For many people today, the name Abraham Lincoln conjures up a mental image of a solemn but kindly statesman. Yet to his contemporaries, one of Lincoln’s defining traits was his humor, which he deployed to great effect throughout his career.

Though the preeminent English theologian of the 17th century, there is much about John Owen’s life which remains obscured to us today. One of the achievements of Crawford Gribben‘s new book John Owen and English Puritanism: Experiences of Defeat (Oxfor...

Marie von Clausewitz: The Woman Behind the Making of On War (Oxford University Press, 2016) is an important and fascinating book that not only tells the story of a remarkable woman’s life during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and Restora...

Polio was a scourge that terrified generations of people throughout the United States and the rest of the world until Jonas Salk’s vaccine provided the first effective defense against it. In Jonas Salk: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2015),

Catapulted into the Oval Office by an unusual set of circumstances, Gerald Ford remains a unique figure in American presidential history. In Ambition, Pragmatism, and Party: A Political Biography of Gerald R. Ford (University Press of Kansas, 2017),

Today we are joined by Brett L. Abrams, author of the book Terry Bradshaw: From Super Bowl Champion to Television Personality (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). It is part of a series called Sports Icons and Issues in Popular Culture. Abrams,

In his new book, Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), cultural historian and biographer Bob Batchelor examines the life of Marvel’s Stan Lee one of the most iconic figures in comic book history.

On March 4, 1953, Soviet citizens woke up to an unthinkable announcement: Joseph Stalin, the country’s all-powerful leader, had died of a stroke. In The Last Days of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2016), Joshua Rubenstein recounts the events surroundin...

With the end of the Civil War, George Crook’s decision to continue serving in the United States Army meant reverting to a lower rank and assuming a command in the Pacific Northwest. Yet, as Paul Magid details in the second volume of his biography of Cr...

You may know Toni Morrison’s famed novel Beloved, but do you know much about the true story of the woman depicted in that story? You will know about the real story and more, by reading her biography called Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Marg...

The Reformer: How One Liberal Fought to Preempt the Russian Revolution (Encounter Books, 2017), written by legal scholar Stephen F. Williams, uses a biographic account of the life and career of Vasily Maklakov to explore issues of legality and rule of ...

In Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), Laura E. Smith, Assistant Professor of Art History at Michigan State University, unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1...

Though not a figure in the public imagination today, William Fox is a man whose legacy is visible in the numerous media enterprises that bear his name. Vanda Krefft‘s biography The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William F...

In November 1944 Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term as president of the United States, despite suffering from heart disease and other medical issues that contributed to his death six months later.

Through meticulous archival research, close readings of key works, and informed and imaginative speculation about a largely enigmatic life, Red Ink author Drew Lopenzina provides a vivid portrait of a singular Native American figure in Through an India...

Anthony Chaney teaches history and writing at the University of North Texas at Dallas. His book Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness (University of North Carolina Press,

Not very many intellectuals really change their minds about anything. They have a big idea, often become well known because of it. Then their big idea becomes an integral part of their identity and they just never let it go.

It’s not often that a single person’s life can reveal the dramatic social and political shifts of a community. From his youth, John Papa I’i, an important statesman and author, played a pivotal role in shaping and supporting the 19th century Kingdom of...

Over the course of a public career that stretched from the Washington administration to the Mexican-American War, John Quincy Adams became a living link to America’s revolutionary generation. In The Lost Founding Father: John Quincy Adams and the Trans...

Laura Lee’s Oscar’s Ghost: The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy (Amberley Publishing, 2017) offers a detailed investigation of a conflict involving the writer and his two friends with whom he maintained sexual relations,

In her new book, Max Liebermann: Modern Art and Modern Germany (Routledge 2015), Marion Deshmukh, the Robert T. Hawkes Professor of History Emeritus at George Mason University, examines the life and career of the prolific German artist Max Liebermann.

Best remembered today for his work as a muralist, the Russian-American artist Victor Arnautoff lived a life worthy of Hollywood. In Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art (University of Illinois Press, 2017),

Born in the Land of Israel around the year 50 C.E., Rabbi Akiva was the greatest rabbi of his time and one of the most important influences on Judaism as we know it today. Traditional sources tell how he was raised in poverty and unschooled in religiou...

In the summer of 1885, the Lakota Sioux holy man Sitting Bull toured North America as a member of Buffalo Bill Cody’s famous “Wild West” show. His participation, as Deanne Stillman explains in her book Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendshi...

When Charles de Gaulle issued his famous call in June 1940 for the French people to continue fighting Nazi Germany, among those within Occupied France who took up the cause was his young niece Genevieve. In The General’s Niece: The Little Known de Gaul...