Reading List: Transatlantic History in the Long Nineteenth Century

A few months ago I posted my exam reading list for U.S. Intellectual and Cultural History.

Since then, I have (pretty much) settled my reading list for my second historical field, Transatlantic History in the Long Nineteenth Century.

I am posting that list below, both to provide an example of what a reading list for this sort of field might look like and to provoke some conversation among our readers about what such a list ought to look like.  The subtitles/subject headings in this list are heuristic -- just markers I came up with to help me put the books I'm using into very broad and basic categories.  They may not be the most apt way to describe the subject matter that I have grouped together; they are simply a kind of preliminary scaffolding.  Once I've read through this list, I will no doubt think of different and probably better ways to group these texts.

In the meantime, I would be glad to hear suggestions about alternate titles I should consider.  However, I can't let this list go (very far?) over 50 titles.  I have to draw the line somewhere. 

Drawing the line was a real challenge here.  While the boundary lines between fields and disciplines always reflect the ways in which knowledge is constructed, this exam field covers -- or at least partially sketches out -- a historical subdiscipline that is itself much concerned with redrawing the boundaries of knowledge in such a way as to bring a subject, if not into being, then at least into view.  Both "the Transatlantic" and "the long nineteenth century" cross (some) conventional boundaries of historical specialization.  Holding those two terms in tension, I have worked with my supervising professor for this field to put together a list that makes sense, and that makes sense for me in terms of contributing to the overall coherence of my training as an Americanist and an intellectual and cultural historian.  Moreover, this particular list will provide part of a very solid foundation from which to begin my dissertation.

But first I have to pass these exams.  I'm looking at Fall of 2013 for that.  I'm not looking forward to it.  But when the time comes, I intend to be ready.  Until then, I am still working on settling my final reading list, American Literature from 1789 - ca. 2000.  When I get that all sorted out, I will post it here as well.

So, anyhow, here's my reading list.


Transatlantic History in the Long Nineteenth Century


theorizing/mapping the Transatlantic

Lucien Febvre, et. al., Le Nouveau Monde et l'Europe (Conference proceedings - Rencontres internationales de Geneve) (1954)
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)
Thomas Bender, editor, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002)
Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (2002)
Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours (2005)
Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (2006)
Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik Seeman, The Atlantic in Global History: 1500-2000 (2006)
Francois Furstenberg, "The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History," The American Historical Review, Vol. 113, No. 3 (June 2008)
Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (2008)
Tom Fulford and Kevin Hutchings, eds., Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750-1850: The Indian Atlantic (2009)
Peter J. Kastor and Francois Weil, eds., Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase (2009)

Forum: Entangled Empires in the Atlantic World (American Historical Review, June 2007)

Epstein, James. "Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Picton and the Cause of Louisa Calderon." The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 712-41.
Blaufarb, Rafe. "The Western Question: The Geopolitics of Latin American Independence." The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 742-63.
Gould, Eliga H. "Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery." The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 764-86.
Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. "Entangled Histories: Borderland Historiographies in New Clothes?" The American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 787-99.

slavery and abolition

Thomas Bender, ed., The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (1992)
Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2001)
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: The Foundations of British Abolitionism (2006)
Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (2007)
Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (2009)
Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery
(2010)

Transatlantic religious/reform movements

Margaret H. McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of Nineteenth-Century Feminism (1999)
David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (2005)
Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (2010)

rise of nation-states

Ian Tyrrell, "Making Nations/Making States: American Historians in the Context of Empire,"     Journal of American History 86 (3), 1999.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (2006)
Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-century Britain and the United States (2006)
Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalism and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (2000)

commerce, commodities and cosmopolitanism

Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (1970)
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (1984)
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1987)
T.H. Breen, "'Baubles of Britain':  The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century," Past & Present 19 (May 1988)
Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (2003)
Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity (2007)
Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (2008)

America's emergence as a Transatlantic imperial power

Thomas J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (1995)
Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (2000)
Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940 (2000)
David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (2004)

Transatlantic cultural / intellectual currents

R.R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760 - 1800 (1964)
Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (1977)
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986)
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989)
Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (1992)
Gillis Harp, Positivist Republic: Auguste Comte and the Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1920 (1995)
Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires (1998)
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998)
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998)
Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (2007)
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2008)