 | Standing at Armageddon: United States, 1877-1919 by NI Painter
Buy new: £12.99 / Used from: £2.75 Painter offers a good summary of the events of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
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 | American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 by TP Hughes
Buy new: £16.63 / Used from: £9.99 Hughes examines the technological change that drove much of the period.
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 | Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow
Buy new: £10.50 / Used from: £8.98 Chernow's biography of Rockefeller provides an excellent description of the development of the oil industry in America using techniques that were soon duplicated in other sectors.
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 | Origins of the New South 1877-1913 (A history of the South) by C.Vann Woodward
Buy new: £21.95 / Used from: £15.95 A landmark history of the region, which reoriented itself in the aftermath of the Civil War.
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 | The American West: A New Interpretive History by RV Hine
Buy new: £19.00 / Used from: £5.95 Summarizes the 'Old West' and puts it into context of the overall history of the region.
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 | The Age of Reform: From Bryan to f.d.r. by Richard Hofstadter
Buy used from: £3.04 Hofstadter provides a good (if dated) summary of the reform groups which emerged starting at the end of the 19th century.
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 | The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt by JM Cooper
Buy new: £18.95 / Used from: £6.09 A dual biography of the two men who defined the Progressive movement nationally.
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 | Over Here: The First World War and American Society by David M. Kennedy
Buy used from: £7.32 Kennedy provides the best account of the impact of the First World War on America.
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 | The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (Galaxy Books) by Paula S. Fass
Buy new: £14.24 / Used from: £6.99 Fass describes the youth culture that defined the 1920s in America.
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 | Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 19191939 by Lizabeth Cohen
Buy new: £16.99 / Used from: £1.22 Cohen's case study of Chicago workers between the wars offers insight into working class conditions during the interwar period.
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 | The Great Bull Market: Wall Street in the 1920s (A Norton essay in American history) by R Sobel
Buy new: £8.99 / Used from: £6.33 A concise examination of both the crash and the conditions that led to it.
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 | Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945 (Oxford History of the United States) by David M. Kennedy
Buy new: £11.19 / Used from: £7.74 The best introduction to America during the 1930s and early 1940s.
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 | Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression by Alan Brinkley
Buy used from: £5.78 Brinkley chronicles two demagogues in the 1930s and their efforts to push New Deal reform further.
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 | Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945: With a New Afterword (Oxford Paperbacks) by Robert Dallek
Buy new: £22.99 / Used from: £32.33 The essential account of Roosevelt's foreign policy.
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 | War without Mercy by John W. Dower
Buy used from: £8.51 Dower's book is a superb study of the role that race played in shaping the war against Japan
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 | The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Buy used from: £5.00 This provides a fantastic account of the development of the weapon that ended the war and transformed the world.
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 | Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford History of the United States) by James T. Patterson
Buy new: £11.19 / Used from: £6.46 A good survey of America in the years after World War II.
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 | Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States by Kenneth T. Jackson
Buy new: £11.69 / Used from: £2.52 Jackson's book is a study of the population shift to the suburbs that took place during this period.
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 | Strategies of Containment by John Lewis Gaddis
Buy used from: £8.98 This best study of the American strategy that defined the Cold War.
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 | Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 by Taylor Branch
Buy new: £11.93 / Used from: £4.37 A good introduction to the struggle for African American civil rights in the 1950s and early 1960s.
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 | Carry ME Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane McWhorter
Buy new: £9.23 / Used from: £1.30 McWhorter focuses on the civil rights protests in Birmingham in 1963
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 | The Warren Court and American Politics by LA Powe
Buy new: £12.71 / Used from: £22.46 Powe's book is an excellent study of the Supreme Court and the broader rights revolution of the era, as well as the reaction it generated
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 | Bright, Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan
Buy used from: £4.70 One of the best studies of the failure of America's involvement in Vietnam.
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 | Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon by SI Kutler
Buy used from: £7.99 Kutler's book is the best account we are likely to have of the event that brought down a presidency and changed the way Americans viewed their leaders
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 | Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford History of the United States) by James T. Patterson
Buy new: £22.09 / Used from: £5.41 Though a little bland, this is the best history available of the U.S. in the last decades of the 20th century.
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