"The most eloquent, understanding, and yet very candid biography of Fremont that has appeared to date"--Howard R. Lamar, Yale University
The career of John Charles Fremont (1813-90) ties together the full breadth of American expansionism from its eighteenth-century origins through its culmination in the Gilded Age. Tom Chaffin's biography demonstrates Fremont's vital importance to the history of American empire, and illuminates his role in shattering long-held myths about the ecology and habitability of the American West.
As the most celebrated American explorer and mapper of his time, Fremont stood at the center of the vast federal project of western exploration and conquest. His expeditions between 1838 and 1854 captured the public's imagination, inspired Americans to accept their nation's destiny as a vast continental empire, and earned him his enduring sobriquet, the Pathfinder.
But Fremont was more than an explorer. Chaffin's dramatic narrative includes Fremont's varied experiences as an entrepreneur, abolitionist, Civil War general, husband to the remarkable Jessie Benton Fremont, two-time Republican presidential candidate, and Gilded Age aristocrat.
This new paperback edition of Pathfinder features a new, additional, updated introduction by the author.

In 1845, seven years after fleeing bondage in Maryland, Frederick Douglass was in his late twenties and already a celebrated lecturer across the northern United States. The recent publication of his groundbreaking Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave had incited threats to his life, however, and to place himself out of harm's way he embarked on a lecture tour of the British Isles, a journey that would span seventeen months and change him as a man and a leader in the struggle for equality. In the first major narrative account of a transformational episode in the life of this extraordinary American, Tom Chaffin chronicles Douglass's 1845-47 lecture tour of Ireland, Scotland, and England. It was, however, the Emerald Isle, above all, that affected Douglass - from its wild landscape (""I have travelled almost from the hill of 'Howth' to the Giant's Causeway"") to the plight of its people, with which he found parallels to that of African Americans. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, critic David Kipen has called Chaffin a ""thorough and uncommonly graceful historian."" Possessed of an epic, transatlantic scope, Chaffin's new book makes Douglass's historic journey vivid for the modern reader and reveals how the former slave's growing awareness of intersections between Irish, American, and African history shaped the rest of his life. The experience accelerated Douglass's transformation from a teller of his own life story into a commentator on contemporary issues - a transition discouraged during his early lecturing days by white colleagues at the American Anti-Slavery Society. (""Give us the facts,"" he had been instructed, ""we will take care of the philosophy."") As the tour progressed, newspaper coverage of his passage through Ireland and Great Britain enhanced his stature dramatically. When he finally returned to America he had the platform of an international celebrity. Drawn from hundreds of letters, diaries, and other primary-source documents - many heretofore unpublished - this far-reaching tale includes vivid portraits of personages who shaped Douglass and his world, including the Irish nationalists Daniel O'Connell and John Mitchel, British prime minister Robert Peel, abolitionist John Brown, and Abraham Lincoln. Giant's Causeway - which includes an account of Douglass's final, bittersweet, visit to Ireland in 1887 - shows how experiences under foreign skies helped him hone habits of independence, discretion, compromise, self-reliance, and political dexterity. Along the way, it chronicles Douglass's transformation from activist foot soldier to moral visionary.

On the evening of February 17, 1864, the Confederacy's "H. L. Hunley" sank the Union's formidable sloop of war the USS "Housatonic" and became the first submarine in world history to sink an enemy ship. But after accomplishing such a feat, the "Hunley" and her crew of eight also vanished beneath the cold Atlantic waters off Charleston, South Carolina. For generations, the legend of the "Hunley" grew as searchers prowled the harbor, looking for remains. Even after the submarine was definitively located in 1995 and recovered five years later, those legends have continued to flourish. In a tour de force of document-sleuthing and insights gleaned from the excavation of this remarkable vessel, the distinguished Civil War-era historian Tom Chaffin presents the most thorough telling of the "Hunley"'s story possible. Of panoramic breadth, this saga begins long before the submarine was even assembled and follows the tale into the boat's final hours and through its recovery in 2000. Engaging and groundbreaking, "The H. L. Hunley" provides the definitive account of a fabled craft.

Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette shared a singularly extraordinary friendship, one involved in the making of two revolutions - and two nations. Jefferson first met Lafayette in 1781, when the young French-born general was dispatched to Virginia to assist Jefferson, then the state's governor, in fighting off the British. The charismatic Lafayette, hungry for glory, could not have seemed more different from Jefferson, the reserved statesman. But when Jefferson, a newly-appointed diplomat, moved to Paris three years later, speaking little French and in need of a partner, their friendship began in earnest. As Lafayette opened doors in Paris and Versailles for Jefferson, so too did the Virginian stand by Lafayette as the Frenchman became inexorably drawn into the maelstrom of his country's revolution. Jefferson counseled Lafayette as he drafted The Declaration of the Rights of Man and remained a firm supporter of the French Revolution, even after he returned to America in 1789. By 1792, however, the upheaval had rendered Lafayette a man without a country, locked away in a succession of Austrian and Prussian prisons. The burden fell on Jefferson and Lafayette's other friends to win his release. The two would not see each other again until 1824, in a powerful and emotional reunion at Jefferson's Monticello. Steeped in primary sources, Revolutionary Brothers casts fresh light on this remarkable friendship of two extraordinary men.