Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana (Mississippi State University. Libraries)

A "biography of one of America's greatest generals-- and most misunderstood presidents"-- "In his time, Ulysses S. Grant was routinely grouped with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the "Trinity of Great American Leaders." But the battlefield commander-turned-commander-in-chief fell out of favor in the twentieth century. In American Ulysses, Ronald C. White argues that we need to once more revise our estimates of him in the twenty-first. Based...

Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, Freeman shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Behind these fights is a larger story of how fisticuffs and journalism, and the powerful...

"When John Wilkes Booth fired his derringer point-blank into President Abraham Lincoln's head, he set in motion a series of dramatic consequences that would upend the lives of ordinary Washingtonians and Americans alike. In a split second, the story of a nation was changed. During the hours that followed, America's future would hinge on what happened in a cramped back bedroom at Petersen's Boardinghouse, directly across the street from Ford's Theatre....

"Thomas Nast (1840-1902), the founding father of American political cartooning, is perhaps best known for his cartoons portraying political parties as the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast's legacy also includes a trove of other political cartoons, his successful attack on the machine politics of Tammany Hall in 1871, and his wildly popular illustrations of Santa Claus for Harper's Weekly magazine. Throughout his career, his drawings...

Recounts the last year of the former president's life, after losing his fortune, discovering he had cancer, and his race to complete his memoirs --

"We were as brothers," Sherman said, describing his relationship to Grant, a friendship forged on the battlefield. They were prewar failures--Grant, forced to resign from the Army because of his drinking, and Sherman, who held four different jobs during the four years before the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter. But heeding the call to save the Union, each struggled to join the war effort. And taking each other's measure at the Battle of Shiloh,...

An analysis of the literary life of the sixteenth president explores the ways in which his views were shaped by classic literature and how he used language as a vehicle for complex ideas and an instrument of change in both political and personal arenas.

"A miracle; an exquisite story exquisitely told ... If you love Jane Austen, or Hamilton, or fiction--of any era--that transports and transforms in equal measure, look no further."--A.J. Finn, bestselling author of The Woman in the Window. From the prizewinning author of Mr. Timothy and The Pale Blue Eye comes Courting Mr. Lincoln, the page-turning and surprising story of a young Abraham Lincoln and the two people who loved him best: a young, marriageable...

Eric Foner gives us the history of Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner begins with Lincoln's youth in Indiana and Illinois and follows the trajectory of his career across an increasingly tense and shifting political terrain from Illinois to Washington, D.C. Although "naturally anti-slavery" for as long as he can remember, Lincoln scrupulously holds to the position that the Constitution protects the institution in the original slave states....