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213 pages 7 hours read

Jill Lepore

These Truths: A History of the United States

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Further Reading & Resources

Further Reading: Literature

Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt: Virginia, 1800 by Arna Bontemps (1936)

Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)

 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)

Complete Poetry and Prose by Walt Whitman, ed. Justin Kaplan (1982)

Further Reading: Beyond Literature (Nonfiction)

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight (2018)

Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America by Jonathan Darman (2015)

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America by Philip Dray (2002)

The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois (1903)

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan (2006)

Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 by Eric Foner (1988)

The Enlightenment (Volume II): The Science of Freedom by Peter Gay (1969)

From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World by Eugene Genovese (1979)

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made by Eugene Genovese (1976)

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (2008)

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861)

The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James (1963)

Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson (1781, 1832)

The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones (2021)

Stokely: A Life by Peniel E. Joseph (2014)

Two Treatises of Government by John Locke (1689)

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (1906)

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (2019)

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable (2011)

The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union by James M. McPherson (1993)

American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (2008)

The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden (2013)

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick (2010)

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez (2016)

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki (1993)

American Colonies by Alan Taylor (2001)

“On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau (1849)

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Native America from 1890 to the Present by David Treuer (2019)

Up from Slavery: An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington (1907)

A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White Jr. (2009)

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (2010)

Other Relevant Media Resources

John Adams (miniseries), HBO (2008)

Adapted from historian David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book of the same name, published in 2001, the seven-episode miniseries starring Paul Giamatti starts during the Boston Massacre and ends during John Adams’s retirement from public life.

Exterminate All the Brutes (documentary miniseries), HBO (2021)

The four-part miniseries directed by Raoul Peck examines the Western history of colonization, starting during the Age of Exploration, and the history of genocide, fostered by the development of scientific racism and culminating in the Holocaust and “ethnic-cleansing” programs of the 1990s.

Eyes on the Prize (documentary miniseries), PBS (1987)

The seminal 14-part documentary series documents the civil rights movement, including the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, the desegregation of Little Rock High School, Freedom Summer, the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, and the rise of militant politics, including the rise of the Nation of Islam, the radicalization of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the growth of the Black Panther Party.

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