Books

• The Historical Tradition of Busoga: Mukama and Kintu (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
• Neither Slave Nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World, edited with Jack P. Greene, with an introduction by David William Cohen and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
• Womunafu's Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth Century African Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). Repr. New York: ACLS History E-Book, 2004.
• Towards a Reconstructed Past: Historical Texts from Busoga, Uganda (London: The British Academy and Oxford University Press, 1986).
• Siaya: A Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape (London: James Currey; Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya; Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1989), with E. S. Atieno Odhiambo.
• Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann; London: James Currey, 1992), with E. S. Atieno Odhiambo.
• The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
• The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990 (Oxford, Ohio: Ohio University Press; 2004), with E. S. Atieno Odhiambo.
• African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), ed. with Luise White and Stephan F. Miescher.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

• "The Cwezi Cult," Journal of African History, ix, 4 (1968), 651-57.
• "Luo History Without Court Chronicles," Journal of African History, ix, 3 (1968), 480-82.
• "A Survey of Interlacustrine Chronology," Journal of African History, xi, 2 (1970), 177-201.
• "Agenda for African Economic History," The Journal of Economic History, xxxi, 1 (March, 1971), 208-21.
• "Precolonial History as the History of Society," African Studies Review, 17, 2, (1974), 467-72.
• "Trends in African Historical Studies," American Anthropologist, 80 (1978), 101-105.
• “The Political Transformation of Northern Busoga: 1600-1900," Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 23 (3-4), 87-88 (1982), 465-88.
• "Ayany, Malo, and Ogot: Historians in Search of a Luo Nation," with E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 107-108, xxcii-3-4, 1987, 269-286.
• "The Cultural Topography of a `Bantu Borderland': Busoga, 1500-1850," Journal of African History, 29, 1, 1988, 57-79.
• "The Undefining of Oral Tradition," Ethnohistory, 36, 1, Winter, 1989, 9-18.
• "Luo Camps in Seventeenth Century Eastern Uganda: The Use of Migration Tradition in the Reconstruction of Culture," SUGIA: Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, 5 (1983), 145-75.
• "Natur und Kampf--Uberfluss und Armut in der Viktoriasee-Region in Afrika von 1880 bis zur Gegenwart," SOWI: Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen fur Unterricht und Studium, 14, 1 (March) 1985, 10-22.

Other

• Selected Texts, Busoga Traditional History, 3 vols., limited xerox and bound edition deposited in Africana collections in North America, Europe, and Africa: 1969, 1970, 1973)

• "The River-Lake Nilotes from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century," Zamani: A Survey of East African History, eds. B. A. Ogot and J. A. Kieran (Nairobi and New York: Longmans, New Edition, ed. B. A. Ogot, (Nairobi: Longmans, 1974).

• "Peoples and States of the Great Lakes Region," in J. F. A. Ajayi, ed., General History of Africa, VI: Africa in the Nineteenth Century until the 1880s (London: Heinemann; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 270-93).1968);