July 4 Reading List

While celebrating the nation's birthday w/mixed-martial arts, the renewal of the East Wing, the removal of DEI everywhere, & the refurbishing of the reflecting pool w/fresh algae, here's a list of books etc that came to mind while dozing off -- additional suggestions welcome! (but my personal list is an aide-memoire for items in my collection already read/could be re-read, or that I would like to read, or which I already have on my wishlist). Alphabetical by author. Added an asterisk to titles I've read; the others represent hope to's.

• The Education of Henry Adams / Henry Adams


• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / James Agee & Walker Evans


• A Religious History of the American People / Sydney Ahlstrom*
  


• Little Women / Louisa May Alcott*


• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness / Michelle Alexander


• Akhil Reed Amar




• America's Constitution: A Biography


• America's unwritten constitution : the precedents and principles we live by


• The Bill of Rights : creation and reconstruction




• Band of Brothers : E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest / Stephen E. Ambrose*


• The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (I have an older hardcover edition on my reference shelf)


• The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms: American English Idiomatic Expressions & Phrases (compiling this list reminded me that it's on my Kindle)


• Collected Poems 1951-1971 / A.R. Ammons


• Roommates: My Grandfather's Story / Max Apple*


• Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words: Selected Writings ed Thomas Brothers


• John Ashbery:




• A Nest of Ninnies*


• River and Mountains*


• Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror*




• The New York Trilogy / Paul Auster* (permeated w/ the ghost of Hawthorne, so my Hawthorne substitute)


• James Baldwin : Collected Essays : Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays (Library of America) / James Baldwin, ed Toni Morrison


• The Sot-Weed Factor / John Barth*


• Hollywood: The Oral History / Jeanine Basinger & Sam Wasson*


• L. Frank Baum:




• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (The Oz Series Book 1)* (read it more than once but don't own a copy; still reading my way through the books in this series)


• The Marvelous Land of Oz*




• The Adventures of Augie March (Everyman's Library) / Saul Bellow*


• American Prometheus: the triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer / Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin


• Elizabeth Bishop




• Poems / Elizabeth Bishop; ed Saskia Hamilton


• One Art: Letters of Elizabeth Bishop / ed Robert Giroux




• The American religion : the emergence of the post-Christian nation / Harold Bloom*


• Fahrenheit 451 / Ray Bradbury*


• Taylor Branch:




• Parting the Waters : America in the King Years 1954-63*


• Pillar of Fire : America in the King Years 1963-65 (America in the King Years)*


• At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (America in the King Years)*




• Van Wyck Brooks:
  
  
  
  • The flowering of New England, 1815-1865
  
  
  • New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915
  
  
  • The Times of Melville and Whitman
  
  
  
  
• Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century / Jessica Bruder*


• A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail / Bill Bryson*


• Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (The History of New York City) / Edwin G. Burrows & Mike Wallace


• Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Studies in Cultural History) / Jon Butler


• In Cold Blood / Truman Capote*


• Robert A. Caro:




• The power broker : Robert Moses and the fall of New York*


• Master Of The Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson




• Willa Cather:




• My Antonia*


• O Pioneers!*




• Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis / Jack Chambers


• Farewell, my lovely, & The lady in the lake / Raymond Chandler*


• The Stories of John Cheever*


• Mary Chesnut's Civil War / ed C. Vann Woodward


• The Beans of Egypt, Maine: The Finished Version / Carolyn Chute*


• James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales I; The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie (Library of America)


• Guard of Honor / James Gould Cozzens*


• Hart Crane Complete Poems and Selected Letters / ed Langdon Hammer


• Crane: Prose and Poetry (Library of America) / Stephen Crane


• William Cronon:




• Changes in the Land, Revised Edition: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (unread & in remote storage!)


• Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West




• No offense : civil religion and Protestant taste / John Murray Cuddihy*


• Columbine / Dave Cullen


• Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster / Mike Davis


• Nicholas Dawidoff:




• In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music*


• The Other Side of Prospect: A Story of Violence, Injustice, and the American City




• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City / Matthew Desmond


• James Dickey:




• James Dickey: Poems 1957-1967*


• Deliverance




• Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries / Emily Dickinson w/commentary by Helen Vendler


• We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction (Everyman's Library) / Joan Didion


• Ragtime / E.L. Doctorow*


• USA (The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money) / John Dos Passos (Library of America)


• An American Tragedy / Theodore Dreiser*


• W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk (Library of America Paperback Classics)


• Vegas: a memoir of a dark season / John Gregory Dunne*


• 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers / Jim Dwyer & Kevin Flynn


• A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius: A Memoir Based on a True Story / Dave Eggers*


• Invisible Man / Ralph Ellison*


• Ralph Waldo Emerson:




• Ralph Waldo Emerson : Essays & Poems (Library of America College Editions) / ed Joel Porte, Harold Bloom & Paul Kane


• The Heart of Emerson's Journals




• Snobbery: The American Version / Joseph Epstein*


• The Night Watchman: A Novel / Louise Erdrich


• William Faulkner:




• Absalom, Absalom!*


• Collected Stories of William Faulkner*


• Light in August*


• The Portable Faulkner*


• The Sound and the Fury*




• Federalist papers: tip of the hat to >3 gilroy:




• The Federalist Papers (Signet Classics)


• The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates (Signet Classics)




• Love and Death in the American Novel / Leslie A. Fiedler*


• The Great Gatsby / F. Scott Fitzgerald*


• I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated History of American Words and Phrases / Stuart Berg Flexner


• Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New American Nation Series) / Eric Foner


• Lawrence M. Friedman:




• A History of American Law (Touchstone Books)


• American Law in the Twentieth Century




• City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's / Otto Friedrich*


• The poetry of Robert Frost / ed Edward Connery Lathem


• Class: a guide through the American status system / Paul Fussell*


• The recognitions, a novel / William Gaddis*


• John Ford: The Man and His Films / Tag Gallagher


• The American City : What Works, What Doesn't / Alexander Garvin


• The William H. Gass Reader


• Colored People: a memoir / Henry Louis Gates Jr. just started!


• Gary Giddins




• Visions of Jazz: The First Century


• Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century




• Many Masks: The Life of Frank Lloyd Wright / Brendan Gill


• Howl and Other Poems / Allen Ginsberg*


• The Movies, Mr. Griffith & Me / Lillian Gish & Ann Pinchot


• Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman / James Gleick*


• The Crucial Decade - and After: America, 1945-1960 / Eric Goldman*


• Good Luck Life: The Essential Guide to Chinese American Celebrations and Culture / Rosemary Gong


• Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters / Robert Gordon


• Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs & Selected Letters (LOA #50) / ed Mary D. & William S. McFeely


• A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (The Penguin History of the United States) / Steven Hahn


• David Halberstam




• The Best and the Brightest*


• The Fifties*




• Roots (Dell Book) / Alex Haley*


• Pekka Hämäläinen:




• The Comanche Empire (The Lamar Series in Western History)


• Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America




• Robert Lowell : a biography / Ian Hamilton*


• The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick ed Darryl Pinckney


• The Making of the Wizard of Oz: Movie Magic and Studio Power in the Prime of MGM / Aljean Harmetz*


• High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America / Jessica B. Harris


• Movie Love in the Fifties / James Harvey*


• Notes on the state of Virginia / Thomas Jefferson


• The Known World: A Novel / Edward P. Jones (on the Guardian top 100)


• The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story / Nikole Hannah-Jones*


• Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups / ed Stephen Thernstrom, Ann Orlov, Oscar Handlin


• The short stories of Ernest Hemingway*


• George V. Higgins




• The Friends of Eddie Coyle*


• The Digger's Game*


• Cogan's Trade*




• Cultural literacy : what every American needs to know / E.D. Hirsch*


• Richard Hofstadter:




