I woke up on Christmas morning thinking about American historians. It probably was because I had a dream about a historian I knew, or maybe it reflected my own wish—having never taken or taught an American history course, but having written five books of American history—to be regarded as one of the gang. I had hours to kill before my family got up, so I started thinking of what historians and books had most influenced my view of American history, and I came up with a list of ten. They're my favorites; they're not the best books, because I haven’t read comprehensively, especially in certain periods. It’s much heavier on the history of religion than on social history, and on the Progressive Era than on, say, the Civil War.

1. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness. (1956) Miller, a professor at Harvard for two decades after World War II, wrote how Puritan theology—before that, popularly identified with sexual repression and witch burning—influenced America’s idea of itself as having a mission—an “errand into the wilderness.” In Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, Miller also parsed the early conflicts within American Christianity that issued, paradoxically, in the First Amendment. Ideas of American exceptionalism and of America having a special mission in the world all date from the Puritan beliefs that Miller described in his books.

2. William McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings and Reform. (1978) McLoughlin, a professor at Brown, described how the history of political and social reform in America tracked that of religious awakenings. What I realized after reading McLoughlin was that the Sixties, which I had lived through, had been a period of religious awakening as well as reform—only the religion had been as different from the standard issue as, say, Millerities or Mormons of the Second Awakening during the 1830s had been from Presbyterianism. McLoughlin would have had trouble, though, fitting the rightwing revival of the ‘80s into his history.

3. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. (1969) Wood, who still teaches at Brown, described how the Federalists justified Constitutional measures aimed at curtailing popular democracy by invoking radical republican ideas of popular sovereignty. The ruse Wood described continues to haunt American debates over “big government” and "states' rights." In a later work, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood describes how the American revolution—which historians sometimes reject as a real revolution—set off a social revolution away from vestiges of English Feudal hierarchy. It’s a great book about American values.

4. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. (1988) When I grew up, kids played cowboys and Indians, and westerns dominated the movies and early television. We still thought of Indians as the bad guys. The American view of Native Americans changed in the civil rights era, but the brutal repression and murder of the Indian tribes laid the foundation for modern America and for modern American democracy, as well as American overseas expansion, and still sits uneasily in our understanding of ourselves. I’d hear occasional echoes of cowboys and Indians in attempts to justify or explain George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Rogin’s book is about the central role that Jackson, the erstwhile popular democrat, played in that history.