American History Biographies

A major new biography of J Edgar Hoover that draws from never-before-seen sources to create a groundbreaking portrait of a colossus who dominated half a century of American history and planted the seeds for much of today's conservative political landscape.

The true story of the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, and the famous Battle at the OK Corral, by the New York Times best-selling author of Dodge City and Wild Bill. On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, nine men clashed in what would be known as the most famous shootout in American frontier history. Thirty bullets were exchanged in 30 seconds, killing three men and wounding three others. The fight sprang forth from a tense, hot summer.

Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her 10 years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in 16 countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter. Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent - an impossible-to-pause record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox's astonishing courage and passion.

For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans 500 years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil offers a rich, dramatic history of this complex country.

This book paints a vivid picture of Jefferson Davis as a multifaceted, often charismatic man who mirrored the turbulent times in which he lived and who stood solidly for the South that he loved. Ranging over the complete span of his long life, it shows him as a hardworking Mississippi planter, a compassionate slave owner, a hero of the Mexican War, and an able secretary of war under Franklin Pierce. But it is on the years of the Civil War and Davis’s controversial performance as president of the Confederacy that the book focuses.

No American president has enjoyed as intimate a relationship with the soldiers in his army as did the man they called “Father Abraham.” In Lincoln’s Men, historian William C. Davis draws on thousands of unpublished letters and diaries—the voices of the volunteers—to tell the hidden story of how a new and untested president became “Father” throughout both the army and the North as a whole. Lincoln’s Men casts a new light on our most famous president and on America’s revolution—on our country’s father and its rebirth.

Andrew Jackson’s America examines the events and personalities, particularly President Andrew Jackson, that shaped the development of the United States during the first half of the 19th century. Learn about the influence that Andrew Jackson had on the way America developed, the industrial revolution and the beginning of the two-party system.

Having once said “a military life had no charms to me,” U.S. Grant entered West Point to get through the course, secure a detail for a few years as assistant professor of mathematics at the Academy, and afterwards obtain a permanent position as professor at some respectable college. But the course his life took was quite different. Little did he ever dream that he would serve with distinction in the Mexican War, lead the Union to victory in the Civil War, and struggle through eight years as President of the United States.

Devotion tells the inspirational story of the U.S. Navy’s most famous aviation duo, Lieutenant Tom Hudner and Ensign Jesse Brown, and the Marines they fought to defend. A white New Englander from the country-club scene, Tom passed up Harvard to fly fighters for his country. An African American sharecropper’s son from Mississippi, Jesse became the navy’s first Black carrier pilot, defending a nation that wouldn’t even serve him in a bar.

Win one for The Gipper. Has there ever been a better-known and widely-used exhortative phrase in sports? Not likely. But who was the "Gipper", this mythical-like sports figure whose nickname has aroused, in turn, awe, wonderment, curiosity, and amusement since the second decade of the 20th century, and why is his story important? Answering those questions is the formidable task taken on here by veteran sportswriter Jack Cavanaugh.

A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism. Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire.

In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger-than-life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily-white business world, he married a White woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally he set his White contemporaries' teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them.

Based in part on Davy Crockett’s own writings, this is the true story about one of America’s most iconic historical figures. From his days as a scout for Andrew Jackson during the war of 1812, his time as a Congressman for the state of Tennessee, and his eventual death at the Alamo, Davy Crockett led a life that was admired and idealized by people all across America, to this very day. Hear about the monopolist and corporate misdeeds, environmental degradation, and foreign military adventures that he experienced during his amazing life. Discover the rich history - part myth and part fact - behind this great American man.

The author was a cannoneer in the historic Rockbridge (Va.) Artillery, which made for itself, from Manassas to Appomattox, a reputation second to none in the Confederate service. No more vivid picture has been presented of the private soldier in camp, on the march, or in action. It was written evidently not with any commercial view, but was an undertaking from a conviction that its performance was a question of duty to his comrades.

In this sweeping, enthralling biography, acclaimed historian David Hackett Fischer brings to life the remarkable Samuel de Champlain - soldier, spy, master mariner, explorer, cartographer, artist, and Father of New France. We remember Champlain mainly as a great explorer. On foot and by ship and canoe, he traveled through what are now six Canadian provinces and five American states. Over more than 30 years he founded, colonized, and administered French settlements in North America.

"To begin with I was in love and I am in love so that's not hard," Barbara Bush told her granddaughter Ellie LeBlond Sosa. Sosa had asked for the secret to her and President George H.W. Bush's 77-year love affair that withstood World War II separation, a leap of faith into the oil fields of West Texas, the painful loss of a child, a political climb to the highest office, and after the White House, the transition back to a "normal" life. Sosa and co-author Kelly Anne Chase paint the portrait of the enduring relationship of George and Barbara Bush.

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of slavery.

Proud and talented, history now remembers this conflicted man solely through the lens of his last desperate act of treason. Yet the fall of Benedict Arnold remains one of the Revolutionary period's great puzzles. Why did a brilliant military commander, who repeatedly risked his life fighting the British, who was grievously injured in the line of duty, and fell into debt personally funding his own troops, ultimately became a traitor to the patriot cause?

Born in an era of rising violence, Black Elk killed his first man at Little Big Horn, witnessed the death of his second cousin Crazy Horse, and traveled to Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Upon his return, he was swept up in the traditionalist Ghost Dance movement and shaken by the massacre at Wounded Knee. But Black Elk was not a warrior, and instead chose the path of a healer and holy man, motivated by a powerful prophetic vision that haunted and inspired him.

In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.