What to Read for AP US History
Looking for some good books to introduce you to the content you need to know for the AP US History test? Check out some of our picks from the list below!
Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington
Think you know everything there is to know about George Washington? Get a fresh perspective on his life and legacy from the engaging new look at who Washington was and what he believed.
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
This book explores the great expansion of cities, industry, and agriculture in the 19th century. This book tells the story of the rise of Chicago as the premier midwestern city, yet at the same time it also introduces many comparisons that are useful for the AP exam, such as the connections between urban and rural, tradition and innovation, the workers and the wealthy.
Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
This book tackles the story of the Dust Bowl, the period of severe draught and storms that affected the US West in the 1930s. Instead of attributing this calamity solely to environmental factors, Egan shows how human action ultimately made the crisis much worse.
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering
While most books about the Civil War focus on how the war played out on battlefields and in cabinet meetings in both the North and South, few books focus on the destruction and devastation that the war caused, uprooting families and destroying lives. This book traces the destruction that the Civil War caused, on a scale previously unimaginable. It also shows how politics and economics—indeed whole industries—were transformed by the
Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
We often talk about US imperialism (it even comes up frequently on the AP exam!) but what do we mean exactly? And where is the US empire? In an engaging book, Immerwahr breaks down the different territories that the US has controlled and how it has exercised its power abroad.
David McCullough, Selected Works
Choose any of McCullough’s many books: on the Revolutionary War, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal, John Adams—he writes in a way that includes large bloc texts of quotes on nearly every page. Beyond learning the content for the exam, these books also offer the perfect way to practice for the stimulus-based multiple choice questions.
Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope
Learn about one of the leading activists in the Civil Rights Movement, John Lewis, as he connects his fight for justice in the 1960s to his subsequent work as a US congressman. Learn about the major events of the Civil Rights Movement and also see how events in the 1960s continued to shape US history for decades to come.
Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West
In studying the Civil War, historians and teachers alike focus on the battles on the eastern side of the United States. This book takes a look at the simultaneous battle for the US West. While the Union quickly defeated pro-Confederacy rebels in what is now Arizona and New Mexico, the US Civil War opened up a wider conflict with US expansion into the southwest. This book overlaps with both the Civil War and western expansions of the exam, making it a great prep for free response questions.
Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World
This book uncovers the story of the Dutch colony on Manhattan Island that predated the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts. We might be more familiar with the English settlers, but starting our studies with the Mayflower overlooks a fascinating prehistory that in many cases—with an emphasis on cosmopolitanism, free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom—aligns in many ways with the more familiar history of the beginning of the United States.
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
This book follows the story of one of the largest internal migrations in US history. It follows the stories of millions of African Americans who moved from the south to mostly industrial cities in the north and west in the first half of the 20th century. Read about how this migration changed the history of the US across the 20th century.
Want to watch something instead? Check out Circa’s AP US History Watchlist.
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