Nineteenth Century
U.S. History

This list is roughly organized by topic, not chronology. Like the other "minor" (for the purposes of my exams) fields, it hits on the highlights of recent scholarship and covers the most influential books in the field.
Picture
A formerly enslaved woman, c. late nineteenth century, courtesy of 19C American Women blog, http://b-womeninamericanhistory19.blogspot.com/
Capitalism
  • Hindle, Brooke, and Steven D. Lubar. Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790-1860. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986.
  • Howe, Daniel W. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
  • Levy, Jonathan. Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012.
  • Mihm, Stephen. A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
  • Rockman, Seth. Scraping by: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
  • Sandage, Scott A. Born Losers: A History of Failure in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.
  • White, Richard. Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Culture, Gender, Sexuality
  • Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001.
  • Clark, Emily. The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
  • Cohen, Patricia Cline. The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: Vintage Books, 1999.
  • Cohen, Patricia Cline, Timothy J Gilfoyle, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. The Flash Press Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
  • Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
  • Fabian, Ann. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
  • Fox, Richard Wightman. Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
  • Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.
  • Johnson, Susan. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
  • Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Knopf, 1990.

Expansion, Environment, Imperialism
  • Cronon, William. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992.
  • Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
  • Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
  • Rico, Monica. Nature's Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
  • Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Reprint edition. London: Penguin UK, 2008.

Politics
  • Anbinder, Tyler. Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850’s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
  • Blight, David W. Race and Reunion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
  • Fields, Barbara Jeanne. Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
  • Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
  • Freeman, Joanne B. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
  • Hahn, Steven A. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 2003.
  • Jones, Martha S. All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
  • Kantrowitz, Stephen. More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889. New York: Penguin, 2012.
  • McCoy, Drew R. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
  • McCurry, Stephanie. Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010.
  • Wilentz, Sean. The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.
  • Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Religion
  • Abzug, Robert H. Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  • Gordon, Sarah Barringer. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
  • Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
  • Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.
  • Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. Religion and the Rise of the American City; the New York City Mission Movement, 1812-1870. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1971.

Slavery
  • Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.
  • Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1998.
  • Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Knopf, 2011.
  • Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
  • Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013.
  • ———. Soul by Soul. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.