American Presidents History

For all the talk of the Civil War "pitting brother against brother", until now there has never been a single book that traces the story of one family ravaged by that conflict. And no family could better illustrate the personal toll the war took than Lincoln's own. Mary Todd Lincoln was one of 14 siblings who were split between the Confederacy and the Union. Three of her brothers fought, and two died, for the South.

The United States of 1797 faced enormous challenges. The father of the new nation, George Washington, left his vice president, John Adams, with relatively little guidance and impossible expectations to meet. Adams was confronted with intense partisan divides, debates over citizenship, fears of political violence, potential for foreign conflict with France and Britain, and a nation unsure that the presidency could even work without Washington at the helm. Making the Presidency is an exploration of the second US presidency, a period critical to the survival of the American republic.

Master storyteller and best-selling historian H. W. Brands narrates the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln - two men moved to radically different acts to confront our nation’s gravest sin. The Zealot and the Emancipator is acclaimed historian H. W. Brands' thrilling account of how two American giants shaped the war for freedom.

The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics", Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.

Few public officials have provoked such intense controversy as Henry Kissinger. During his time in the Nixon and Ford administrations, he came to be admired and hated in equal measure. Notoriously, he believed that foreign affairs ought to be based primarily on the power relationships of a situation, not simply on ethics. He went so far as to argue that under certain circumstances America had to protect its national interests even if that meant repressing other countries' attempts at democracy.

Who are the Kennedys? Are they the brilliant, heroic, extraordinary people their admirers believe them to be? Or are they arrogant, competitive, self-absorbed children of a willful and immensely rich patriarch, as their detractors claim? In fact, they are all of these things, and more.

For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight. Historian Joseph J. Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today "hover[s] over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams".

Abraham Lincoln grappled with the greatest crisis of democracy that has ever confronted the United States. While many books have been written about his temperament, judgment, and steady hand in guiding the country through the Civil War, we know less about Lincoln’s penetrating ideas and beliefs about democracy, which were every bit as important as his character in sustaining him through the crisis. Allen C. Guelzo, one of America’s foremost experts on Lincoln, captures the president’s firmly held belief that democracy was the greatest political achievement in human history.

In All the Powers of Earth, Lincoln's incredible ascent to power in a world of chaos is newly revealed through the great biographer's extraordinary research and literary style. After a period of depression that he would ever find his way to greatness, Lincoln takes on the most powerful demagogue in the country, Stephen Douglas, in the debates for a Senate seat. He sidelines the front-runner William Seward, a former governor and senator for New York, to cinch the new Republican Party's nomination.

A hundred years after his inauguration, Woodrow Wilson still stands as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, and one of the most enigmatic. And now, after more than a decade of research and writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg has completed Wilson - the most personal and penetrating biography ever written about the 28th President. This is not just Wilson the icon - but Wilson the man.

Born in London to an American father and a British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different from the New England upbringing of future president John Quincy Adams, whose life had been dedicated to public service from the earliest age. And yet John Quincy fell in love with her almost despite himself. Their often tempestuous but deeply close marriage lasted half a century.

In this propulsive history, constitutional law and political science professor Corey Brettschneider provides a thoroughly researched account of assaults on democracy by not one such president, but five.

When President Theodore Roosevelt welcomed the country’s most visible Black man, Booker T. Washington, into his circle of counselors in 1901, the two confronted a shocking and violent wave of racist outrage. In the previous decade, Jim Crow laws had legalized discrimination in the South, eroding social and economic gains for former slaves. Lynching was on the rise, and Black Americans faced new barriers to voting. Slavery had been abolished, but if newly freed citizens were condemned to lives as share croppers, how much improvement would their lives really see?

Designed to be fun and engaging for students or anyone with a love for history, these stories include a fascinating focus on important, influential, and visionary people, along with heroic animal escapades! From scientists to famous women to war heroes and more, there is something of interest for everyone in this exciting series!

In a lifetime shaped by politics, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proved himself a master manipulator of Congress, the press, and the public. But when war in Europe and Asia threatened America's shores, FDR found himself in a world turned upside down, where his friends became his foes, his enemies his allies. To help wage democracy's first "total war", he turned to one of history's most remarkable triumvirates.

This is the bizarre tale of 12 young American soldiers who are deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2006. Rather than fight the enemy in combat, the men are unexpectedly assigned to guard the country's notorious leader - Saddam Hussein - in the months leading to his execution. Living alongside and caring for their "high-value detainee" in a former palace dubbed The Rock and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions.

George W. Bush arrived in the White House an untested governor with an unfortunate habit of tripping over his own tongue, presiding over an economy slipping into recession, and a nation more obsessed with reality television than with the reality of international terrorism. He was considered by many opinion-leaders a dupe, an illiterate, a cowboy, a preppie, a child of privilege. Now, it is clear to John Podhoretz that Bush has become, and will be remembered, as one of this nation's strongest leaders.

Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States and commander of the Union forces in the Civil War, tells the story of his life in his own words. In this opening volume, Grant covers his early years, including his time at the U.S. military academy at West Point and his service during the Mexican War under Zachary Taylor. Grant wrote his memoirs in order to rescue his family from debt and they were published as he lay dying of throat cancer. Today, they are an American classic.

On a dangerous mission for the British army, young Major Washington had no idea that one day he would lead an army of fellow colonials in a bitter battle for independence against Great Britain herself, the most powerful empire in the world. In each new crisis, the young United States sought out George Washington. As commander in chief of the Continental army, chairman of the Constitutional Convention, and first president, this indispensable American served the struggling nation when its survival and form hung in the balance.

Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, writes about losing her father to Alzheimer's disease, saying goodbye in stages, and watching the progression of a disease that steals what is most precious: a person's memory. Past and present come together in this illuminating portrait of grief, of a man, a disease, and a girl and her father.