Bibliography

Books & other sources

Part of the learning experience at the University involves improving and refining one's skills in finding various documents and sources on a topic, consulting them and assessing their value and usefulness. This truism is perhaps even more topical today, when information technology is constantly expanding our horizons, than it was even a mere twenty years ago.

Students who wish further to expand their horizons regarding the various phenomena of US civilization have a wide range of options, including, but not limited to:

Textbook "Panoramas", such as

• Marie-Christine Pauwels Civilisation des Etats-Unis (although the title of this book is in French, the text is in English)
  
• Pierre Lagayette Les États-Unis contemporains 2002 [973.92 LAG]
• La civilisation américaine par les textes Frédéric Robert,... 2003 (973 ROB)
• Éléments de civilisation américaine Michel Goussot,...2009 (973.92 GOU)
• A new introduction to American studies Howard Temperley and Christopher Bigsby 2006 (810.9 NEW)

There are also any number of histories of the US, including narrative histories like

• Maldwyn Jones The Limits of Liberty (this book is also used in 2nd and 3rd year courses, and might be a good choice for that reason)
• Eric Foner The Story of American Freedom
• Bernard Vincent Histoire des E-U (this work is in French, and may be more readable for that reason)

Students may wish to purchase one or more of these, but I recommend the "try-before-you-buy" approach: the University library at the Manufacture des Tabacs has all of them and students can consult them there for free.

Another rich, albeit potentially misleading, source of information and explanation is the internet. Some potentially useful sites include:

Two US government sites:

• The Library of Congress's "American Memory" exhibit (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/)
• the US Department of State's history pages (http://www.state.gov/history/)

Current events are treated in newspaper and other news sources, such as

• the Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
• the New York Times (nytimes.com)
• the Washington, D.C., Post (washingtonpost.com)
• the television news station CNN cnn.com; (CNN seems recently to have become more like cable news channels, in including major headlines about topics which are of great importance to the people involved, but of only passing and sometimes voyeurish interest to a wider public)

not to mention weeklies such as

• Time (time.com)
• Newsweek (newsweek.com)
and the list goes on endlessly.

Of course, searches using the available search sites such as Google or Yahoo can be made on such key words as "US history", "US civilization", "US education", "US maps", "US census", "National Atlas", etc.

Another interesting source is Wikipedia (by default, it opens to a randomly chosen article), a web encyclopedia that is constantly being modified and brought up to date by users. Anyone can add to or modify articles in Wikipedia, which has emerged as a remarkably useful and accurate source of information about just about anything. It is also a striking example of how the internet can be used.

One final source: this web-site, devoted to this course: CharlesHadley.net