Book Review
The final part of your tasks includes writing a scholarly book review of an academic history book. This will form 20 percent of your grade. The book review needs to do the following:
Tell what the book is about. Do not simply summarize the story, but give the topic, geographic area, and timespan that the book covers. This should take only one mid-length paragraph.
Give the book’s key argument/point.
Discuss the book’s sources and methodology: what kind of evidence and methods the author uses to make his/her point.
Analyze if the argument hold water. Is the point well-made and supported with solid evidence and reasoning? If you were a juror, would you buy the author’s argument/point or not? Why or why not?
Your take. What did you think about the book? Did it interest or entertain you? Was it well written and clearly organized? This is the only openly subjective part of your review.
Write your work in fluent, beautiful essay form, not as a numbered list! The desired length is 2-4 double-spaced pages, with normal fonts and margins. Below, please find a list of the books suitable for our review. Some of these are in Clayton State library, but the rest you can get either via interlibrary loan (GIL) or, alternatively, by purchase. Internet is full of cheap used copies of many of these books.
Also, you can choose your own book, as long as it is a real history monograph, covering a specific topic in American history since 1877. The book has to be written by a professional historian and published by an academic press. If you find a book not in this list that you want to review, you have to get an okay from me. Email me the author’s name and title of the book, and I will tell you if it is suitable or not.
Do not, I repeat, DO NOT even think about plagiarizing your review. If you found it online, I will find it online as well. I will screen all papers for plagiarism and AI-work. If you plagiarize, you will get caught and YOU WILL FAIL THE COURSE!
Your book review is due April 15th, 2024, 11:59 PM. Upload it to our D2L-page, to the Assignments-drop box.
African American history
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of African Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
Tiffany M. Gill, Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry.
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.
Maurice J. Hobson, The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in Making of the Modern Atlanta.
Larry Tye, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class.
Business and Economic History
Richard S. Tedlow, New and Improved: The Story of Mass Marketing in America.
Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market.
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
Neil Dahlstrom, The Tractor Wars: John Deere, Henry Ford, International Harvester, and the Birth of Modern Agriculture.
Nicole C. Kirk, Wanamaker’s Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store.
Women’s History
Catherine S. Ramírez, The Woman in the Zoot Suit: Gender, Nationalism, and the Cultural Politics of Memory.
Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933.
Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1860-1960.
Tera W. Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War.
Political History
James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore.
Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism.
Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939.
Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s.
Social and Cultural History
George Chancey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.
David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945.
Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class.
Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store.
Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.
