John Stewart sat hunched in the wooden cage that swung from the ship’s horizontal mainyard, riding out a storm off […]

Sponsored by the Chipstone Foundation Busts are odd things. Heads free of their bodies, severed at the shoulders, often at […]

Little is known? One might well say that far too much is known to hold black lives within the comforting confines of a narrative biography.

He [Hamilton] did not trust ordinary American voters.

John Dixon’s welcome study of Cadwallader Colden is the most comprehensive of the few biographies we have of this important North Briton colonial.

“As the best biography does, Winch’s portrait of Forten illuminates not only the man’s life but his times.”

With my subject so elusive in the archive, material culture offered a compellingly direct link to her world

As Grasso explains in his introduction, Kelso became a “preacher and schoolteacher turned Civil War guerrilla fighter who subsequently became a congressman calling for the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, then later a public agnostic, a spiritualist lecturer, and eventually an anarchist.”

Carla Mulford’s new book examines Benjamin Franklin’s approach to empire.

Vowell has a sharp eye for paradox, contradiction, coincidence, and most especially for hypocrisy. She delights in poking her finger into the eye of American complacency.

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg have written a monumental work, detailing the lives of two men—James Madison and Thomas Jefferson—whose […]

Paul Revere was the only major patriot who was also a founder—literally. He started a successful iron foundry in 1788, […]

Looking for connections between various reform movements, rather than examining them as distinct entities, can reveal surprising convergences.

For many readers, the most eye-opening revelation of this book will be Osborn’s evolving position on slavery.

Despite the limited extant documents penned in Wheatley’s hand or published in her name, Carretta finds her almost everywhere, in church records, letters, newspaper articles, subscription lists, and elsewhere.

There is much more to know about the enigmatic George Whitefield, as new books by Kidd and Parr amply demonstrate.

Rhys S. Bezzant, Jonathan Edwards and the Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 328 pp., $49.95.

This is the Abraham Lincoln of America’s monuments.

With Mightier Than the Sword, Reynolds has written the biography of a book, and 2012 might be the perfect time to […]

How did women, with multiple daily obligations to family, reconcile a seemingly contradictory Transcendentalist imperative to cultivate “self-reliance”?

Whether or not the two men actually had conversational exchanges, there is no disputing the commonality of their experience.

What was Burr to do, once the path to further political advancement was barred?

Hakluyt’s life’s work, to the extent that it is captured in his publications, takes center stage in this history.

Dolley Madison proved a premier influence peddler, though she would have never seen her work that way nor would her contemporaries.

As Marrs makes clear, the career plot of transbellum authors reveals how periodization has distorted what we could know about the works of writers stranded for too long on one side of the Civil War divide.

How can belief in such oddities be allowed any place in scholarship?

Ward gives equal consideration to the historical evidence of text and image, reminding us that portraits are not just cultural commentary, but are in fact culture itself.

Burstein is most provocative and imaginative, and the book is most intriguing, when he is exploring the “Jefferson-Hemings puzzle,” as he terms it.

The collapse of “psychohistory” and “psychobiography” appears to have been nearly total.

For Morse, life was one smear campaign and betrayal after another.

The taste of independence Sampson experienced as a “masterless woman,” according to Young, may have contributed to her willingness to seek her fortunes as Robert Shurtliff in May 1782.

“Late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century mug books are collections of biographical sketches, a curiously rich source for genealogists and historians alike.”

“Emerson celebrated the creative originality of each new generation and warned his readers and listeners against undue reverence for ‘the sepulchers of the fathers.'”

The late-breaking beatification of John Adams and his family, soon to be a major monument, forms one of the wonders […]

“History concerns what Napoleon did; biography concerns what it meant to him.”

Common-place asks Richard Wightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, whether he thinks the largely backward-moving narrative he uses in his recent book, Trials of Intimacy, is a strategy other historians might want to try.

Common-Place asks scholar-writer Richard Slotkin, author of such classics of American cultural history as Regeneration Through Violence, The Fatal Environment, Gunfighter Nation, and, most recently, of Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln: “What can you do as a novelist that you can’t as an historian–and vice versa?

The reverend author of this book before us, which we are at a loss whether to denominate a biography, or a novel, founded on fact, has presented a specimen of writing, which for variety and oddity is almost an unique in the annals of literature.

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