• American Colonies: The Settling of North America
  (The Penguin History of the United States, Volume1) (Hist of the USA), Alan Taylor
• Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775 (Early American Studies), Aaron Spencer Fogleman
• The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture, Wendell Berry
• Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Early America: History, Context, Culture), Jennifer M. Spear
• The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture), Saul Cornell
• Kentucky Rising: Democracy, Slavery, and Culture from the Early Republic to the Civil War

(Yale Historical Publications)
Professor Karen Halttunen
From Amazon.com: Aa must for both scholars and living historians alike. Halttunen's work vividly details the social and cultural development of 19th Century Middle Class America, their etiquette, values and mores. Taken from etiquette books, manuals and magazines of the era, Halttunen's study covers the sentimental culture of fashion, etiquette, hypocrisy of the time and even mourning the dead.

Rodney Hessinger
The content is easy for modern readers to relate to: young adults exploring religion and sexuality and occasionally rioting against college authorities, themes interwoven with the political, economic, and cultural values of the early republic to discover the roots of that generation. The book is not only a compelling piece of scholarship but also a model of clear, succinct, engaging historical writing.

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg
First collection of essays by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, one of the leading historians of women. Her focus is on the "disorderly conduct" women (and some men) used to break away from the Victorian Era's rigid class and sex roles. The essays consider the dramatic changes in male-female relations, family structure, sex, social custom, and ritual that occurred as colonial America was transformed by rapid industrialization. Included are: "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America" and "The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Order and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936," including essays on abortion, eligious fanatics, and revisionist history.

Fred Rosenbaum
Levi Strauss, A.L. Gump, Yehudi Menuhin, Gertrude Stein, Adolph Sutro, Congresswoman Florence Prag Kahn -- Jewish people have been so enmeshed in life in and around San Francisco that their story is a chronicle of the metropolis itself. Since the Gold Rush, Bay Area Jews have countered stereotypes, working as farmers and miners, boxers and mountaineers. They were Gold Rush pioneers, Gilded Age tycoons, and Progressive Era reformers. Told through a range of characters and events.

David Cesarani
The history of Jews in cosmopolitan maritime trading centres is a field of research that is reshaping our understanding of how Jews entered the modern world. These studies show that the utility of Jewish merchants in an era of European expansion was vital to their acculturation and assimilation.

Jim Christina
Following the American Civil War, the freed slaves began the migration to the north and the west. Many freedmen became respected and valued cowboys on some of the largest ranches in the west.

This is the story of two brothers, Bountiful Jim Lent and Lewis Bishop. Both hard working hands but with an awful story to tell. Lewis' direct family including his sister, her husband, their baby and his father are killed in a raid by the hooded citizens known as the Nightriders, a holdout of the old slave hunters and killers during the slavery period.

The raid ignites what would become to be known as the Williamson Valley War and would drag in some of the territory's toughest fighters and gunmen in a last ditch effort too reclaim what rightly belongs to the two brothers and their neighbors.

Bernard Bailyn gives a compelling account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard. They were a mixed multitude from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland. They moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures, and under different auspices and circumstances.

Even the majority that came from England fit no distinct socioeconomic or cultural pattern. They came from all over the realm, from commercialized London and the southeast; from isolated farmlands in the north still close to their medieval origins; from towns in the Midlands, the south, and the west; from dales, fens, grasslands, and wolds. They represented the entire spectrum of religious communions from Counter-Reformation Catholicism to Puritan Calvinism and Quakerism. They came hoping to re-create if not to improve these diverse lifeways in a remote and, to them, barbarous environment. But their stories are mostly of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and recapture lost worlds. And in the process they tore apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded. Later generations, reading back into the past the outcomes they knew, often gentrified this passage in the peopling of British North America, but there was nothing genteel about it. Bailyn shows that it was a brutal encounter brutal not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves. All, in their various ways, struggled for survival with outlandish aliens, rude people, uncultured people, and felt themselves threatened with descent into squalor and savagery. In these vivid stories of individual lives some new, some familiar but rewritten with new details and contexts Bailyn gives a fresh account of the history of the British North American population in its earliest, bitterly contested years.