- Bad Analogy Theater
- Posts
- April Book Recs
April Book Recs
A trio of titles that I've leaned on a lot over the full course of the year.
Shawn Hudson
April 09, 2025
A short bonus newsletter today, no Bad Analogy Theater™ in sight.
When I knew I was going to be teaching AP US History last year, I immediately began the process of gathering sources. Most of my history classes I took in college were not US history stuff - I took the first half survey (to 1877) and a modern US diplomatic history class that was mostly just the 20th century, and pretty specific. Then I wound up teaching US History to 1877 to 8th graders a couple decades ago, which leaves me with some very thin understandings or knowledge about several periods in US history. I had stumbled across a great website for finding book recs, especially in non-fiction stuff, called, and you’ll never guess the hook, Five Books. Authors with expertise in a topic or who’ve authored books in the subject do interview where they recommend five books for folks wanting to get some great insight or understand the “canon” or whatever.
I immediately built a giant wishlist of US stuff, and to my sheer, utter delight and shock, friends on the facespace bought out my entire wishlist. I still have the list and receipts and someday I’m going to get around to thanking everyone who contributed, but it gave me SO MUCH to work with. This year I’ve been mostly skimming and searching for teachable tidbits, since the task of reading the entire pile is just not possible while teaching the class for the first time. I intend to keep reccing books as part of my “thank you” for everyone who helped me out last summer (and will do an actual, full thank you), and certainly.. I’m never posting my wishlist again because the love I felt deserves to be shared with other people.
So here are just three books that have been continual friends throughout the class that I highly recommend for anyone wanting to learn about the broadest sweep of US history.
Book 1 (If you want a modern survey): These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore
So I knew I needed a survey of the whole shebang, and I’d remembered this being recommended in the past. It was published in 2018 and won a bunch of awards, so it was a recent survey that ran right up to 2016. I have not been disappointed at all.
“These Truths” are a reference to the Declaration of Independence - that all men are created equal and they have some inalienable rights. Every chapter introduces an individual or two to track through the history of the time period. Especially early on, there is strong female and minority representation (Ben Franklin’s sister Jane; Maria Stewart, a free African American woman who wrote for The Liberator; women’s rights advocate Margaret Fuller, “the people’s party Amazon” Mary E. Lease, etc.), and I think Lepore is fantastic at blending quotes and narrative to give you real insight into the people of the period without getting you bogged down in epically long excerpts. It’s super readable, and my favorite negative review is from Bill Gates, who complained that her analysis of the Great Recession was a little unfair. Well, tough shit Bill.
Oh, and the absolute best thing: I really feared that leaving world history behind would rob me of the joy of saying Lake Titicaca and Djibouti. Well, Jill Lepore handed me this treasure:
“In December 1816, a group of northern reformers and southern slave owners met in Washington at Davis’s Hotel for a meeting chaired by Henry Clay, the fast-talking Kentucky congressman and Speaker of the House. They’d gathered to discuss what to do about the nation’s growing number of free black… the men who met in Davis’s Hotel decided upon a plan: they would found a colony in Africa, as Clay said, ‘to rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population.’ They a elected a president, BUSHROD WASHINGTON, George Washington’s nephew and a Supreme Court justice. Andrew Jackson served as a vice president. They chose a name for their organization; they called it the American Colonization Society.”
Y’all. Bushrod Washington. Great name, but an even more fascinating story lurking there.
Book Two (If you want a survey about the relationship between government and the economy): Land of Promise - An Economic History of the United States by Michael Lind
When I ran into this one, it was an absolute no brainer. Honestly, if nothing else, check it out from the library and just read the first eighteen pages. Lind runs through the broadest strokes of US economic development and the link it has between the structure and function of our federal government. Here’s the premise:
“Some economic historians have distinguished as many as five major waves of technological change since the industrial era began. Many identify three… the late 1700s, based on the steam engine; the late nineteenth century, based on electricity, automobiles, and science-based chemical industries; and the mid- and late twentieth century, based on the computer.
“Students of American political history have argued that, despite the formal continuity of its political institutions, the United States has gone through two or three regimes or informal “republics…”
“What is the connection, if any, between successive industrial revolutions and successive American republics? As many scholars have observed, therre tends to be time lag of a generation or two between the invention of general-purpose technology and its widespread adoption in ways that revolutionize the economy and society…
“That means that, while the invention phase of each industrial revolution has coincided roughly with the foundation of each American republic… The result is a lag of several decades between technology-driven change in America’s economy and society and the adaptation to the change of America’s political and legal institutions.”
The book then runs through the successive waves of economic development and political adaptation. I have to quote Chapter 1 a second time, because for a person who has taught world geography, human geography, and world history, this little insight really made me sit back and stare off into the middle distance as realization struck:
“The cotton South had long been an informal economic colony of Britain, even though it was part of the United States. Now the planters sought to make the Confederate States of America into an independent country that would specialize in commodity exports to Britain as part of Britain’s informal economic empire, like the postcolonial Latin America in the nineteenth century. But the South’s bid for independence depended on British intervention, and when that did not occur, it was inevitable that the forces of the Union, strengthened by modern industry and modern finance, would conquer a renegade region that had boasted of its rejection of both.”
Savage.
Book 3 (If you want to learn about how successive generations of Americans have viewed and used the American Revolution): The Memory of ‘76 - The Revolution in American History by Michael D. Hattem
Okay, one of my big dreams/goals for next year is to incorporate more of this book each time we move from one time period in US history to the next. I’d teach a whole class built around the historiography of major events or narratives if I could. This book is so fascinating — when asked I’ll almost always say that the Revolution/Constitution era is my favorite part of US history, so when I heard about this book, I knew I had to have it.
If you’ve lived in the US for any period of time and paid any attention to politics, you’ll know that we argue constantly about what the Revolution actually means - from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution, to Washington’s precedents and decisions, to the deification of the Founding Fathers. Speaking of, this book introduced me to the fact that it was Warren fucking Harden that elevated that founders to deities in 1916. For people interested in figuring out the development of our partisan divide, watching the shift in emphasis from one element to another is really instructive.
“Many Americans have believed that the legacy of the Revolution has the power to bring the country together. But this book argues that the memory of the Revolution has often done more to divide Americans than to unite them. First, it has been used to protect and defend the status quo… The second political purpose of the memory of the Revolution has been to effect or justify change…
I have found that, throughout our history, conflict over the memory of the Revolution has tended to become more vehement and consequential when one or more of five circumstances exist: unusually high levels of political partisanship, economic uncertainty, active social movements against inequality and injustice, increased immigration (or widespread perceptions of increased immigration), and major anniversaries.
The dual principles of liberty and equality have a long history of debate. This is a really important thread throughout our history, from justifying the overturn of minimum wage laws during the Gilded Age (freedom to sign whatever contract you want) to both ending and continuing segregation (the equality part should be obvious, the liberty part is freedom for states or cities to govern themselves).
A second thread follows the changes in how Americans have understood the two key revolutionary first principles of liberty and equality. Generally speaking, conservatives (and their classical liberal forebearers) have typically prioritized liberty over equality. They have understood liberty as a set of privileges; therefore, a major part of the value of liberty comes from the fact that others are denied those privileges. As a result, equality, particularly since the end of slavery, has been seen as an inherent threat to liberty. Liberals and progressives, however, have prioritized equality. For them, there can be no liberty for society as a whole as long as gross inequalities exist. These two principles — like the two founding documents — have been defined in no small part in response to the countries racial politics.
So there you go, three book recommendations that run the full course of US history but in different ways. Would love to hear from anyone who reads (or has read) any of these three, and if this is helpful, I would happily write more recs as sort of “bonus” newsletters down the road. Believe me, I have plllllllenty more books to talk about! Relatedly, if anyone wants to donate a few bookshelves, uh, I may know someone who could use them.