AP U.S. History Summer Assignment 2013

Mr. Heffernan Northern Highlands Regional High School

Welcome to AP US History! The course is a college-level course that will requires extensive knowledge and understanding of US History. It is imperative to have a strong foundation as a class for our return in September. As such, every student is expected to complete the following summer reading assignment.

SUMMER READING

1. Read and take notes on pages 59 – 125 in the textbook, A People and a Nation.

(You do not have to take notes in any particular format, but I’ve included the

Cornell University Note Taking System for your reference.)

2. Read A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz In September...

1. On the first full day of class there will be a multiple-choice test on the text material. For this test

you may use your notes.

2. On the next class meeting the class will have an essay & short-answer test on A Voyage Long and

Strange.

APUSH Reading List

Reading list: Below is a list of books covering different topics in American History. These books may be useful in expanding your knowledge and understanding of US history. Reading all of these books in one

summer would be an impossible task, and is in no way encouraged. But reading or familiarizing yourself with some of these books can assist in your understanding of US History.

Discovery & Colonial Era

New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America – Colin Calloway

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop – Edmund Morgan

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War – Nathaniel Philbrick

The Wordy Shipmates – Sarah Vowell

The Emergence & Rise of the American Republic

The Federalist Papers

The Autobiography of Ben Franklin – Ben Franklin

The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789 – Edmund Morgan

Antebellum Period

Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right – Stephan Anderson

The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th Century America – Paul

Johnson Walden – Henry David Thoreau

Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain

The Civil War

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War – Tony Horwitz

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War – Tony Horwitz

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era – James McPherson

Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln – Doris Kearns Goodwin

1861: The Civil War Awakening – Adam Goodheart

Reconstruction

Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

The Gilded Age/American Capitalism

American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 - H.W. Brands

Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century – John Kasson

The Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President – Candice Millard

The ‘Conquest’ of the West &Native Americans

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – Dee Brown

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Big Horn – Nathaniel Philbrick

Progressive Era

Looking Backward – Edward Bellamy

Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era- Neil Painter

The Jungle – Upton Sinclair

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America – Timothy Egan

Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-loving New York Richard Zacks

Women’s Rights

Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left – Sara Evans

Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States – Eleanor Flexner

The Feminine Mystique – Betty Friedan

World War I

The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemmingway

The First World War – John Keegan

Interwar Period

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age – Kevin Boyle

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis

Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City – Nelson Johnson

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition – Daniel Okrent

New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America – Nathan Miller

The Great Depression

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl – Timothy Egan

Freedom from Fear: The American People in the Depression and War, 1929-1945- David Kennedy

World War II

War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War – John Dower

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin – Erik Larson

The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer

Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War – William Manchester

Unbroken: World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption – Laura Hillenbrand

Civil Rights

Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age – Kevin Boyle

Coming of Age in Mississippi – Anne Moody

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America – Beryl Satter

Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot

The Cold War

Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties – Peter Biskind

The Cold War – John Lewis Gaddis

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller

Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State – Gary Wills

Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour – David Bianculli Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"

Vietnam

A Rumor of War – Philip Caputo

Dispatches – Michael Herr

Vietnam: A History – Stanley Karnow

Watergate

All the President’s Men – Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein

Time of Illusion: An Historical and Reflective Account of the Nixon Era – Jonathan Schell

The Road to September 11th

and the Post-September 11th

World

102 Minutes: the Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside The Twin Towers – Jim Dwyer

The Forever War – Dexter Filkins

The Good Soldiers – David Finkel

War – Sebastian Junger

Jarhead – Anthony Swofford

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 – Lawrence Wright

The Yellow Birds – Kevin Powers

American Ideas

The Education of Henry Adams – Henry Adams

The Metaphysical Club: The Story of Ideas in America – Louis Menand

Biography

Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt – H.W.

Brands

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt – Edmund Morris

Theodore Rex – Edmund Morris

Colonel Roosevelt – Edmund Morris

Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times – H.W. Brands

The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr- H.W. Brands

Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty – John M. Barry

General History

American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 – H.W. Brands

The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls- Joan Jacobs Brumberg

Lies My Teacher Told Me – James Loewen

A Pocket History of the United States – Allan Nevins, Henry Steele Commager

A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn

Thinking the Twentieth Century - Tony Judt

The Cornell Note Taking System

Recall Column

------2 1/2”-------- ----------------6”--------------------

Reduce ideas and facts to

concise jottings and

summaries as cues for Record the lecture as fully and as

Reciting, Reviewing, meaningfully as possible. and

Reflecting.

The format provides the perfect opportunity for following through with the 5 R's of note-taking. Here they are:

1. Record. During the lecture, record in the main column as many meaningful facts and ideas as you can. Write

legibly.

2. Reduce. As soon after as possible, summarize these ideas and facts concisely in the Recall Column. Summarizing

clarifies meanings and relationships, reinforces continuity, and strengthens memory. Also, it is a way of preparing for

examinations gradually and well ahead of time.

3. Recite. Now cover the column, using only your jottings in the Recall Column as cues or "flags" to help you recall,

say over facts and ideas of the lecture as fully as you can, not mechanically, but in your own words and with as much

appreciation of the meaning as you can. Then, uncovering your notes, verify what you have said. This procedure helps

to transfer the facts and ideas of your long term memory.

4. Reflect. Reflective students distill their opinions from their notes. They make such opinions the starting point

for their own musings upon the subjects they are studying. Such musings aid them in making sense out of their

courses and academic experiences by finding relationships among them. Reflective students continually label and

index their experiences and ideas, put them into structures,

outlines, summaries, and frames of reference. They rearrange and file them. Best of all, they have an eye for the vital-for

the essential. Unless ideas are placed in categories, unless they are taken up from time to time for re-examination, they

will become inert and soon forgotten.

5. Review. If you will spend 10 minutes every week or so in a quick review of these notes, you will retain most of

what you have learned, and you will be able to use your knowledge currently to greater and greater effectiveness.

©Academic Skills Center, Dartmouth College 2001

The 1850's

Civil War

Reconstruction