Book Corner

The following are links to some great literature sites where you can enjoy reading and improving you knowledge of American (and English) literature, history and culture!

Bancroft Prize Winners Complete list of Bancroft Prize Winners The Bancroft Prizes are awarded annually by Columbia University— two to three annual prizes of equal rank to be awarded to the authors of distinguished works in either or both of the following categories: American History (including biography) and Diplomacy.
“The art of reading is among other things the art of adopting that pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed.” —Mark Van Doren
Year	Author	Title
2011	Eric Foner Sara Dubow Christopher Tomlins	The Fiery Tale Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America
2010	Linda Gordon Woody Holton Margaret D. Jacobs	Dorthea Lang: a Life Beyond Limits Abigail Adams White Mother to a Dark Race
2009	Thomas G. Andrews	Killing For Coal : America’s deadliest labor war
2008	Allan M. Brandt	The Cigarette Century : the Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America
2008	Charles Postel	The Populist Vison
2008	Peter Silver	Our Savage Neighbors : How Indian War Transformed Early America
2007	Robert D. Richardson	William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
2007	Jack Temple Kirby	Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South
2006	Erskine Clarke	Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic
2006	Odd Arne Westad	The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
2005	Melvin Patrick Ely	Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War
2005	Michael J. Klarman	From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality
2005	Michael O’Brien	Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860
2004	Edward L. Ayers	In The Presence Of Mine Enemies: War In The Heart Of America, 1859-1863
2004	Steven Hahn	A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles In The Rural South From Slavery To The Great Migration
2004	George M. Marsden	Jonathan Edwards: A Life
2003	James F. Brooks	Captives And Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, And Community In The Southwest Borderlands
2003	Alan Gallay	The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise Of The English Empire In The American South, 1670-1717
2002	David W. Blight	Race And Reunion: The Civil War In American Memory
2002	Alice Kessler-Harris	In Pursuit Of Equity: Women, Men, And The Quest For Economic Citizenship In 20th-Century America
2001	Susan Lee Johnson	Roaring Camp: The Social World Of The California Gold Rush
2001	David Nasaw	The Chief: The Life Of William Randolph Hearst
2000	John Dower	Embracing Defeat: Japan in the wake of World War II
2000	Linda Gordon	The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
2000	James Hart Merrell	Into the American Woods: negotiators on the Pennsylvania frontier
1999	Ira Berlin	Many Thousands Gone: the first two centuries of slavery in North America
1999	Jill Lepore	The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the origins of American identity
1999	Philip Morgan	Slave Counterpoint
1998	Christine Leigh Heyrman	Southern Cross: the beginnings of the Bible Belt
1998	Walter Lafeber	The Clash: a history of U.S.-Japan relations
1998	Thomas Sugrue	The Origins of the Urban Crisis
1997	David Kyvig	Explicit and Authentic Acts
1997	James Patterson	Grand Expectations: the United States, 1945-1974
1996	David S. Reynolds	Walt Whitman’s America: a cultural biography
1996	Alan Taylor	William Cooper’s Town
1995	John Brooke	The Refiner’s Fire
1995	John Dittmer	Local People
1994	Stanley Elkins and Eric McKintrick	The Age of Federalism
1994	Winthrop Jordan	Tumult and Silence at Second Creek
1994	David Levering Lewis	W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1911
1993	Charles Capper	Margaret Fuller
1993	Melvyn Leffler	A Preponderence of Power
1992	William Cronon	Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
1992	Charles Royster	The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans
1991	Laurel Thatcher Ulrich	A Midwife’s Tale: the life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary, 1785-1812
1991	Lizabeth Cohen	Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939
1990	Neil McMillen	Dark Journey
1990	James Merrell	The Indian’s New World
1989	Eric Foner	RECONSTRUCTION: AMERICA’S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION: 1863-1877
1989	Edmund S. Morgan	INVENTING THE PEOPLE: THE RISE OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA
1988	Michael S. Sherry	THE RISE OF AMERICAN AIR POWER: THE CREATION OF ARMAGEDDON
1988	Peter Kolchin	UNFREE LABOR: AMERICAN SLAVERY AND RUSSIAN SERFDOM
1987	Thomas Doerflinger	A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise
1987	Roger Lane	Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900
1986	Kenneth Jackson	Crabgrass Frontier
1986	Jacqueline Jones	Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow
1985	Suzanne Lebsock	The Free Women of Petersburg
1985	Kenneth Silverman	The Life and Times of Cotton Mather
1984	Louis Harlan	Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee
1984	Paul Starr	Social Transformation of American Medicine
1983	John Demos	Entertaining Satan
1983	Nick Salvatore	Eugene V. Debs
1982	Edward Countryman	A People in Revolution
1982	Mary Ryan	Cradle of the Middle Class
1981	Ronald Steel	Walter Lippmann and the American Century
1981	Jean Strouse	Alice James
1980	Robert Dallek	FDR and American Foreign Policy
1980	Thomas Dublin	Women at Work
1979	Christopher Thorne	Allies of a Kind
1979	Anthony Wallace	Rockdale
1978	Alfred Chandler, Jr	The Visible Hand
1978	Morton Horwitz	The Transformation of American Law
1977	Alan Dawley	Class and Community
1977	Robert Gross	The Minutemen and Their World
1976	David Brion Davis	The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823
1976	R. W. B. Lewis	Edith Wharton
1975	Robert William Fogel and Stanley Enerman	Time on the Cross
1975	Eugene Genovese	Roll, Jordan, Roll
1975	Alexander George and Richard Smoke	Deterrence in American Foreign Policy

