AMERICAN EMPRESS is the best-selling history of the dramatic life of heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, daughter of breakfast-cereal magnate C.W. Post, founder of the Postum Cereal Company.As a girl growing up in the Midwest, young Marjorie Post helped glue cereal boxes in her father’s barn, later sat on the board of directors of her father’s company, wed several times and by late middle age was widely acknowledged as the “ Queen of Washington, D.C.” because of her friendship with...

Meet the overlooked women in history who loved, nurtured, and defended the famed American scientist and founding father.“ . . . highlights a side of Ben Franklin too often ignored by historians . . . and provides a necessary reminder that the women who came into his life are as deserving of our attention as Ben himself.” —Carol Berkin, author of Revolutionary MothersEveryone knows Benjamin Franklin—the thrifty inventor-statesman of...

Get a “fresh perspective on the American Revolution” as an award-winning author reveals the true story of two young women who defied their Loyalist families to marry radical patriots, Henry Knox and Benedict Arnold (Shelf Awareness).When Peggy Shippen, the celebrated blonde belle of Philadelphia, married American military hero Benedict Arnold in 1779, she anticipated a life of fame and fortune, but financial debts and political intrigues prompted her to co...

Praised by her mentor John Adams, Mercy Otis Warren was America's first woman playwright and female historian of the American Revolution. In this unprecedented biography, Nancy Rubin Stuart reveals how Warren's provocative writing made her an exception among the largely voiceless women of the eighteenth century.

**“An engrossing look at the human side of Benjamin Franklin . . . Using a post-feminist lens that’s critical of gender essentialism, Stuart rescues these women from obscurity . . . This is a terrific read: poignant, provocative, and probing.”—Library Journal, Starred ReviewA vivid portrait of the women who loved, nurtured, and defended America’s famous scientist and founding father.**Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin—the thrifty inventor-statesman of the Revolutionar...

Get a “fresh perspective on the American Revolution” as an award-winning author reveals the true story of two young women who defied their Loyalist families to marry radical patriots, Henry Knox and Benedict Arnold (Shelf Awareness).When Peggy Shippen, the celebrated blonde belle of Philadelphia, married American military hero Benedict Arnold in 1779, she anticipated a life of fame and fortune, but financial debts and political intrigues prompted her to co...

**From the author of Alexander Hamilton, the New York Times bestselling biography that inspired the musical, comes a gripping portrait of the first president of the United States.Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography“Truly magnificent . . . [a] well-researched, well-written and absolutely definitive biography” —Andrew Roberts, The Wall Street Journal“Until recently, I’d never believed that there could be such a thing as a truly gripping b...

In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot -- "the colossus of independence," as Thomas Jefferson called him -- who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second President of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but a few and regarded by so...

A compelling, intimate look at the founders—George Washington, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison—and the women who played essential roles in their livesWith his usual storytelling flair and unparalleled research, Tom Fleming examines the women who were at the center of the lives of the founding fathers. From hot-tempered Mary Ball Washington to promiscuous Rachel Lavien Hamilton, the founding fathers' mothers powerfully shaped their s...

National BestsellerTo this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a military and political leader and a man whose “statue-like solidity” concealed volcanic energies and emotions.

Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, where the egalitarian spirit sweeping the North seeped down through border states already uncertain about slavery, where even sections of the same state (for instance, coastal and mountain Virginia) divid...

**The #1 New York Times bestseller, and the inspiration for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton!Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Chernow presents a landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, the Founding Father who galvanized, inspired, scandalized, and shaped the newborn nation."Grand-scale biography at its best—thorough, insightful, consistently fair, and superbly written . . . A genuinely great book." —David McCullough“A robust full-length portrai...