Elizabeth Shippen Green
Happily, summer revives that treasured list of must-reads that we shoved aside for coursework, research, grading, and gaming. Here are a few new releases in early American history that I plan to check out. What’s on your summer reading list? What can you recommend for us to review here at The Junto?
James Corbett David, Dunmore’s New World
Denver Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
Andrew R.L. Cayton, Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793-1818
Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia: A New Edition with an Introduction by Susan Scott Parrish
Daniel K. Richter, Trade, Land, Power: The Struggle for Eastern North America
Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution
Karen A. Weyler, Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America
Brenda Wineapple, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877
Teresa Anne Murphy, Citizenship and the Origins of Women’s History in the United States
Harold Holzer and Eric Foner, The Civil War in 50 Objects
Robert Englebert and Guillaume Teasdale, eds., French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630-1815
Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire
Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator
Timothy M. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein
Christopher Hanlon, America’s England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism
Susan Hardman Moore, Abandoning America: Life-Stories from Early New England
Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas P. Cole, eds., Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America
Barry Levy, Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution
The Junto 
I apologize for the self-promotion, but since I wrote it to be read and responded to, I wanted to mention my upcoming book, _The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America_. Comes out in June from Palgrave’s new Pivot series (so will be available and particularly affordable in digital versions as well as in print), and again, any and all thoughts would be very very appreciated. Thanks so much!
Yikes! I remember Summer reading lists to be a challenge, but your list Sara is daunting. But thank you, nonetheless. Here’s some more line-items for those of you who have not thrown up their hands in response…
Here are some additions that our fellow readers may enjoy:
Shay’s Rebellion; The American Revolution’s Final Battle; Leonard L. Richards
The name of War; King Philip’s War and The Origins of American Identity; Jill Lepore
Notes On A Lost Flute; A Field Guide to the Wabanaki; Kerry Hardy
Every Day Life in The Massachusetts Bay Colony; George Francis Dow
The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625-1725; Abbott Lowell Cummings
There are a number of popular histories coming out this summer having to do with years just before independence (in addition to Philbrick and O’Shaughnessy, whom you already mentioned):
Richard Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774-1776
Joseph Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence
John Ferling, Jefferson and Hamilton: The Rivalry That Forged a Nation
Allegra di Bonaventura, For Adam’s Sake: A Family Saga in Colonial New England
Ruma Chopra, Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America
My response to the first three on that list was, in increasing magnitude, “OMG, that guy’s doing ANOTHER one of these books?!”
HA!! That’s what they do. 😉 I listed them because what struck me about them is their focus on the pre-independence 1770s rather than the 1780s or 1790s which Beeman and Ellis have written about to death. Personally, I will probably read Beeman’s book and the one by di Bonaventura.
The Men Who Lost American is the title that MOST interests me.
I downloaded the Beeman title sample chapter – looks like a very good synthesis that probably won’t contain much new for those who live and breath this period and its inhabitants, but I’d really be curious to hear anyone’s views on that.
Personally, I’m 1/2 through vol 1 of Freeman’s bio of Washington, honoring a long standing pledge to climb that hill one volume per year.
Thanks for these, Sara; looks like I’ve got some Interlibrary Loan requests to make. I’d add Edward Andrews’s _Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World_ to the list
I would like to read Patrick Griffin’s new popular book on the revolution, creatively titled “America’s Revolution”. The cover choice is genuinely intriguing: http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Revolution-Patrick-Griffin/dp/0199754802
Hadn’t seen that one, but looks very interesting. Thanks.
Looks great! How about the new edited volume from Peter Thompson and Peter Onuf?
I’d add Joseph Eaton’s Anglo-American Paper War and Andrew Burstein’s Lincoln Dreamt He Died.
I would add Caleb McDaniel’s The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionism & Transatlantic Reform. I was lucky enough to read a manuscript version of this book during my master’s studies. It is definitely worth a look.