Recommended Reading

American Political Culture Reading List

Provided by Dr. Angie Maxwell

Arnold, Douglas. The Logic of Congressional Action
Barber, James David.  Presidential Character
Beard, Charles A. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
Beschloss, Michael.  The Presidents: From Washington to Bush
Black, Earl and Merle Black. Politics and Society in the South
Black, Earl and Merle Black. The Vital South: How Presidents are Elected
Bullock, Charles S. The New Politics of the Old South
Burnham, Walter Dean. Democracy in the Making
Croly, Herbert. The Promise of American Life
Daalder, Ivo H. and James M. Lindsey. America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy
Dahl, Robert A. Preface to Democratic Theory
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz
DeLeon, Richard. Left Coast
De Tocqueville, Alexis Democracy in America (selections from)
Edsall, Thomas B. and Mary D. Edsall. Chain Reaction
Fisher, Louis. Constitutional Conflicts Between Congress and the President
Ginsberg, Benjamin and Martin Shefter, Politics By Other Means
Gould, Lewis L. and Richard Norton Smith. The Modern American Presidency
Grant, Ulysses S. Personal Memoirs
Greenstein, Fred. The Presidential Difference
Greenstein, Fred. The Hidden-Hand Presidency
Hamilton, Alexander, et. al. The Federalist Papers (selections from)
Harrington, Michael. The Other America
Hart, Roderick. The Sound of Leadership
Hartz, Louis. The Liberal Tradition in America
Hofstadter, Richard. The Idea of a Party System
Jones, Charles. The Presidency in a Separated System
Kernell, Samuel. Going Public
Key, V. O. Southern Politics
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Letter From A Birmingham Jail
Lippman, Walter. Essays in Public Philosophy; Public Opinion
Lowi, Theodore J. The Personal President
Mayhew, David. Divided We Govern
McDonald, Forrest. Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution
Mead, Walter Russell. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World
Milkis, Sidney. The President and the Parties
Morgenthau, Hans. The Purpose of American Politics
Neustadt, Richard. Presidential Power and Modern Presidents
Oshinsky, David. A Conspiracy so Immense
Sabato, Larry. Feeding Frenzy
Savage, David: Turning Right: The Making of the Rehnquist Supreme Court
Schlesinger, Arthur. The Cycles of American History; The Vital Center
Skowronek, The Politics That Presidents Make
Sowell, Thomas. Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
Teixeira, Ruy. The Disappearing American Voter
Tulis, Jeffrey. The Rhetorical Presidency
Verba, Sidney and Norman Nie. Participation in America
White, Theodore. The Making of the President
Wilson, Woodrow. Constitutional Government in the United States

