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 transformingthe 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 New York Times bestselling historian H. W. Brands comes the riveting story of how America's second generation of political giants--Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Calhoun--battled to complete the unfinished work of the Founding Fathers and decide the shape of our democracy. In the early days of the nineteenth century, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning...

"A fast-paced, often riveting account of the military and political events leading up to the Declaration of Independence and those that followed during the war ... Brands does his readers a service by reminding them that division, as much as unity, is central to the founding of our nation."—The Washington Post
From best-selling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands comes a gripping, page-turning narrative of...

The first "common man" to rise to the presidency, Jackson embodied the spirit and the vision of the emerging American nation; the term "Jacksonian democracy" is embedded in our national lexicon. Historian Brands follows Jackson from his days as rebellious youth, risking execution to free the Carolinas during the Revolutionary War, to his years as a young lawyer and congressman from the newly settled frontier state of Tennessee. As general of the Tennessee...

When Napoleon offered to sell French Louisiana, America was launched on a fateful and fraught journey west. Brands takes us from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush. Live in the west evoked both selfless heroism and unspeakable violence, against indigenous peoples and one another. It was soon evident that El Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it...

"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....

One of the nation's most respected historians and a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, H.W. Brands has the rare gift of investing historical narrative with unmatched verve and insight. The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr sheds light on the life of the third vice president of the United States, a man who is perhaps best known for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel.