Books by David S. Brown
A Hell of a Storm: The Battle for Kansas, The End of Compromise, and the Coming of the Civil War
A series of great and still resonant sectional debates – the Constitutional Convention, the Missouri Compromise in 1820, and the Compromise of 1850 – made America. While these accords formed an imperfect republic, or ‘a house divided,’ as Lincoln put it, the country remained united. But in 1854, this three-generations arrangement suddenly blew up with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, leading, as David Brown explores in riveting detail, to a fatal break in the Union.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-Hell-of-a-Storm/David-S-Brown/9781668022818
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-hell-of-a-storm-david-s-brown/1144787615
The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson
The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams
A number of bestselling and award-winning biographies have been written about the seventh president of the US, but none have positioned Andrew Jackson so firmly in the forefront of the country’s populist tradition. Now, historian David S. Brown traces Jackson’s unusual life and legacy and sheds new light on his place in our nation’s history, focusing on his role as a popular leader.
A “marvelous…compelling” (The New York Times Book Review) biography of literary icon Henry Adams—one of America’s most prominent writers and intellectuals, who witnessed and contributed to the United States’ dramatic transition from a colonial society to a modern nation.
Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald
Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography
Pigeonholed as a Jazz Age epicurean and an emblem of the Lost Generation, Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation’s shifting mood and manners after WWI. Placing him among Progressives such as Charles Beard, Randolph Bourne, and Thorstein Veblen, David Brown reveals Fitzgerald as a writer with an encompassing historical imagination.
Richard Hofstadter (1916-70) was America’s most distinguished historian of the twentieth century. The author of several groundbreaking books, including The American Political Tradition, he was a vigorous champion of the liberal politics that emerged from the New Deal. During his nearly thirty-year career, Hofstadter fought public campaigns against liberalism’s most dynamic opponents, from McCarthy in the 1950s to Barry Goldwater and the Sun Belt conservatives in the 1960s.