The two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War emythologizes Texas’s journey to statehood and restores the genuinely heroic spirit to a pivotal chapter in American history. • “A balanced, unromanticized account [of] America’s great epic.” —The New York Times Book Review

From Stephen Austin, Texas’s reluctant founder,...

What do moral people do when democracy countenances evil? The question, implicit in the idea that people can govern themselves, came to a head in America at the middle of the nineteenth century, in the struggle over slavery. John Brown's answer was violence--violence of a sort some in later generations would call terrorism. Abraham Lincoln's answer was politics. But the time for moderation had passed. Slaveholders lumped Lincoln with Brown as an enemy...

From bestselling historian H. W. Brands, an incisive chronicle of the events and trends that guided--and sometimes misguided--our nation from the A-bomb to the iPhone. Ultimately Brands captures the national experience through the last six decades and reveals the still-unfolding legacy of dreams born out of a global cataclysm.

In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky; as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing...

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War: a "first-rate" narrative history (The New York Times) that brilliantly portrays the emergence, in a remarkably short time, of a recognizably modern America. 

American Colossus captures the decades between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century, when a few breathtakingly...

From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War—a fascinating portrait of one of the most compelling politicians in American history—a Revolutionary War hero, vice president of the United States, and the man who killed Alexander Hamilton. 

But as H. W. Brands demonstrates in this biography, Burr was a man before his time—a proponent...

Traces the life of notorious financier James "Diamond Jim" Fisk, providing narrative coverage of his business and personal exploits before he was gunned down in New York's Grand Central Hotel by a rival.

"From master storyteller and New York Times bestselling biographer H. W. Brands, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes the first full life of Ronald Reagan since his death. Ronald Reagan today is a conservative icon, celebrated for transforming the American domestic agenda and playing a crucial part in ending communism in the Soviet Union. In his masterful new biography, H. W. Brands argues that Reagan, along with FDR, was the most consequential...