• The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made It*


• Anti-Intellectualism in American Life*




• Nisei: The Quiet Americans / Bill Hosokawa*


• Farewell to Manzanar: a true story of Japanese American experience during and after the World War II Internment / Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston


• What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States) / Daniel Walker Howe


• World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made / Irving Howe


• American visions : the epic history of art in America / Robert Hughes


• Steve Jobs / Walter Isaacson


• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl / Harriet Jacobs


• The Death and Life of Great American Cities / Jane Jacobs


• Henry James:




• The American


• The Bostonians*


• Portrait of a Lady*


• The Wings of the Dove*




• The Age of Energy : Varieties of American Experience, 1865-1915 / Howard Mumford Jones


• From Here to Eternity (The World War II Trilogy Book 1)* / James Jones


• White over black : American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 / Winthrop D. Jordan


• The Boys of Summer / Roger Kahn*


• The Pound Era / Hugh Kenner*


• On the Road / Jack Kerouac*


• China Men / Maxine Hong Kingston*


• Henry Kissinger:




• White House years


• Years of upheaval




• Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality / Richard Kluger*


• Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family / Robert Kolker


• What It Takes: The Way to the White House / Richard Ben Kramer


• The Ecological Indian: Myth and History / Shepard Krech


• The Reader's encyclopedia of the American West / Howard Lamar


• Helen And Teacher: The Story Of Helen Keller And Anne Sullivan Macy (Radcliffe Biography Series) / Joseph P. Lash


• Studies in Classic American Literature / D.H. Lawrence


• The Making of Asian America: A History / Erika Lee


• To Kill a Mockingbird / Harper Lee*


• These Truths: A History of the United States / Jill Lepore*


• You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn / Wendy Lesser


• W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919-1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century / David Levering Lewis


• The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West / Patricia Nelson Limerick


• Leon F. Litwack:




• Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery*


• Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow*




• H. P. Lovecraft: Tales (Library of America)


• Robert Lowell:




• Lord Weary's castle ; and, The mills of the Kavanaughs*


• Life studies, and For the Union dead*


• Words in air : the complete correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell




• Under the Volcano / Malcolm Lowry*


• Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families / J. Anthony Lukas*


• Stanwyck: A Biography / Axel Madsen


• Norman Mailer:




• The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History*


• The Executioner's Song*




• Jefferson and his Time (6 v) / Dumas Malone


• Charles C. Mann:




• 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus*


• 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created*




• Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music / Greil Marcus*


• The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Galaxy Books) / Leo Marx*


• American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman / F.O. Matthiessen


• Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul / James McBride*


• Blood Meridian / Cormac McCarthy*


• Truman / David McCullough*


• George Cukor: A Double Life / Patrick McGilligan


• Lonesome Dove : a novel / Larry McMurtry*


• Coming into the country / John McPhee (Alaska)*


• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States) / James M. McPherson*


• American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House / Jon Meacham


• Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company / James R. Mellow*


• Moby-Dick (Norton Critical Edition) / Herman Melville*


• Louis Menand:
  
  
  
  • The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War*
  
  
  • The Metaphysical Club: a story of ideas in America*
  
  
  
  
• H. L. Mencken:




• The American language : an inquiry into the development of English in the United States


• A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing




• James Merrill:




• Divine Comedies: poems*


• From the first nine : poems, 1946-1976


• The changing light at Sandover




• Hawaii: A Novel / James A. Michener*


• Tropic of Cancer / Henry Miller*


• Perry Miller:




• New England Mind the Seventeenth Century


• New England Mind from Colony to Province




• Up in the Old Hotel / Joseph Mitchell*


• Gone with the Wind / Margaret Mitchell*


• Marianne Moore: Collected Poems


• Rise of Theodore Roosevelt / Edmund Morris


• Beloved / Toni Morrison*


• Albert Murray: Collected Essays & Memoirs: The Omni-Americans / South to a Very Old Place / The Hero and the Blues / Stomping the Blues / The Blue Devils of Nada (The Library of America) / ed Henry Gates Jr & Paul Devlin


