Catalog Search Results

A brilliant combination of literary analysis and historical detail, this masterfully written biography of the much misunderstood sixth president of the United States reveals the many sides of this forward-thinking man whose progressive vision helped shape the course of America.

Born in London to an American father and British mother on the eve of the Revolutionary War, Louisa Catherine Johnson was raised in circumstances very different than those of future president John Quincy Adams, and yet John Quincy fell in love with her. Their marriage lasted half a century. They lived in Prussia, Massachusetts, Washington, Russia, and England, at royal courts, on farms, and in the White House. Louisa saw more of Europe and America...

"Spiced with sexual mischief, political conflict and family tragedy . . . Her biography is nothing less than captivating, an engrossing read."—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams, wife and political partner of John Quincy Adams, became one of the most widely known women in America when her husband assumed office as sixth president in 1825. Shrewd, intellectual, and articulate, she was close to the center of American power over...

Following his single term as President of the United States (1825-1829), John Quincy Adams, embittered by his loss to Andrew Jackson, boycotted his successor's inauguration, just as his father John Adams had done (the only two presidents ever to do so). Rather than retire, the sixty-two-year-old former president, U.S. senator, secretary of state, and Harvard professor was elected by his Massachusetts friends and neighbors to the House of Representatives...

Chronicles the 1839 revolt on board the slave ship Amistad bound for America. Much of the story involves the court-room drama about the slave who led the revolt.

Few figures in American history have held as many roles in public life as John Quincy Adams. The son of John Adams, he was a brilliant ambassador and secretary of state, a frustrated president, and a dedicated congressman who staunchly opposed slavery. In John Quincy Adams, scholar and journalist James Traub draws on Adams's diaries, letters, and writings to evoke his numerous achievements-and failures-in office. A man of unwavering moral convictions,...

Early in 1815, Louisa Catherine Adams and her young son left St. Petersburg in a Russian carriage and set out to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of eastern Europe, across the battlefields of Germany, and intoa France then experiencing Napoleon's return from Elba. Along the way, she learned what Napoleon's wars had done to Europe, what her old friends in the royal court in Berlin had experienced during...

Though the Emancipation Proclamation, limited as it was, ultimately defined his presidency, Lincoln was a man shaped by the values of the white America into which he was born. While he viewed slavery as a moral crime abhorrent to American principles, he disapproved of antislavery activists. Until the last year of his life, he advocated "voluntary deportation" concerned that free blacks in a white society would result in centuries of conflict. In...

"Former presidents have an unusual place in American life. King George III believed that George Washington's departure after two terms made him "the greatest character of the age." But Alexander Hamilton worried former presidents might "[wander] among the people like ghosts." They were both right. Life After Power tells the stories of seven former presidents, from the Founding to today. Each changed history. Each offered lessons about how to decide...