H. W Brands

"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...

"From bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands, a revelatory history of the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States Founding Partisans is a lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be. To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were an existential threat to republican virtues....

Examines "how President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur squared off to decide America's future in the aftermath of World War II. At the height of the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman committed a gaffe that sent shock waves around the world. When asked by a reporter about the possible use of atomic weapons in response to China's entry into the war, Truman replied testily, 'The military commander in the field will have charge of the...

Theodore Roosevelt (1857—1919) was the most literary of American Presidents, writing scores of books, including Through the Brazilian Wilderness and African Game Trails. He was also the most active of American writers. In little more than six decades, Roosevelt was, among many of his activities, a rancher, historian, reformer, New York City Police Commissioner, renowned hunter, New York State Governor, conservationist, Vice President of the United...

Brands writes the story of Texas's precarious journey to statehood, from its early colonization in the 1820s to the shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad by the Mexican army, from its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by Comanche to its day of liberation an upstart Republic.

Since the formation of the American Republic the principles of free enterprise and equal opportunity have been at the very core of economic philosophy. During the revolution, colonists fought not only for intangibles like "liberty" and "justice," but also for the promises of a free market that provided everyone with the opportunity to pursue economic advancement regardless of social position and unsubjugated to a crown. America quickly became a society...

From the first days of the United States, a battle raged over money. On one side were the democrats, who wanted cheap money and feared the concentration of financial interests in the hands of a few. On the other were the capitalists who sought the soundness of a national bank-and the profits that came with it. In telling this exciting story, H. W. Brands focuses on five "Money Men": Alexander Hamilton, who championed a national bank; Nicholas Biddle,...

From the very beginning, America is a nation shaped by adversity. These are the stories of the challenges that helped shape a nation.

As the twentieth century continues, America faces perhaps its most daunting challenges yet. The 1930s brings the greatest economic crisis in its history; FDR offers the troubled nation a New Deal, but there are clouds on the horizon.

"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. Brown was a deeply religious man who heard the God of the Old Testament speaking to him, telling him to do whatever was necessary...