• Vladimir Nabokov:




• The Annotated Lolita / Alfred Apple, editor; read this in another edition but not this one


• Pale fire; a novel*


• Pnin*


• The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson 1940-1971 ed Simon Karlinsky




• A Turn in the South / V.S. Naipaul


• Longtime Californ'; a documentary study of an American Chinatown / Victor Nee & Brett de Bary Nee


• A New Literary History of America (Harvard University Press Reference Library) / editors Greil Marcus & Werner Sollers


• Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 / Barbara Novak


• Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance / Barack Obama*


• Flannery O'Connor : Collected Works : Wise Blood / A Good Man Is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear It Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays & Letters (Library of America) / Flannery O'Connor


• Mormon America: The Power and the Promise / Richard & Joan Ostling*


• The road to Miltown; or, Under the spreading atrophy / S.J. Perelman*


• Rick Perlstein:
  
  
  
  • Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
  
  
  • Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America*
  
  
  • The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan
  
  
  • Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
    
  
  
• South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation / Imani Perry (currently reading)


• The Bell Jar / Sylvia Plath*


• Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance / Robert Pirsig*


• Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka / Edgar Allen Poe*


• Pale Horse, Pale Rider: Three Short Novels: A Library of America eBook Classic / Katherine Anne Porter*


• True Grit / Charles Portis*


• New Selected Poems and Translations (Second Edition) (New Directions Paperbook) / Ezra Pound


• City: Urbanism and Its End (The Institution for Social and Policy St) / Douglas W. Rae*


• Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography / David S. Reynolds (wishlist)


• Housekeeping: A Novel / Marilynne Robinson*


• Hunger of memory : the education of Richard Rodriguez : an autobiography / Richard Rodriguez*


• Joy of Cooking / Irma S. Rombauer (don't own or plan to own a copy, but I've consulted my late mother's copy back in the day)


• Philip Roth:




• American Pastoral*


• The Plot Against America: a novel*


• Portnoy's Complaint*




• A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America / Philip Rucker & Carol Leonig*


• A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century / Witold Rybczynski (supposedly in my bedroom)


• The Catcher in the Rye / J.D. Salinger*


• Low life : lures and snares of old New York / Luc Sante


• The American cinema : directors and directions 1929-1968 / Andrew Sarris*


• Arthur M. Schlesinger:




• The Age of Roosevelt


• A thousand days; John F. Kennedy in the White House




• Gunther Schuller:




• Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (History of Jazz)*


• The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz 1930-1945




• The Golden Gate: a novel in verse / Vikram Seth*


• Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race / Margot Lee Shetterly


• Leslie Marmon Silko:




• Ceremony: (Penguin Orange Collection)


• The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel




• The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood / David Simon & Edward Burns


• Gunfighter Nation: Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America / Richard Slotkin


• A Thousand Acres / Jane Smiley*


• The Greenlanders / Jane Smiley* (historical novel about the future 51st state)


• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn / Betty Smith*


• Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell / Deborah Solomon


• The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck*


• The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play / Wallace Steven, ed Holly Stevens I consult this selection -- esp in ebook, my 3rd copy -- more than Wallace Stevens : collected poetry and prose (Library of America) / Wallace Stevens


• Names on the Land. A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States / George R. Stewart


• The Help / Kathryn Stockett*


• Uncle Tom's Cabin / Harriet Beecher Stowe


• Olive Kitteridge / Elizabeth Strout


• Raise the Roof: The Inspiring Inside Story of the Tennessee Lady Vols' Groundbreaking Season in Women's College Basketball / Pat Summitt w/Sally Jenkins (the Lady Vols were the chief rivals of the UConn Women's teams; Sally Jenkins was a senior sports correspondent who was part of the recent WaPo layoffs)


