If you're into the Revolutionary War era, I definitely recommend John Adams and 1776 by David McCullough.

Colonial Period:
"The Island at the Center of the World" by Russell Shorto
American Revolution:
"Redcoats and Rebels" and "Wolfe at Quebec" by Christopher Hibbert
"The Perils of Peace" by Thomas Fleming
U.S. Civil War:
"The Killer Angels" by Michael Sharra (fiction)
"Lincoln at Gettysburg" by Garry Wills
"April 1865" by Jay Winek

Hope this help some. Good luck.

I love America's Women by Gail Collins. You won't get much about women unless it's written by women authors, and only getting the men's perspective (which must of history is) gives you a skewed look at things.

The most readable book on the settlement by the Pilgrims was Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick. It gets into a lot of the early-early history, before America was America. It sets up the environment our founding fathers were steeped in pretty well, I thought.

It's definitely biased (and whether or not that's a good thing depends on your perspective), but I though Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States was interesting.

How Lincoln Learned to Read by Daniel Wolff is more of a daily life-type history--it talks about how Lincoln and some other "famous" Americans were educated as children. It really shows how what people were expected to need to know changed as time passed, and it goes into more detail about certain time periods and places than the average history book does.

If you're interested in fiction, too, you could try some of Gore Vidal's books. Lincoln was the first book of his that I read, and of his American history-related books I think it's still my favorite.

I prefer the small slice of history books over the general overview ones, so:

The Poisoner's Handbook, by Deborah Blum
     Excellent book covering the rise of forensic science, which happened to coincide with Prohibition. There are some gripping stories in here.

Slavery by Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon
     As we all know, officially sanctioned slavery may have ended with the Civil War, but the Jim Crow laws lasted for decades later. Blackmon finds that it was even worse than that, as prison sentences were used to get free labor out of black prisoners.

Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, by Geoffry Stone
     It didn't start with Bush/Cheney. Attempts to stifle speech go back to the very beginning of the Republic. Stone covers the conflicts the U. S. was in, the attempts to quash dissenting speech, and the people who fought those attempts.

Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin.
     I'm only in the middle so I can't give a complete summary, but I'm liking what I'm reading of Lincoln's handling of his cabinet, many of whom wanted his job.

Edited at 2011-10-22 06:44 pm (UTC)

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer
No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin