David S. Reynolds

Can our unruly national story be squeezed into two vessels?

A new biography details the cultural jumble of literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the making of the foremost self-made American.

Abraham Lincoln is widely revered, while many Americans consider John Brown mad. Yet it was Brown’s strategy that brought slavery to an end.

Revisionist biographers have given us countless perspectives, from Honest Abe to Killer Lincoln. Is there a version that’s true to his time and attuned to ours?

Stowe’s novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the institution.

The righteous rage of John Brown.

To appreciate who Whitman was, we have to reinterpret the poet in ways that have made generations of critical gatekeepers uncomfortable.

The incredible story of how a disgraced Civil War general became one of the best-selling novelists in American history.