• Henry David Thoreau:




• A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers ; Walden, or, Life in the woods ; The Maine woods ; Cape Cod (Library of America)* (except Cape Cod; the LoA volume lacks "Civil Disobedience"* readily available from other sources


• The Journals of Henry David Thoreau: 1837-1861 (New York Review Books Classics)




• Writings and drawings (Library of America) / James Thurber


• Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America (LOA #147): A new translation by Arthur Goldhammer (Library of America)


• Calvin Trillin




• American Fried*


• Alice Let's Eat*


• Third Helpings*




• Mark Twain:




• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. An Annotated Text. Backgrounds and Sources. Essays in Criticism. (Norton Critical Editions)*


• Life on the Mississippi (The World's Best Reading)




• John Updike (the American dad novelist):




• Rabbit, Run*


• Rabbit Redux*


• Rabbit at Rest*


• Rabbit Is Rich*




• Gore Vidal:




• Lincoln: A Novel*


• Palimpsest: A Memoir*




• The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War / William T. Vollmann


• Infinite Jest / David Foster Wallace (might take this off once I get around to reading it; we'll see)


• Andy Warhol:




• The Andy Warhol Diaries / Pat Hackett, editor


• The philosophy of Andy Warhol : from A to B and back again*




• All the king's men / Robert Penn Warren*


• Eudora Welty




• Eudora Welty : Stories, Essays & Memoir (Library of America, 102)


• Thirteen stories*




• Edith Wharton:




• The Age of Innocence*


• The House of Mirth*




• The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States) / Richard White


• The Underground Railroad / Colson Whitehead*


• American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 / Alec Wilder*


• The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln / Sean Wilentz


• The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration / Isabel Wilkerson


• Miami Blues / Charles Willeford*


• Stoner / John Williams*


• William Carlos Williams:




• William Carlos Williams : Selected Poems with an introduction by Randall Jarrell*


• Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems*




• Garry Wills:




• Explaining America: The Federalist


• Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence


• Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (wishlist)


• Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man*




• Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War / Edmund Wilson*


• Twentieth-Century American Architecture: The Buildings and Their Makers / Carter Wiseman


• Tom Wolfe:




• The Bonfire of the Vanities*


• The Right Stuff*


• I Am Charlotte Simmons: A Novel*




• Native Son / Richard Wright


• The Autobiography of Malcolm X*


• Revolutionary Road / Richard Yates

American Philosophers to celebrate: >7 featherbear:
Wishlist >8 featherbear:

Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha Jones!

I recommend The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 by Dr Manisha Sinha a lot, too.

Megan Kate Nelson's The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier is on my reading list (soon...)

I saw these two in the UCP and UWP sales this week, and am adding them to my list, too:

• Claude S. Fischer - Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character

• Flannery Burke - Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region

I'm very interested in "What is American?"/"How to be American" after reading so many old children's books, and related to that, the mythmaking of the American Identity. :) (American Civic Religion is the term used to talk about it, in some aspects anyway)

I suppose Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ought to be included, too, but I'm not sure of a good edition. If anyone can suggest one, please do!

A valuable picture book: This Land, text by Ashley Fairbanks (Anishinaabe)

The Federalist Papers
The Anti-Federalist Papers
Common Sense

New books to celebrate, an omnium gatherum:

David Waldstreicher. Boston Review, spring 2026: The Spirit of ’76: What is living and what is dead in our memory of the American Revolution. Review of: The American Revolution, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. Florentine Films and WETA, 2025 -- We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution / Jill Lepore -- Money and the Making of the American Revolution / Andrew David Edwards -- The American Revolution and the Fate of the World / Richard Bell -- Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution / Sarah M. S. Pearsall -- The Unfinished Business of 1776: Why the American Revolution Never Ended / Thomas Richards Jr. -- The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 / Nathan Perl-Rosenthal.

