a short reading list

I've been asked by a friend of mine -- someone not from the US nor educated here -- for a short list of reading that will provide a good survey of American history.

The only requirements: non-specialist, well-written, and not too controversial. Basic.

I've a couple of ideas of my own, but I'd be interested to hear what the group might suggest...

The volumes in the Oxford History of the United States series are generally recognized as high quality surveys. On the context of colonization, John H. Elliott's Empires of the Atlantic World. On European-Indian relations, Colin G. Calloway's New Worlds for All or Karen Ordahl Kupperman's Indians and English : facing off in early America. On slavery, Ira Berlin's Generations of Captivity or Peter Kolchin's American Slavery: 1619-1877. On Reconstruction, Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution. Rebecca Edwards' New spirits : Americans in the gilded age, 1865-1905 on the late 19th century.

I could probably come up with more but I'm already breaking the condition of a short list. I could also recommend some true survey textbooks, but even the best of them are not the best history or very good reading.

Perhaps Barbara W. Tuchman's First Salute, which I can personally recomment or 1776 by David McCullough, which I haven't gotten around to yet.

I agree with the suggestion of the Oxford History of the United States series. They're not thin books, but they are excellent surveys of the periods they cover.

I think anything by David Hackett Fischer is great - for a survey of early history: Albion's Seed. But you get even broader coverage from the two books by Walter McDougall: Freedom Just Around the Corner and Throes of Democracy. These take you from 1585 to 1877. McDougall draws on Fischer quite a bit (so you get Fischer's analyses thrown into the bargain), but he is less "academic" so might be better for a non-specialist. The books are well-written and full of fun factoids about history. As an added "bonus" you get to see plenty of historical basis for the "greed on Wall Street and Main Street."

Just a brief cautionary note about Albion's Seed: it is an interesting book, but Fischer's scholarship in it is not always top-of-the-line. Almost an entire issue of the William and Mary Quarterly (April, 1991) was devoted to critiques of his approach, so if you do read him, be sure to read the discussion which sprang up around the book as well.

While I haven't read them, I've heard/read great things about Bill Bennet's 2-volume America: The Last Best Hope. They're recent so would come up through Reagan (I believe) and are written in a narrative style.

I've read bits and pieces of America: The Last Best Hope and they were pretty good. However, they may not be cynical enough about America for some people.

Although it was controversial when it came out 20+ years ago, I think the dust has settled and your friend may enjoy A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.

Howard Zinn? Still plenty controversial.

Here is a book that is currently found in the Rare Book and Special Collections division at the Library of Congress, and in the legacy libraries of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others. How controversial could it be?
In 1991 Black Classic Press published an excellent paperback edition of the Jefferson-Barlow translation of The Ruins: Or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, a translation from the French Les Ruines ou Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires, published in 1796 by William A. Davis, in New York.. This book was a reprint of the 1890 Eckler edition. African-American academics have long valued this book because Volney was one of the first to champion the idea that early Nile Valley civilizations contributed to the rise of the "scientific method." Volney, who was a member of the “Friends of Blacks Club” in France during the early days of the French Revolution was an advisor to Napoleon as well as a writer of the French Constitution.
While serving as Ambassador to France, Thomas Jefferson seriously imperiled his political future by secretly joining with the noted anti- slavery poet and founder of ''the American Mercury", Joel Barlow to provide his friend Constantin-Francois Volney with an English translation of The Ruins: Or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, a translation from the French Les Ruines ou Meditations sur les Revolutions des Empires, published in 1796 by William A. Davis, in New York. This is an admittedly radical work even by today's Liberal standards. Maybe that is why it took the University of Virginia 185 years to remember that Jefferson had given it not one, but two copies of his personally selected translations of Volney's work.

One copy was presented to the Library of Congress just in time for it's 200th birthday. This translation of Volney's work is the same edition as the one Jefferson had sold to The Library of Congress in 1815, but which was sadly lost to flames in 1851.

Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections division at the Library of Congress, has called Volney's work an “important source,..”, “that influenced Jefferson's thinking”. Just think, “Afro-Centric Scholars” (Not an oxymoron) have been teaching for decades that this particular translation of this work is an important primary source. Its taken almost 200 years, but thanks to the ongoing deification of Thomas Jefferson, more mainstream scholars may finally work up the nerve to examine Volney's message in the exact words that President Jefferson chanced so much to pass along.
Thanks Thomas

This edition also includes Volney's Law of Nature and Volney's Response to Dr. Priestly (sic).

The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History by D. W. Meinig

Paul Johnson's History of the American People is a good one-volume survey. In three volumes, Daniel Boorstin's The Americans.