Selected Bibliography

Comprehensive Surveys of Twentieth Century American Social History:
American Social History Project, Nelson Lichtenstein, Roy Rosenzweig, Susan Strasser. Who Built America: From 1877 to the Present. City: Worth Publishers, date? This survey recounts America's past from the perspective of working men and women. This history from "the bottom up" not only charts the country's presidents, politics and wars, along with the life and values of the nation's elite, but also focuses on the fundamental social and economic conflicts in American history, integrating the history of community, family, gender roles, race and ethnicity.

http://historymatters.gmu.edu. This extensive website offers hundreds of documents, teaching materials, and discussions on teaching the U.S. History Survey. Materials focus on the lives of ordinary Americans and actively involve students in analyzing and interpreting evidence.

Early Twentieth Century Immigration, Ethnicity, Class and Gender:
Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. This survey of immigration to America over the course of several centuries offers a useful context for understanding and analyzing the early twentieth century wave of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.

Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985. This engaging study that draws extensively from oral history interviews, documents the domestic, economic, political and cultural experiences of Jewish and Italian immigrant women in New York City during the heyday of immigration from those regions.

Orleck, Annelise. Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Through this collective biography of four Jewish immigrant women radicals, Orleck documents and analyzes the history of working-class urban activists from the sweatshops and labor uprisings of the early twentieth century, through the Depression organizing of housewives and tenants, the New Deal struggles for labor legislation, and the McCarthy era affect on women's political activism.

The Depression and New Deal Era:
Fraser, Steve and Gary Gerstle. The Rise and the Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. A detailed look at the formation of the New Deal through ten well-documented and intellectually provocative essays.

Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. Compelling interview excerpts with dozens of Americans about life during the Great Depression. Narrators include the wealthy and poor, farmers and factory workers, strikers and radicals, politicians and performers.

World War II and the Homefront:
Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the ï40s. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. Hartmann describes and analyzes the impact of World War II on American women and the restructuring of gender roles during this period. The author documents opportunities opened up to women in military service, government sector, factory work and labor unions, and educational institutions. The end of the war, and the wartime economy, however, saw a return to more traditional division of labor and gender roles.

http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/WWII_women/tocCS.html
This wonderful website was created by South Kingstown High School students. Entitled, "What did you do in the war, Grandma?" it includes oral history interviews with women who had a range of experiences during World War II including teaching elementary school, playing professional baseball, and volunteering at the Red Cross headquarters as a pacifist response to the war. This lovely model of student produced work also includes contextual essays, a timeline, bibliography and glossary.

The McCarthy Era: May, Lary, ed. Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age of Cold War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. This stimulating compilation of essays explores the intersection between politics and culture after World War II, positing theories on postwar American culture, reflecting on shifts in family life and gender roles, and exploring the surge of intellectual inquiry, modern art, popular culture, jazz and rock and roll.

Schrecker, Ellen. The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002. This invaluable little volume includes a synthetic essay by a leading historian of the domestic Cold War, dozens of primary documents and accompanying explanations ranging from President Truman's Executive Order 9835 (the 1947 Loyalty-Security Program), to Judge Kaufman's sentencing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and testimonies before HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), a chronology, and a comprehensive bibliographic essay.

Schrecker, Ellen. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Schrecker's text is the seminal study on the impact of McCarthyism on professors, students and administrators on college campuses across the nation. Professors and administrators discussed by the Brooklyn College Vanguard students are also featured in book.

http://www.vny.cuny.edu/gutter/panels/panel1.html
The exhibition, "The Struggle for Free Speech at CCNY, 1931-1942," produced by Carol Smith can be seen at this site. This exhibition describes challenges to academic freedom and civil liberties that took place at City College of New York, the oldest of the City University of New York campuses, during the 1930s and early 1940s. The postwar McCarthy committees continued the work initiated by the Rapp-Coudert Committee described in this exhibition.

http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/FSM
The Free Speech Movement Digital Archive includes an impressive array of hundreds of primary documents that relate to the 1964 Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley. The archives contain letters, trial transcripts, newsletters, meeting minutes, press releases, leaflets, speech transcripts, video and audio clips and a handful of oral history interviews primarily with university faculty and administrators.

History of American Student Activism: Altbach, Philip G. Student Politics in America: A Historical Analysis, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1997.)

By far the strongest overview of American student activism in the first six decades of the 20th century, and in many ways the most capable synthetic discussion of American student activism available. Primarily a history of national student organizations. Originally published in 1974, reissued in 1997 with a new preface and an introduction discussing student activism since 1970.

Cohen, Robert, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.)

An enlightening, engaging history of American student activism in the depression era, emphasizing the role of the American Student Union and its forebears, the communist National Student League and socialist Student League for Industrial Democracy. Devotes substantial attention to the thirties' student movement's roots on New York City college campuses.

Olson, Keith W. The GI Bill, the Veterans, and the Colleges. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1974.)

Sadly out of print, this is the most thorough treatment of the impact of the GI Bill on the American campus.

Brooklyn College and City University of New York History:
Fischel, Jack Robert. "Harry Gideonse: The Public Life." Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1973. This study charts Harry Gideonse's intellectual and academic career from his wunderkind days at University of Chicago, through his presidency at Brooklyn College (1939-1966).

Horowitz, Murray M. Brooklyn College, the First Half Century. New York: Brooklyn College Press, 1981. A celebratory history of Brooklyn College's developement written by a faculty member of Brooklyn College's history department.

Roff, Sandra Shoiock, Anthony M. Cucchiara, and Barbara J. Dunlap. From the Free Academy to CUNY: Illustrating Public Higher Education in New York City, 1847-1997. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. This concise history of the City University of New York draws extensively on CUNY's various campus archives, to narrate and illustrate the transformation of the nation's largest urban public institution of higher education.

http://www.brooklyn.cuny/edu/bc/offices/vanguard/
This is the website of Brooklyn College Vanguard alumni. It includes contemporary articles by Vanguard authors, reminiscences, contact information, and the Vanguard prize awardees, recent graduating Brooklyn College student journalists who have raised the standards of journalism and "successfully defended First Amendment rights at the Brooklyn College campus."

Oral History:
Shopes, Linda. "Making Sense of Oral History." http://www.historymatters@gmu.edu/mse/oral Shopes' smart, concise and accessible essay, "What is Oral History?" also includes a wonderful, annotated bibliography of oral history sources, a guide to finding and using oral history online, and a list of some exemplary oral history websites.

http://fas-history.rutgers.edu/oralhistory/orlhom.htm
The Rutgers Oral History Archive contains over 350 oral history interviews with Rutgers College alumni and Douglass College alumnae who served on the homefront and overseas during World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War. The site includes interview summaries and transcripts, and primary documents from the interviewees like letters, diaries, memoirs and photographs.

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~oralhistory/projects.html
This site is H-Nets subject list of oral history projects. The site contains nearly 50 oral history website references. The sites are organized by subjects that include, "Military History and the Homefront," "Immigration," "Family History," "Agricultural History," "Women," "African Americans," "Local and Regional History."