Susan Dunn, the Massachusetts Professor of Humanities at Williams, is the author of 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler—the Election Amid the Storm. Her latest book is A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days that Mobilized America. (November 2018)
The Improbable Wendell Willkie: The Businessman Who Saved the Republican Party and His Country, and Conceived a New World Order
by David Levering Lewis
“I’d watch Willkie,” wrote the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock in February 1939, quoting an anonymous Republican observer who admitted that Wendell Willkie was a “long shot” candidate for the presidency of the United States and “the darkest horse in the stable” for 1940. Readers of the Times may …
The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation
by Colin G. Calloway
“The greatest Estates we have in this Colony,” George Washington reminded an impoverished Virginia neighbor in 1767, “were made…by taking up and purchasing at very low rates the rich back Lands which were thought nothing of in those days, but are now the most valuable Lands we possess.” From the …
A Cold Welcome: The Little Ice Age and Europe’s Encounter with North America
by Sam White
“We are starved! We are starved!” the sixty skeletal members of the English colony of Jamestown cried out in desperation as two ships arrived with provisions in June 1610. They suffered from exhaustion, starvation, and malnutrition as well as from a strange sickness that “caused all our skinns to peele off, from head to foote, as if we had beene flayed.” During those pitiless months of “starving time” they turned to eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, venomous snakes, and other famine foods: mushrooms, toadstools, “or what els we founde growing upon the grounde that would fill either mouth or belly.”
The “fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth,” declared the great Irish statesman and author Edmund Burke to the British Parliament in 1775, urging conciliation and not war with the colonists. And the people of the American South, …
Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 3: The War Years and After, 1939–1962
by Blanche Wiesen Cook
Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady
by Susan Quinn
In the fall of 1940, when Luftwaffe planes were dropping tens of thousands of bombs over British cities and ports every night, and when American intervention in the war seemed more and more necessary, Eleanor Roosevelt published a short book entitled The Moral Basis of Democracy. Framed around Christ’s message …
Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution
by Nathaniel Philbrick
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789
by Joseph J. Ellis
“I heartily wish some person would try an experiment upon him,” wrote an army physician at Fort Ticonderoga about the enigma that was Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, “to make the sun shine through his head with an ounce ball; and then see whether the rays come in a direct or …
by Margery M. Heffron, edited by David L. Michelmore
John Quincy Adams was a highly principled, hardworking, and patriotic man of great intelligence and integrity. He was complex and full of contradictions, frigid and hot-tempered, confrontational and thin-skinned, devoted to public service and egocentric. He yearned for acclaim and strove for achievement and high political office, but had a personality quite unsuited for a life in politics.