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A comprehensive account of the rise and fall of one of the major shapers of American foreign policy
On the eve of his inauguration as President, Woodrow Wilson commented, “It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.” As America was drawn into the Great War in Europe, Wilson used his scholarship, his principles, and the political savvy of his advisers to overcome his ignorance of world affairs and lead the country out of isolationism. The product of his efforts—his vision of the United States as a nation uniquely suited for moral leadership by virtue of its democratic tradition—is a view of foreign policy that is still in place today.
Acclaimed historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H. W. Brands offers a clear, well-informed, and timely account of Wilson’s unusual route to the White House, his campaign against corporate interests, his struggles with rivals at home and allies abroad, and his decline in popularity and health following the rejection by Congress of his League of Nations. Wilson emerges as a fascinating man of great oratorical power, depth of thought, and purity of intention.
In his time, there was no more popular national figure than
Theodore Roosevelt. It was not just the energy he brought to every
political office he held or his unshakable moral convictions that
made him so popular, or even his status as a bonafide war hero,the
man who led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba during the
Spanish-American war. Most important, Theodore Roosevelt was loved
by the people because this scion of a privileged New York family
loved America and Americans.And yet, according to Bill Brands, if
we look at the private Roosevelt without blinders, we see a man
whose great public strengths hid enormous personal deficiencies.
His highly exaggerated, and often uncompromising ways drove many of
his business and personal friends crazy. His historical writings,
which Brands quotes from extensively, are nothing if not a portrait
of a boy's endless macho fantasies. He was often so full of himself
that his speeches and writings were the frequent subject of fierce
satire in their time.Even more revealing, according to Brands, was
Roosevelt as son, brother, husband, and father. According to
Brands, to understand both the public and private Roosevelt one
must understand the impact of his father's death while he was still
a child, denying him the opportunity to come to terms with his own
manhood. When his first wife Alice died of complications from
childbirth, leaving behind a baby daughter Alice, his response was
to run away to shoot Buffalo in the west, leaving the newborn
infant to the care of his unmarried sister Bamie. When his second
wife Edith was seriously, perhaps fatally ill, he left her to fight
in the Spanish-American war. His only concern when his brother
Elliot, who had been his only friend as a child, became an
alcoholic was to hide the news from the public. Determined that his
four sons would not dishonor his belief that men, to achieve their
manhood, must test themselves in war, he arranged for each to
serve, often in the frontlines, during WWI. His youngest son
Quentin would die in that cause.Beautifully written, powerfully
moved by its subject, TR is nonetheless a biography more
appropriate to today's critical times.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A "Washington Post" Notable Book
A brilliant evocation of the qualities that made FDR one of the
most beloved and greatest of American presidents.
Drawing on archival material, public speeches, correspondence and
accounts by those closest to Roosevelt early in his career and
during his presidency, H. W. Brands shows how Roosevelt transformed
American government during the Depression with his New Deal
legislation, and carefully managed the country's prelude to war.
Brands shows how Roosevelt's friendship and regard for Winston
Churchill helped to forge one of the greatest alliances in history,
as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin maneuvered to defeat
Germany and prepare for post-war Europe.
In Dreams of El Dorado, H. W. Brands tells the thrilling, panoramic
story of the settling of the American West, from Lewis and Clark's
expedition in the early 19th century to the closing of the frontier
by the early 20th. He introduces us to explorers, mountain men,
cowboys, missionaries and soldiers, taking us from John Jacob
Astor's fur trading campaign in Oregon to the Texas Revolution,
from the California gold rush to the Oklahoma land rush.
Throughout, Brands explores the contradictions of the West and
explodes its longstanding myths. The West has been celebrated as
the proving ground of American individualism; in reality, the West
depended on collective action and federal largesse more than any
other region. The West brought out the finest and the basest in
those who ventured there, evoking both selfless heroism and
unspeakable violence. Visons of great wealth drew generations of
Americans westward, but El Dorado was never more elusive than in
the West. Balanced, authoritative, and masterfully told, Dreams of
El Dorado sets a new standard for histories of the American West.
The question of how far mathematical methods of reasoning and inves
tigation are applicable in economic theorising has long been a
matter of debate. The first part of this question needing to be
answered was whether, outside the range of ordinary statistical
methods, such application is in fact possible. In my opinion the
controversy on this point has been a fruitful one, which has led,
as might have been expected, to an affirmative answer. What,
however, has not yet been decided - for the simple reason that
hitherto it has not been investigated - is whether the application
of mathematical methods to our science is expedient. From the point
of view of economic methodology this seems to me the more important
part of the question, although the only considerations hitherto
brought to bear upon it have been of a rather general character,
based on uncer tain ideas which have led to uncertain conclusions.