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1. BBC List of 100 Most Loved Books in the English Language BBC NOVELS

• http://www.america.gov/fr/publications/books/usa-literature-in-brief.html This is a great guide to American literature containing lots of literary analyses and some audio speeches (check out the one by Allan Ginsberg on Walt Whitman).
• The Best of English Literature
  http://www.e-anthologie.com/   Jean Briat and Annie Lherete, both French University agreges professors, teamed up to create this site to bring English literature to students in the form of PDF files. For those of you who understand French, there are lots of critical essays to help you appreciate the different texts.
• Cambridge History of English and American Literature
  http://www.bartleby.com/cambridge/
  This site contains an 18 volume encyclopedia with plenty of reading to keep you busy on a rainy day!
• Willa Cather Archive
  http://cather.unl.edu/ For Willa Cather fans this is an extremely interesting site to discover.
• Childrens’ Literature Web Guide
  http://www.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/index.html
  For those of you who want something light to read or not too difficult, check out this site. It’s also great for children and young adults.
• David Perdue’s Charles Dickens Page
  http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/index.html
  David takes us on a journey through a tale of 2 cities.
• Geoffrey Chaucer Home Page
  http://www.umm.maine.edu/faculty/necastro/chaucer/
  This site was created by Gerard NeCastro, an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine at Machias. It’s great for lovers of classical English literature.
• Shakespeare
  http://the-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/works.html
  The complete works! And it looks like it really is “all” of Shakespeare.Electronic Literature Directory
  http://directory.eliterature.org/
  This site contains a wide selection of literature which is now available on the web.
• William Faulkner
  http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/faulkner.html Center for Faulkner Studies
  http://www6.semo.edu/cfs/ These 2 sites are a must for Faulkner readers..
• The Literary Gothic
  http://www.litgothic.com/
  This site was created by Jack G. Voller, Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University. It is a wonderful place to start for students of Gothic literature. It’s a well organized resource site for critical analyses, discussion groups and forums, and advice on how to carry out research in Gothic literature.
• Literature: What makes a good short story?
  http://www.learner.org/exhibits/literature/index.html For those who don’t have enough time to get into a novel, check out this site which covers the art of the short story.
• Jack London Collection http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/ Jack London’s Ranch Album
  http://www.jacklondons.net/
  For those who are answering the “Call of the Wild”, go to this 2 rich sites which contains a lot of Jack London’s literature in addition to lots of pictures and documents.
•  Project Gutenberg
  http://promo.net/pg/
  Don’t miss this site which contains thousands of digital copies of classical literature.
• Online Mysteries http://www.mysterynet.com/online-mysteries/
  Weekly mini-mysteries with a twist.Beyond Nancy Drew
  http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/women/beyond-nancy-drew.html
  Two great sites for those who enjoy mysteries.