>1 featherbear: Wow! Awesome list!

>2 keristars: I was introduced to Manisha Sinha this past semester. We read from The Slave’s Cause. She’s got a refreshing perspective.

>3 gilroy: One of the first political (novelized) biographies I ever read was To Spit Against the Wind back in the 70s. I think it was formative for me. I’m trying nowadays to read some of the Federalist/Anti-federalist materials.

I just finished Seceding from Secession, which though narrow in point, about the formation of the state of West Virginia, covered a lot of constitutional questions by all three branches of government.

>5 2wonderY: Oh, I need to read The Slave's Cause! That sounds so interesting.

One of my historian friends runs a walking tours company for Baltimore and has a few that touch on topics in that book. I've been so intrigued when she talks about the research she's done. (She's also the one who told me, very correctly, that I would enjoy The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic.)

and not to reply without a contribution to the list:

• Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

July 4 Addendum: American Philosophers
(in my personal library that I remembered to catalog; alphabetical order by philosopher; books about under the philosopher's name; collective intellectual histories under the author's name)

• Allan Bloom: The closing of the American mind : how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today's students


• Robert B. Brandom:
  
  
  
  • Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment
  
  
  • A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology
  
  
  
  
• Stanley Cavell:




• Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays


• Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Harvard Film Studies)


• The Senses of Walden




• Arthur C. Danto:




• Analytical Philosophy of History


• Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective


• Connections to the world : the basic concepts of philosophy


• Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays & Aesthetic Meditations


• Encounters & Reflections: Art in the Historical Present


• The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World


• Nietzsche as philosopher


• The State-Of-The-Art


• What Philosophy Is: a guide to the elements




• Donald Davidson:




• Essays on Actions and Events


• Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation




• Daniel C. Dennett:
  
  
  
  • Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology
  
  
  • Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
  
  
  • Consciousness explained
  
  
  • Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
  
  
  • Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting
  
  
  
  
• John Dewey:




• Democracy and Education, 1916 : The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 9, 1899-1924: (Collected Works of John Dewey) / Jo Ann Boydston, ed


• John Dewey and American democracy / Robert B. Westbrook




• Susan Haack:




• Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays


• Philosophy of logics




• William James:




• Pragmatism, and four essays from The meaning of truth


• The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in human nature; Being the Gifford Lectures on natural religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902


• A Stroll With William James / Jacques Barzun




• Thomas Nagel: Mortal Questions


• Robert Nozick
  
  
  
  • Anarchy, State, and Utopia (forgot to catalog)
  
  
  • The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations
  
  
  • The Nature of Rationality
  
  
  • Philosophical Explanations
  
  
  
  
• Martha C. Nussbaum:




• Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education


• The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (just discovered I forgot to catalog it; 1st book I ever owned by her)


• Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)


• Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law




• Willard Van Ormond Quine:


• Elementary logic


• Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary


• Word and Object (Studies in Communication)


• John Rawls:




• Justice as Fairness: A Restatement


• The Law of Peoples


• Political Liberalism


• A Theory of Justice




• Richard Rorty:




• Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity


• Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980


• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature




• John R. Searle:




• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge Paperback Library)


• Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language

See also:

• The Metaphysical Club: a story of ideas in America / Louis Menand


• Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition / ed. Amy Gutmann

Americana Wish List

Possible adds to my collection; by author:

• L. Frank Baum: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Illustrated): Classic Edition with Original Illustrations (ebook)


• H.G. Bissinger: Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream


• Robert Coles: Children of Crisis: Five Volume Set


• Paul Fischer: The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg―and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema


• David S. Reynolds: Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (if I can't find my uncataloged pbk, I'll eventually get the ebook version)


• Namwali Serpell: On Morrison


• Lionel Trilling: The Liberal Imagination (New York Review Books Classics) (ebook available)


• Garry Wills: Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America


• Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States