American Studies, CSUF

At least one semester before taking their exam, MA candidates must select three of the following categories for their subject fields. Every candidate must also identify three full-time faculty to serve as MA committee members with each faculty overseeing preparation for one of the three subject fields. The subject fields are:

Book lists for all subject fields, each arranged in chronological order, are outlined below, or click here for a PDF version of all seven lists.

In consultation with the faculty members on his or her committee, a candidate must select and read a minimum of ten books from each of the three chosen categories. Also, in consultation with faculty, a student may substitute a maximum of two books outside the list for each subject field.

Candidates will have four days (four consecutive 24 hour periods) to write three essays—one essay for each of the chosen subject fields. Each essay must be a minimum of ten double-spaced pages.

The faculty member responsible for each section of the exam will provide two questions for that section. The two questions for each section will be of two types:

To insure methodological and historical coverage, students must choose one A-type question for any subject field and one B-type question for another subject field. They may select either A or B for the remaining subject field.

David D. Hall. Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Karen Halttunen. Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Shane and Graham White. Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Bernard Herman. Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Jane Tompkins. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Scott Reynolds Nelson. Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Shelly Fisher Fishkin. Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices. New York: Oxford University Press,1993.

Laura Wexler. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Kathy Peiss. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture. New York: Holt, 1998.

Sarah Schrank. Art and the City: Civic Imagination and Cultural Authority in Los Angeles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Michael Denning. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. Brooklyn: Verso, 1997.

Lary May. The Big Tomorrow: Hollywood and the Politics of the American Way. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Eric Avila. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Tricia Rose. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Victoria Pitts. In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

II. Gender and Sexuality

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990.

Clare Lyons. Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender & Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Albert Hurtado. Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California. Albuerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Thomas Foster. Sex & the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts & the History of Sexuality in America. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2006.

Nancy Cott. The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780-1835, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.

Andrea Tone. Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Christine Stansell. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1986.

Glenda Gilmore. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

George Chauncey. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994.

John Kasson. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. New York: Hill & Wang, 2001.

Martin Summers. Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Elizabeth Kennedy. Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Miriam Reumann. American Sexual Character: Sex, Gender, and National Identity in the Kinsey Reports. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Amy Farrell. Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Shirley Lim. A Feeling of Belonging: Asian American Women’s Public Culture, 1930-1960. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

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Jill Lepore. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity New York: Knopf, 1998.

Nancy Cott. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Albert Raboteau. Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Walter Johnson. Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Alfred Young. The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

Drew Faust. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

David Henkin. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2006.

Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.

Joan Jacobs Brumberg. Kansas Charley: The Boy Murderer. New York: Viking, 2003.

Ellen Herman. Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008.

Sarah Igo. The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

William Graebner. Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990.

Lisa McGirr. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Kathryn Dudley. Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002.

Anne Fadiman. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997.

IV. The National and the Global

Richter, Daniel K. Facing East From Indian Country: A Native History of Early America.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Rediker, Markus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Armitage, David. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2008.

Kuo Wei Tchen, John. New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of
American Culture, 1776-1882. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003.

Sanchez, George. Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and
Jewish Immigrants in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Azuma, Eiichiro. Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese
America. Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 2005.

Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's
Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007.

Seigel, Micol. Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the
United States in Austria after the Second World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Von Eschen, Peggy. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

McAlister, Melani. Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945, Updated Edition, With a Post-9/11 Chapter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

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William Cronon.Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.

Gabrielle M. Lanier. The Delaware Valley in the Early Republic: Architecture, Landscape, and Regional Identity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Michael Lewis, ed. American Wilderness: A New History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Frieda Knobloch. The Culture of Wilderness: Agriculture as Colonization in the American West. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

John F. Sears. Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Dolores Hayden. Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820-2000. New York: Pantheon Books, 2003.

Patricia Nelson Limerick. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987; new edition, 2006.

Donald Worster. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Phoebe Kropp. California Vieja: Culture and Memory in a Modern American Place. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008.

Don Mitchell. The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Kai Erickson. Everything in its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976.

Jane Jacobs. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

Thomas Sugrue. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

VI. Race, Ethnicity, and Class Formation

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.

Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Sweet, John Wood. Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Pitti, Steven J. The Devil in Silicon Valley: Northern California, Race, and Mexican Americans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

West, Eliot. The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.

Welke, Barbara. Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002.

Gordon, Linda. Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Leong, Karen. The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna Mae Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Ngai, Mai. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Dudziak, Mary. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

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Daniels, Bruce. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1996.

Breen, T.H. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

White, Shane. Stories of Freedom in Black New York. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Hunter, Tera. To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920. Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Levine, Lawrence. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass:Harvard University Press, 1990.

Garvey, Ellen Gruber. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

May, Lary. Screening out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Oriard, Michael. Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Alamillo, Jose. Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town 1880-1960. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2006.

Newman, Kathy. Radio Active: Advertising and Consumer Activism, 1935-1947. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 2004.

Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Culture in Postwar America. New York: Vintage, 2003.