American Presidents History

In this multifaceted portrait, acclaimed Lincoln biographer Stephen B. Oates, “the most popular historical interpreter of Lincoln” (Gabor S. Boritt, New York Times Book Review), exposes the human side of the great and tragic president - including his depression, his difficulties with love, and his troubled and troubling attitudes about slavery - while also confronting the many legends that have arisen around “Honest Abe”. Oates throughout raises timely questions about what the Lincoln mythos reveals about the American people.

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.

After 150 years, many unsolved mysteries and enduring urban legends still surround the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the popular stage actor John Wilkes Booth. In a new look at the case, award-winning author Robert Hutchinson (The Dawn of Christianity) explores what we know, and don’t know, about what really happened at Ford’s Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865. In addition, he argues that the deep-seated political hatreds that roiled Washington, DC, in the final weeks of the Civil War are particularly relevant to our own polarized age.

Historian Joel Augustus Rogers provides his evidence that there have been 19th- and 20th-century presidents of the United States who had partial Black ancestry, including Harding, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln.

Award-winning author John Ferling is a leading authority on the American Revolution. His entertaining and enlightening histories have greatly improved our understanding of early America and the Founding Fathers. Now Ferling opens a window to the past and explores the contentious presidential election of 1800.

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 America's First Dynasty, Richard Brookhiser tells the story of America's longest and still-greatest dynasty, the Adamses, the only family in our history to play a leading role in American affairs for nearly two centuries.John Adams was only the first of the Adamses to occupy the highest office in the land; his son, John Quincy Adams, ascended to the presidency as an equal champion of liberty.

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.

In Becoming Madison, Michael Signer takes a fresh look at the life of our fourth president. His focus is on Madison before he turned 36, the years in which he did his most enduring work: battling with Patrick Henry - the most charismatic politician in revolutionary America, whose political philosophy and ruthless tactics eerily foreshadowed those of today's Tea Party - over religious freedom; introducing his framework for a strong central government; and becoming the intellectual godfather of the Constitution.

Ronald Reagan’s daughter writes with a moving openness about losing her father to Alzheimer’s disease. The simplicity with which she reveals the intensity, the rush, the flow of her feelings encompasses all the surprises and complexities that ambush us when death gradually, unstoppably invades life.

The riveting story of a dramatic confrontation between Native Americans and White settlers, a compelling conflict that unfolded in the newly created Washington Territory from 1853 to 1857. When appointed Washington’s first governor, Isaac Ingalls Stevens, an ambitious military man turned politician, had one goal: To persuade (peacefully if possible) the Indians of the Puget Sound region to turn over their ancestral lands to the Federal Government.

One 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.

Wealthy Virginia planter, revolutionary general, and founding president, George Washington was the most illustrious public man of his time, a man whose image today still reflects his own careful shaping of his persona. In this thoughtful and incisive biography, Burns and Dunn dissect the strengths and weaknesses of Washington's presidential leadership, from his lasting foreign and economic policies to his polarizing denunciation of the political parties and his public silence about slavery.

Nineteenth-century African Americans felt deep affection for their "liberator" as a "homely" man who did not hold himself apart; Southerners felt a nostalgia for Abraham Lincoln as a humble "conciliator". Later, educators glorified Lincoln as a symbol of nationhood to help assimilate poor immigrants. Monument makers focused not only on a gigantic body but also on a nationalist "union", downplaying "emancipation". Among both Black and White liberals in the 1960s and 1970s, Lincoln was derided or fell out of fashion.

At the beginning of 1864, the Civil War was far from won; terrible and bloody Union setbacks and casualties lay ahead. Abraham Lincoln was facing a re-election battle as some northern Democrats were ready to start peace talks that could leave the Confederacy a separate slaveholding American nation and as his secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, challenged him for the Republican nomination. But by the end of the year, the war's end was in sight, and slavery was on the verge of extinction.

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, consecutive presidents of the United States, were Midwesterners alike in many ways - except that they also sharply differed. William Lee Miller interweaves Truman's and Eisenhower's life stories, which then also becomes the story of their nation as it rose to great power. Listening to their story is a reminder of the modern American story, of ordinary men dealing with extraordinary power.

Why was the Spanish Peso more valuable than the US dollar? How did a public relations fiasco derail Cuban statehood? Would we remember Herbert Hoover as the Jeff Bezos of his time had he been elected eight years earlier? If these don’t sound like questions you heard in history class, you’re right. They’re not. These are the questions you ask when you look at presidential history through the eyes of an advertising executive.

How is it that so little is known about the Renaissance man of America’s early history, with no image on Mount Rushmore, no face on currency, and certainly no Broadway musical to his posthumous credit? Perhaps it’s because he was not a man who sought renown. Throughout his career, others, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams, sought his help when the country was in need of his skills. John Jay’s role in the establishment of the United States, a country that was founded upon ideals of freedom and democracy, has almost been forgotten.

The year was 1862. The Union’s first large scale offensive, the Peninsula campaign led by Major General George B. McClellan, had been disastrous. Doubt in Congress grew that President Lincoln and his generals could win the war. In Saving the Union, Joe Scarborough analyzes the hard choice Lincoln faced—the debate raging inside him over how quickly to move toward emancipation, if at all.

The culmination of years of work on Abraham Lincoln's political thought, Michael Zuckert's A Nation So Conceived argues for a coherent center to Lincoln's political ideology. Zuckert provides invaluable guidance to understanding both Lincoln and the politics of the United States between 1845 and Lincoln's death in 1865 by focusing on roughly a dozen speeches that Lincoln made during his career. This listener-friendly chronological organization is motivated by Zuckert's emphasis on Lincoln as a practical politician who was always fully aware of the political context of the moment.