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[spork]

If you're looking for good books on American history, I can strongly recommend:

Patriots:  The Men Who Started the American Revolution, by A. J. Langguth.

[yemaya]

Anne Farrow et al, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery.  (By a group of journalists for The Hartford Courant)

The Hartford Courant ruined my life.

I agree that it's not a great newspaper, but the book's good.  It can be tough to use in a classroom - many times (esp. northern) students have been taught that the northerners were all a bunch of abolitionists.  The reality?  Not so much.

And I concur with alan_cc on Salt.  Kurlansky's got a number of really good books.

[dr_stones]

Someone here needs to invent a word for these sorts of self-promoting windbags who try to sell anecdotal information to the public as real scholarship.  You can add Jeremy Rifkin and Thomas Friedman to the list. 

As a collector of small trivia, may I try?

Microlectuals

[spork]

Bingo!

[anthroid]

Salt is good (I'm almost done with it).  To go along with the North-is-virtuous debunking, I'd recommend Noel Ignatiev's How The Irish Became White.  It's quite an eye-opener and really demonstrates that the Irish, far from being persecuted victims in the US, victimized African Americans pretty thoroughly right from the start.  (I am speaking as someone of Irish descent who heard all of the "poor me" stories from me dear old granny about the persecution of the Irish by the Brits, first, and then the WASPs in the US.)

[dr_stones]

Salt is good (I'm almost done with it).  To go along with the North-is-virtuous debunking, I'd recommend Noel Ignatiev's How The Irish Became White.  It's quite an eye-opener and really demonstrates that the Irish, far from being persecuted victims in the US, victimized African Americans pretty thoroughly right from the start.  (I am speaking as someone of Irish descent who heard all of the "poor me" stories from me dear old granny about the persecution of the Irish by the Brits, first, and then the WASPs in the US.)

They had lots o' Negroes over there in County Cork, did they?  The Irish may have been kicking blacks good in America in the 19th century, but that doesn't absolve 600 years of English exploitation and religious persecution, not to mention the forced displacement of property owners and the rent system, which was on par to the Russian serfdom.

Erin go bragh!

[swhistory]

I like the "Major Problems" series. I also like to use Howard Zinn as an addition to the required textbooks.

I used "Lies My Teacher Told Me" as a basis for a critical thinking exercise once. I printed out basic information of several abolitionists, and had my class try to find references to these people in their textbook. It was an eye-opener to them how little these (well known) abolitionists were discussed in the textbook, if at all.

[crazybatlady]

Thanks for all of the suggestions, folks.  I've got Salt waiting for me at the library and How the Irish Became White next in line. 

I liked Freakonomics, by the way.  Whoever said it wasn't good reading was wrong.  It's very entertaining--thus, the popularity, I imagine.

Thanks again!