Abigail S.

Gruber
Early America Exam List
Final Draft, October 2018; Tentative Exam, May 2019

In addition to the applicable books on the 60-Book List (anything touching on pre-1865
material), you are responsible for reading the following:

Native Americans
1. Calloway, Colin. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in
Native American Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
2. DuVal, Kathleen. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the
Continent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
3. Hamalainen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
4. Lipman, Andrew. The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American
Coast. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
5. Richter, Daniel K. Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
6. Silverman, David. Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native
America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.
7. Snyder, Christina. Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early
America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
8. Witgen, Michael. An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North
America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Race and African Americans

9. Dunbar, Erica Armstrong. A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and
Emancipation in the Antebellum City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.
10. Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
11. Frey, Sylvia. Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in the Revolutionary Age. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991.
12. Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York:
Vintage, 1976.
13. Johnson, Michael. “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” The William and Mary
Quarterly 58, no. 4 (October 2001): 915-976.
 14. Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century
Chesapeake & Low Country. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
15. Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
16. Pryor, Elizabeth Stordeur. “The Etymology of Nigger: Resistance, Language, and the
Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 36, no. 2
(June 2016): 203-245.
17. Berry, Daina Ramey. The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved,
From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. Boston: Beacon Press, 2017.
18. Sinha, Manisha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2017.

Labor, Economy, & Material Culture

19. Anderson, Jennifer L. Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2012.
20. Anishanslin, Zara. Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic
World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
21. Hartigan-O’Connor, Ellen. The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary
America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
22. Kelly, Catherine E. Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
23. Matson, Cathy. Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1998.
24. Van Horn, Jennifer. The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.
25. Zabin, Serena R. Dangerous Economies: Status and Commerce in Imperial New York.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011.

Law and Politics in Early American Society

26. Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in
British North America, 1754-1766. New York: Random House, 2001.
27. Beeman, Richard R. The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century
America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
 28. Mapp, Paul. The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
29. Murphy, Brian Phillips. Building the Empire State: Political Economy in the Early
Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
30. Romney, Susannah Shaw. New Netherlands Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic
Ties in Seventeenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2014.
31. Roney, Jessica Choppin. Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American
Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2014.
32. Thompson, Peter. Rum Punch & Revolution: Taverngoing & Public Life in Eighteenth-
Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
33. Tomlins, Christopher. Freedom Bound: Law, Labor and Civic Identity in Colonizing
English America, 1580-1865. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Daily Life in Early America

34. Altschuler, Sari. The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United
States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
35. Bushman, Richard L. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York:
Vintage Books, 1992.
36. Dayton, Cornelia H. and Sharon V. Salinger. Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for
Strangers in Colonial Boston. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
37. Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2011.
38. Inman, Natalie R. Brothers and Friends: Kinship in Early America. Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2017.
39. Kopelson, Heather Miyano. Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the
Puritan Atlantic. New York: New York University Press, 2014.
40. Manion, Jen. Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
41. Shields, David S. Civil Tongues and Polite Discourses: Letters in British America.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
 42. Winiarski, Douglas L. Darkness Falls on the Land of Light: Experiencing Religious
Awakenings in Eighteenth-Century New England. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2017.

Gender & Women’s History

43. Block, Sharon. Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2006.
44. Brown, Kathleen. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race,
and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
45. Cleves, Rechel Hope. Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
46. Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in
Connecticut, 1639-1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
47. Toby L. Ditz, “Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of
Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Journal of American
History 81, no. 1 (June 1994): 51-80.
48. Foster, Thomas. Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of
Sexuality in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007.
49. Kerber, Linda K., Nancy F. Cott, Robert Gross, Lynn Hunt, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and
Christine M. Stansell. “Forum: Beyond Roles, Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender
in the Early Republic,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), 565-585.
50. Lyons, Clare A. Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the
Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730—1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006.
51. Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American
Women, 1750-1800. Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1980.
52. Norton, Mary Beth. Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming
of American Society. New York: Vintage, 1996.
53. Wulf, Karin. Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2000.

War, Empire, and the Revolution

54. Chopra, Ruma. Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2013.
 55. DuVal, Kathleen. Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution.
New York: Random House, 2015.
56. Edelson, S. Max. The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before
Independence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017.
57. Greene, Jack P. The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011.
58. Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. New
York: Vintage Books, 2011.
59. Parkinson, Robert G. The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American
Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
60. Wells, Colin. Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early
Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
61. Alfred Young, “American Historians Confront the ‘Transforming Hand of Revolution,’”
in The Transforming Hand of Revolution: Reconsidering the American Revolution as a
Social Movement, eds. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1996), 346-494.

Early Republic
62. Bjork, Katharine. Prairie Imperialists: The Indian Country Origins of American Empire.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
63. Fitz, Caitlin. Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2017.
64. Furstenberg, Francois. When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees who Shaped
a Nation. New York: Penguin Press, 2015.
65. Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New
Haven: Yales University Press, 2002.
66. Howe, David Walker. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-
1848. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
67. Hyde, Anne F. Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American
West, 1800-1860. New York: HarperCollins, 2011.
68. Karp, Matthew. This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American
Foreign Policy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.
69. John, Richard R. Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to
Morse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
70. Luskey, Brian P. and Wendy A. Woloson. Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the
Economy of Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2015.
71. Onuf, Peter. Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1987.
72. Pasley, Jeffrey L. “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American
Republic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.
73. Sachs, Honor. Home Rule: Households, Manhood, and National Expansion on the
Eighteenth-Century Kentucky Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
74. Saler, Bethel. The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old
Northwest. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
75. Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1987.
76. Wood, Gordon S. Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.