That is why I welcome this attempt of Dr. Heinz W. Brand to bring
the solution nearer by his present work. The conclusion he reaches
here is that mathematical methods cannot unreservedly be employed
in our science. The arguments which he carefully weighs, in the
course of a criticism which is never destructive, are centred on
his own criterion of asking whether it is not merely possible, but
at the same time profitable, to apply mathematics in economic
science."
For the past nine years, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands has been
tweeting the history of the United States. But this has been no
ordinary version of the American tale. Instead, Brands gives his
5,000-plus followers a regular dose of history and poetry combined:
his tweets are in the form of haiku. Haiku History presents a
selection of these smart, shrewd, and always informative short
poems. "Shivers and specters / Flit over souls in Salem / As
nineteen are hanged; describes the Salem witch trials, and "In
angry war paint / Men board three Indiamen / And toss the cargo"
depicts the Boston Tea Party. "Then an anarchist / Makes one of the
war heroes / The next president" recalls the assassination of
William McKinley and the accession of Teddy Roosevelt to the
presidency, while "Second invasion: / Iraq, where Saddam is still /
In troubling control" returns us to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
As he travels from the thirteen colonies to the 2016 election,
Brands brings to life the wars, economic crises, social upheavals,
and other events that have shaped our nation. A history book like
no other, Haiku History injects both fun and poetry into the story
of America-three lines at a time.
The question of how far mathematical methods of reasoning and inves
tigation are applicable in economic theorising has long been a
matter of debate. The first part of this question needing to be
answered was whether, outside the range of ordinary statistical
methods, such application is in fact possible. In my opinion the
controversy on this point has been a fruitful one, which has led,
as might have been expected, to an affirmative answer. What,
however, has not yet been decided - for the simple reason that
hitherto it has not been investigated - is whether the application
of mathematical methods to our science is expedient. From the point
of view of economic methodology this seems to me the more important
part of the question, although the only considerations hitherto
brought to bear upon it have been of a rather general character,
based on uncer tain ideas which have led to uncertain conclusions.
That is why I welcome this attempt of Dr. Heinz W. Brand to bring
the solution nearer by his present work. The conclusion he reaches
here is that mathematical methods cannot unreservedly be employed
in our science. The arguments which he carefully weighs, in the
course of a criticism which is never destructive, are centred on
his own criterion of asking whether it is not merely possible, but
at the same time profitable, to apply mathematics in economic
science."
The story of our nation from the A-bomb to the iPhone-from
bestselling historian H.W. Brands
With keen insight and an impeccable sense of the spirit of the
times, H. W. Brands, one of today's preeminent historians, captures
the American experience through the last six decades. As he
chronicles politics, pop culture, and everything in between, Brands
traces the changes we have gone through as a nation, recounting the
great themes and events that have driven America- from the Yalta
conference to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Apollo 11 to 9/11, My
Lai to "shock and awe." In his adroit hands, movements and trends
unfold through a character- driven narrative that shines a
brilliant light on America's watershed moments and reveals a still
unfolding legacy of dreams.
The 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory was a watershed event
for the fledgling United States. Adding some 829,000 square miles
of territory, the Louisiana Purchase set a striking precedent of
Presidential power and brought to the surface profound legal and
constitutional questions. As the nation continued to expand
westward and into the Pacific and Caribbean, critical social,
political and constitutional questions arose that greatly tested
American resolve and reshaped the nation's founding premises. In
this exciting collection, Sanford Levinson and Bartholomew Sparrow
bring together noted scholars in American history, constitutional
law, and political science to examine role that the Louisiana
Purchase played in shaping both the expansionist policies of the
nineteenth century and critical interpretations of the
Constitution. The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803
1898 provides a fascinating overview of how the U.S. Constitution
and the American political system is inextricably tied to the
Louisiana Purchase and the territorial expansion of the United
States."
By the time he became president in 1801, Thomas Jefferson had
already been looking west for decades. He saw the country's
population expanding and he judged that America's territory must
expand too, lest America become as crowded and conflict-prone as
Europe. He started modestly, by seeking to purchase New Orleans
from the French. Napoleon Bonaparte answered with a breathtaking
proposal: would the Americans care to purchase all of Louisiana?
