Stuart Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class - never actually read it but I probably picked most of it up (and a lot of these books, and a lot of everything I say) from his classes.
\n\nRick Perlstein, Before the Storm and Nixonland - treatments of two Republican presidential candidates, one successful and one not (which one depending on your notion of \u201csuccess\u201d) that end up being used as a prism on the politics and culture of their times. Relies a bit much on period newspaper articles without making much effort to revise the \u201cfirst draft of history\u201d, but at least it\u2019s not Foucault-level \u201cthis anecdote, and then this one from another country centuries later, therefore the true nature of power and sex\u201d stuff. Can\u2019t recommend The Invisible Bridge, I think Reagan\u2019s still too close for him to get in perspective.
\n\nWilliam Cronon, Changes in the Land - an enthralling history of Colonial America through the framework of ecology and land use.\n\n\n
\n\nBeth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat - shifts in courtship in 20th Century America, ends up touching on shifts in everything in 20th Century America
\n\nKenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier and Sam Warner, Streetcar Suburbs - together a comprehensive treatment of the development of American suburbs since the 19th century (including a lot of stuff that would be recognized as \u201ccity\u201d today).
\n\nRobert Caro, The Power Broker - a biography about a master of governance and city politics that touches on everything related to politics, cities, and governance. A goddamn brick, and when Caro traces everything back to Moses\u2019 overbearing mother you realize they weren\u2019t lying about midcentury pop-Freudianism, you can skip those parts.
\n\nE. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class - another brick, and a lot of it framed as an argument against works it\u2019s long since displaced, but so good it\u2019s influenced damn near everything to come after it.
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