves as an immensely readable narrative of the conflict.
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