Southern Culture Reading List

Provided by Dr. Angie Maxwell

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Aiken, Charles S. The Cotton Plantation South Since the Civil War.
Angelou, Maya. I know why the caged bird sings.
Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction.
Ayers, Edward L., and Bradley C. Mittendorf. The Oxford book of the American South: testimony, memory, and fiction.
Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 1863-1915.
Braseaux, Carl. In Search of Evangeline: Birth and Evolution of the Evangeline Myth.
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh. Lynching in the New South, Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930.
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed. Under Sentence of Death: Lynchings in the South.
Brundage, W. Fitzhugh, ed. Where these Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity.
Campbell, Jr., Edward. The Celluloid South: Hollywood and the Southern Myth.
Campbell, Will D. Brother to a dragonfly.
Cash, Wilbur J. The Mind of the South.
Cell, John T. The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South.
Clinton, Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Old South.
Clinton, Catherine. Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend.
Cobb, James C. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity..
Cobb, James C. Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South.
Cooper, William J., and Thomas Terrill. The American South: A History.
Couch, William T. Culture in the South.
Daily, Jane, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, eds. Jumping’ Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights.
Daniel, Pete. Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s.
Davis, Allison, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary B. Gardner. Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class
Degler, Carl N. Place over time: the continuity of southern distinctiveness.
Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave.
Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America.
Egerton, John. Speak Now the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement.
Ellison, Ralph. Going to the Territory. New York: Random House, 1986.
Faulkner, William. If I forget thee, Jerusalem: the wild palms.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South.
Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.
Foster, Gaines M. Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South.
Frank, Andrew K. The Routledge historical atlas of the American South Routledge atlases of American history.
Franklin, John Hope. Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988.
Gaines, Ernest J. The autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
Gates, Henry Louis. The Classic slave narratives.
Genovese, Eugene. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.
Gerster, Patrick, and Nicholas Cords, eds. Myth and Southern History.
Gilmore, Glenda. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy.
Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.
Goldfield, David. Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region.
Grantham, Dewey. The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds.
Griffin, Larry J., and Don Harrison Doyle. The South as an American problem.
Hair, William Ivy. The kingfish and his realm : the life and times of Huey P. Long.
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940.
Handler, Richard, and Eric Gable. The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg.
Hobson, Fred C. Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain.
Howard, John, ed. Carryin’ Out in the Lesbian and Gay South.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Of Mules and Men.
King, Richard H., and Helen Taylor, eds. Dixie Debates: Perspectives on Southern Cultures.
Kirby, Jack Temple. Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination.
Kolchin, Peter. American slavery, 1619-1877.
Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America.
Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow.
Lomax, Alan. Land Where the Blues Began.
Lumpkin, Katharine Du Pre. The making of a Southerner.
Malone, Bill. Southern Music, American Music.
McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow.
Mohl, Raymond, ed. Searching of the Sunbelt: Historical Perspectives on a Region.
Moody, Anne. Coming of age in Mississippi.
Morris, Willie. North toward home.
Naipaul, V.S. A Turn in the South.
O’Brien, Michel. The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941.
O’Connor, Flannery. Collected Works.
O’Dell, Darlene. Sites of southern memory: the autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray.
Odum, Howard W. American Epoch: Southern Portraiture in the National Picture.
Owsley, Frank Lawrence. Plain folk of the Old South.
Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues.
Percy, William Alexander. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son.
Powdermaker, Hortense. After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the Deep South.
Pyron, Darden Asbury. Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell.
Rabinowitz, Howard. Race, Ethnicity, and Urbanization.
Ray, Celeste. Highland Heritage: Scottish Americans in the American South.
Ray, Celeste, ed. Southern Heritage on Display.
Reed, John Shelton. One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture.
Reed, John Shelton. The enduring South:  subcultural persistence in mass society.
Rubin, Louis D. The History of Southern literature.
Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America.
Scott, Anne Firor. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930.
Silber, Nina. Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900.
Singal, Daniel Joseph. The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945.
Singal, Daniel J. William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist.
Smith, Lillian. Killers of the dream.
Smith, Mark M. The Old South.
“Special Issue on the American South.” Amerikastudien/American Studies 42, no. 2 (1997).
Stack, Carol B. Call to home: African Americans reclaim the rural South.
Taylor, William R. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character.
Tindall, George Brown. The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945.
Tolnay, Stewart E., and E.M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: an Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930.
Tucker, Susan. Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South.
Twelve Southerners, Twelve. I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.
Vernhard, Virginia, Betty Brandon, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Theda Purdue, eds. Southern Women: Histories and Identities.
Vlach, John Michael. Back of the big house : the architecture of plantation slavery.
Walker, Margaret. Jubilee.
Walton, Anthony. Mississippi: An American Journey. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Warren, Robert Penn. The legacy of the Civil War.
Welty, Eudora. The optimist’s daughter.
Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill. New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States.
Whisnant, David. All That is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region.
Williamson, Joel. A Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation.
Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History
Wilson, Charles Reagan. Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause.
Wilson, Charles Reagan, and William Ferris, eds. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.
Woods, Clyde Adrian. Development arrested: the blues and plantation power in the Mississippi Delta.
Woodward, C. Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913.
Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow.
Woodward, C. Vann. The Burden of Southern History.
Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth.
Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South.
Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family.