I teach English to refugees and I'm likely to continue to do that in Nashville, but if I'm teaching English to refugee kids in school it might be useful to be able to use my History MA and do History classes for extra cash if the schools need teachers. But I assume American History classes are about, well, American history? And I'm not American. What kind of things ought I to read to get up to speed?
I have some idea of the main stuff, because it comes up in American TV and so on. You know, I've seen Lincoln, Hamilton, etc. I know that the Civil War was about slavery and the top generals were guys called Ulysses Grant and something or other Lee, but I couldn't tell you much more about them. I know one of the triggers for the War of Independence was stamp tax... or maybe we actually didn't charge them stamp tax in the end? I'm not sure? I know a lot of it was fallout from debt incurred in the 7 Years War, which I believe is called the French and Indian War in the US, but I don't know the details. I had one lecture on American history in my History degree and it was mostly about Native Americans and their interaction with the British (which was really interesting).
My fiancee lives in Tennessee, so I'd be particularly interested at looking at things from that perspective. The Civil War I guess is important, that was a big part of the Tennessee State Museum when we visited but I don't have a lot of background so the details were a bit confusing, and the Cherokee whose territory it was until US settlers moved in after the revolution.
Congratulations on being an immigrant to Nashville. I grew up there and it's a lively place.
You'll find a number of good books over on the BookList ( and check out Parnassus Books, over in Green Hills). For a one-volume history, These Truths by Jil Lepore is very good. It very easily takes the place of Howard Zinn's A People's History. Zinn's book has long been popular, as it claimed to tell the story of other people than heroic white males, but if you search this subreddit you'll find a very low opinion of Zinn's book- he wasn't a historian, and historians really can't just pick and choose to tell people things they want to hear. Lepore is a historian; a good one, and she does not limit her attention to generals, presidents, and charismatic dead white guys.
Lepore's book does have something of an aversion to military history, though, and if you want to know more about the events, not just the political and intellectual origins of the War of Independence, Alan Taylors American Revolutions is very good. He wisely starts early, in 1750: that's when the population of the colonies and the British government really began to have different priorities, goals. And it also wisely ends at 1804, because many of the important changes in the US government did not come with the War, but later.
The history of much of the country west of the Alleghenies could be told as a narrative of colonial settlement driven by land speculators, and Tennessee was no exception. You might find Samuel Coles' History of the Lost State of Franklin (1924) diverting, when some poorer land speculators from Virginia ran up against some richer land speculators from North Carolina, couldn't get admitted to the US, and briefly found themselves running a land-locked nation, using animal hides for currency. You'll find much more succinct accounts ( I'm sure the Tennessee State Museum has something on Franklin) , but Coles has fun details.
James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom is still a great book on the Civil War. Stanley Horn's The Decisive Battle of Nashville will fill you in on much of the local history. You should also check out the Franklin Battlefield. The two battles were the end of John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee. Franklin also could have been a useful lesson to the Europeans in 1914 on the new dangers of frontal assault tactics against newer, more modern weapons.
Eric Foner's Reconstruction is excellent- the sad tale of how the North won the war but the South kept much of its slave society.
I also recommend another bit of Nashville history, James Squires' Secrets of the Hopewell Box. Nashville was once just a little southern railroad town. I think now most Nashville residents haven't lived there more than ten years, and this will give you some notion of what the old days were like, when the low end of Broadway was filled with farm supply stores and light industry, and country music was just getting to be popular.