Conceived in the 1950s and launched in 1961 under the co-editorship of historians Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward, the series has been edited by David M. Kennedy since 1999.
Since its inception, the series editors have invited numerous historians to write for the Oxford History of the United States.
No author originally commissioned to write for the series has ultimately gone on to publish a volume with the Oxford History of the United States.
[8] Hofstadter and Woodward tried but failed to contract the Atlantic historian Bernard Bailyn for the series' volume on the American Revolution.
[10] Kenneth M. Stampp signed to write the volume about the American Civil War, but he withdrew from the series; Woodward and Hofstadter replaced Stampp with William W. Freehling, who had initially signed to write the volume about the early nineteenth century, or Jacksonian era, replacing Freehling in turn with Charles Grier Sellers.
[9] Among historians connected with the series at one time or another were Morton Keller, John Lewis Gaddis, Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick.
[14] Freehling, signed to write about the Civil War, later withdrew from the series, replaced by Willie Lee Rose, a former graduate student of Woodward's.
[15] After Rose had a stroke in 1978, she was unable to continue the project, and James M. McPherson replaced her as the series' Civil War author.
[17] Oxford University Press later published Elkins and McKitrick's manuscript, narrating United States history up to 1800, as the 1993 The Age of Federalism.
[26] Oxford University Press' catalog for the spring of 2007 announced that a volume written by H. W. Brands, Leviathan: America Comes of Age, 1865–1900, would be published as part of the series.
[27] In 2008, the series published George C. Herring's From Colony to Superpower: U. S. Foreign Relations Since 1776[28] as its thematic volume on diplomatic history.
[33] In 2005, the series published a revised edition of Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause that added more social history and a new epilogue and bibliographic essay.
When originally published in hardcover, McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom spent 16 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and an additional 3 months for the subsequent paperback edition.
[46] However, in the October 2006 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, the magazine's book editor, Benjamin Schwarz, criticized the volumes by Kennedy and Patterson in the Oxford History of the United States as "bloated and intellectually flabby" compared to the entries in the New Oxford History of England, maintaining that the volumes "lack the intellectual refinement, analytic sharpness, and stylistic verve" of their English counterparts.