Huey Long (1893-1935) was one of the most extraordinary American politicians, simultaneously cursed as a dictator and applauded as a benefactor of the masses. A product of the poor north Louisiana hills, he was elected governor of Louisiana in 1928, and proceeded to subjugate the powerful state political hierarchy after narrowly defeating an impeachment attempt. The only Southern popular leader who truly delivered on his promises, he increased the miles of paved roads and number of bridges in Louisiana tenfold and established free night schools and state hospitals, meeting the huge costs by...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this work describes the life of one of the most extraordinary figures in American political history. Huey Long was a great natural politician who looked, and often seemed to behave, like a caricature of the red-neck Southern politico, and yet had become at the time of his assassination a serious rival to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Presidency. In this "masterpiece of American biography" New York Times Book Review], Huey Long stands wholly revealed, analyzed, and understood.

First published in 1955 to wide acclaim, T. Harry Williams' P.G.T. Beauregard is universally regarded as "the first authoritative portrait of the Confederacy's always dramatic, often perplexing" general (Chicago Tribune). Chivalric, arrogant, and of exotic Creole Louisiana origin, Beauregard participated in every phase of the Civil War from its beginning to its end. He rigidly adhered to principles of war derived from his studies of Jomini and Napoleon, and yet many of his battle plans were rejected by his superiors, who regarded him as excitable, unreliable, and contentious. After the war,...

Here are the characters and personalities of the three great Union generals, explored with intelligence and wit by one of our most distinguished historians of the Civil War. Mr. Williams is interested not only in military skills but in the temperament for command and, most of all, in moral courage. Each of these men, he writes, "represents a particular and significant aspect of leadership, and together they show a progression toward the final type of leadership that had to be developed before the war could be won. Most important, each one illustrates dramatically the relation between...