Jefferson said yes and soon enough had dispatched two explorers,
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to find a passage across the
new territory to the Pacific. In Dreams of El Dorado, the
bestselling author H. W. Brands captures the experiences of the men
and women who headed into this new territory, from Lewis and
Clark's expedition in early 19th century to the closing of the
frontier in the early 20th. He introduces us to explorers, mountain
men, cowboys, missionaries, and soldiers; he takes us on the Oregon
Trail, to John Jacob Astor's fur trading outpost in the Pacific
Northwest, to Texas during its revolution and California during the
gold rush and to Little Big Horn on the day of Custer's defeat at
the hands of the Indian general Crazy Horse. Not every American who
went West sought immense wealth but most expected a greater
competence than they could find in the East. Their dreams drove
them to feats of courage and perseverance that put their
stay-at-home cousins to shame; their dreams also drove them to
outrageous acts of violence against indigenous peoples, foreigners
and one another. Throughout, Brands explodes many longstanding
myths, reorienting our view of the West and of American history
more broadly. The West was often viewed as the last bastion of
American individualism but woven through its entire history was a
strong thread of collectivism. Westerners sneered, even snarled, at
federal power but federal power was essential to the development of
the West. The West was America's unspoiled Eden but the spoilage of
the West proceeded more rapidly than that of any other region. The
West was where whites fought Indians but they rarely went into
battle without Indian allies and their ranks included black
soldiers. The West was where fortune beckoned, where riches would
reward the miner's persistence, the cattleman's courage, the
railroad man's enterprise, the bonanza farmer's audacity; but El
Dorado was at least as elusive in the West as it ever was in the
East. A sweeping, engrossing work of narrative history, Dreams of
El Dorado will forever change how we think about the making of the
American nation.
"Large-scale economic change, job uncertainty, the politics of
extremism and paranoia, arguments over America's international
role, racial conflicts. Sound familiar?"(Fritz Lanham, "Houston
Chronicle") Just as we do today, Americans of the 1890s faced
changes in economics, politics, society, and technology that led to
wrenching and sometimes violent tensions between rich and poor,
capital and labor, white and black, East and West. In "The Reckless
Decade," H. W. Brands demonstrates that we can learn a lot about
the contradictions that lie at the heart of America today by
looking at them through the lens of the 1890s.
The 1890s saw the closing of the American frontier and a shift
toward imperialist ambitions. Populists and muckrakers grappled
with robber barons and gold-bugs. Americans addressed the
unfinished business of Reconstruction by separating blacks and
whites. Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other black
leaders clashed over the proper response to continuing racial
inequality. Those on top of the economic heap--Rockefeller,
Carnegie, and Morgan--created vast empires of wealth, while those
at the bottom worked for dimes a day. Brands brings all this to
life in a vivid narrative filled with larger-than-life characters
facing momentous challenges as they worked toward an uncertain
future.
Most Americans are familiar with the political history of the
United States, but there is another history woven all through it, a
largely forgotten history the story of the money men. Acclaimed
historian H. W. Brands brings them back to life: J. P. Morgan, who
stabilized a foundering U.S. Treasury in 1907; Alexander Hamilton,
who founded the first national bank, and Nicholas Biddle, under
whose directorship it failed; Jay Cooke, who helped to finance the
Union war effort through his then-innovative strategy of selling
bonds to ordinary Americans; and Jay Gould, who tried to corner the
market on gold in 1869 and as a result brought about Black Friday
and fled for his life."
In this grand-scale narrative history, two-time Pulitzer Prize
finalist H. W. Brands brilliantly portrays the emergence, in a
remarkably short time, of a recognizably modern America.
"American Colossus" captures the decades between the Civil War and
the turn of the twentieth century, when a few breathtakingly
wealthy businessmen transformed the United States from an agrarian
economy to a world power. From the first Pennsylvania oil gushers
to the rise of Chicago skyscrapers, this spellbinding narrative
shows how men like Morgan, Carnegie, and Rockefeller ushered in a
new era of unbridled capitalism. In the end America achieved
unimaginable wealth, but not without cost to its traditional
democratic values.
He was the foremost American of his day, yet today he is little more than a mythic caricature in the public imagination. Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the pivotal figure in colonial and revolutionary America, comes vividly to life in this masterly biography. Wit, diplomat, scientist, philosopher, businessman, inventor, and bon vivant, Benjamin Franklin was in every respect America’s first Renaissance man. From penniless runaway to highly successful printer, from ardently loyal subject of Britain to architect of an alliance with France that ensured America’s independence, Franklin went from obscurity to become one of the world’s most admired figures, whose circle included the likes of Voltaire, Hume, Burke, and Kant. Drawing on previously unpublished letters and a host of other sources, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands has written a thoroughly engaging biography of the eighteenth-century genius. A much needed reminder of Franklin’s greatness and humanity, The First American is a work of meticulous scholarship that provides a magnificent tour of a legendary historical figure, a vital era in American life, and the countless arenas in which the protean Franklin left his legacy.
Even before he was shot dead on the stairway of the tony Grand
Central Hotel in 1872, financier James "Jubilee Jim" Fisk, Jr., was
a notorious New York City figure. From his audacious attempt to
corner the gold market in 1869 to his battle for control of the
geographically crucial Erie Railroad, Fisk was a flamboyant
exemplar of a new financial era marked by volatile fortunes and
unprecedented greed and corruption. But it was his scandalously
open affair with a showgirl named Josie Mansfield that ultimately
led to his demise.
In this riveting short history--the first in his American Portraits
series--H. W. Brands traces Fisk's extraordinary downfall, bringing
to life New York's Gilded Age and some of its legendary players,
including Boss William Tweed, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the
railroad tycoon Jay Gould.
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