Martin Van Buren was a one-term president whose public life has long been overshadowed by the more fiery personalities of his day--Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun. Nevertheless, Van Buren was a transforming political figure in American history, one of the first of the new republic's professional politicians. In the early part of the nineteenth century, America was skeptical of popular politics, distrustful of political parties, and disdainful of political management. However, as prominent historian Joel H. Silbey demonstrates, Martin Van Buren took the lead...

Perhaps best known for his debates with Abraham Lincoln and his role in introducing the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, Stephen A. Douglas was a central character in the political firestorm that culminated in the American Civil War. In this engaging new biography, James L. Huston explores the life, ideology, and historical importance of America's "Little Giant." Born in 1813, Douglas came of age during the great democratization of American life. This was a time when egalitarianism became the national creed and President Andrew Jackson stood forth as its champion. Huston sets Douglas in...

At the time of his death in 1925, William Jennings Bryan was, as Henry Steele Commager wrote, "the most representative American of his time." To understand Bryan is to understand the United States on the cusp of modernity as regionalism declined, national political and economic institutions expanded, and the urban way of life began to eclipse the rural. Bryan's time, as today, was one of profound transition and tumult in the United States. The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw significant changes in economic, social, and political life which were to result in the modern...