Thursday, April 16, 2009

Reading Project Goals

This blog will follow my personal project to read through US history from the revolution to the present, roughly one book per decade or era. I love history and am always reading some book or studying some topic for fun. But after reading Winston Churchill's "History of the English Speaking Peoples" I saw how useful it was to read through a long narration spanning different eras in chronological order to see how they all fit together. So my goal is to get a better understanding and context of US history across the eras by reading chronologically.

I hope to mix the books up by political histories, biographies, niche subject histories, economic history, event histories, etc. I would even like to mix in some fiction written in and about the era as a follow up to the non-fiction entry.

The following are the eras : decades that I want to cover.


Revolution
Late 1700s: 1780s
Late 1700s: 1790s
Early 1800s: 1810s
Early 1800s: 1820s
Early 1800s: 1830s
Pre-Civil War: 1840s
Pre-Civil War: 1840s
Pre-Civil War: 1850s
Civil War
Reconstruction: 1860s
Reconstruction: 1870s
Reconstruction: 1880s
Gilded age: 1890s
Turn of the Century: 1900s
Turn of the Century: 1910s
WWI
Between Wars: 1920s
Between Wars: 1920s
Between Wars: 1930s
WWII
Mid 1900s: 1940s
Mid 1900s: 1950s
Mid 1900s: 1960s
Late 1900s: 1970s
Late 1900s: 1980s
Late 1900s: 1990s

The most difficult part is choosing books. There are countless options, but I only want to read a few at most for each decade. I am naturally interested in certain subjects more than others so there is a risk of not being balanced. And while I had a list of potential books in mind at the beginning, I hope to find a lot of good recommendations.

Please leave any recommendations in the comments!

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