H. W Brands

"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 president of the twentieth century. Brands employs archival sources not available to previous biographers and dozens of interviews with surviving members of the administration....

"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....

A masterful biography of the Civil War general and two-term president who saved the Union twice, on the battlefield and in the White House, holding the country together at two critical turning points in our history.

What causes people to forsake their country and take arms against it? George Washington in the 1770s stood at the apex of Virginia society. Benjamin Franklin was more successful still, having risen from humble origins to world fame. John Adams revered the law. Yet all three men became rebels against the British Empire that fostered their success. Others in the same circle of family and friends chose differently-- and soon heard themselves denounced...

Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic story of the settling of the American West. He takes readers from John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in Oregon to the Texas Revolution, from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush.

" ... [A]cclaimed historian H.W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis."--Page [4] of jacket.

From bestselling historian and long-time Texan H. W. Brands, a richly textured history of one of the most fascinating and colorful eras in U.S. history—the Texas Revolution and the forging of a new America.

"For better or for worse, Texas was very much like America. The people ruled, and little could stop them. If they ignored national boundaries, if they trampled the rights of indigenous peoples and of imported bondsmen,...

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...