Presents an overview of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, explaining the genius of his political savvy, and describes the context in which he assigned a cadre of his fiercest rivals as his closest cabinet advisors.

In this monumental multiple biography, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin studies Abraham Lincoln's mastery of men. She shows how he saved Civil War-torn America by appointing his fiercest rivals to key cabinet positions, making them help achieve his vision for peace. As well as a thrilling piece of narrative history, it's an inspiring study of one of the greatest leaders the world has ever seen. A book to bury yourself in.

Pulitzer Prize–winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s dynamic history of Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft and the first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air. Winner of the Carnegie Medal. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit is a dynamic history of the first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air. The story is told through the intense friendship of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft—a close relationship that strengthens both men before it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the presidential nomination that divides their wives, their children, and their closest friends, while crippling the progressive wing of the Republican Party, causing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to be elected, and changing the country’s history. The Bully Pulpit is also the story of the muckraking press, which arouses the spirit of reform that helps Roosevelt push the government to shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. The muckrakers are portrayed through the greatest group of journalists ever assembled at one magazine—Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—teamed under the mercurial genius of publisher S.S. McClure. Goodwin’s narrative is founded upon a wealth of primary materials. The correspondence of more than four hundred letters between Roosevelt and Taft begins in their early thirties and ends only months before Roosevelt’s death. Edith Roosevelt and Nellie Taft kept diaries. The muckrakers wrote hundreds of letters to one another, kept journals, and wrote their memoirs. The letters of Captain Archie Butt, who served as a personal aide to both Roosevelt and Taft, provide an intimate view of both men. The Bully Pulpit, like Goodwin’s brilliant chronicles of the Civil War and World War II, exquisitely demonstrates her distinctive ability to combine scholarly rigor with accessibility. It is a major work of history—an examination of leadership in a rare moment of activism and reform that brought the country closer to its founding ideals.

A masterful work by Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Herbert Donald, Lincoln is a stunning portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s life and presidency. Donald brilliantly depicts Lincoln’s gradual ascent from humble beginnings in rural Kentucky to the ever-expanding political circles in Illinois, and finally to the presidency of a country divided by civil war. Donald goes beyond biography, illuminating the gradual development of Lincoln’s character, chronicling his tremendous capacity for evolution and growth, thus illustrating what made it possible for a man so inexperienced and so unprepared for the presidency to become a great moral leader. In the most troubled of times, here was a man who led the country out of slavery and preserved a shattered Union—in short, one of the greatest presidents this country has ever seen.

Now an epic documentary event on the HISTORY Channel! The illuminating, bestselling exploration on leadership from Pulitzer Prize–winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, and also the inspiration for the HISTORY Channel multipart series Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. “After five decades of magisterial output, Doris Kearns Goodwin leads the league of presidential historians” (USA TODAY). In her “inspiring” (The Christian Science Monitor) Leadership, Doris Kearns Goodwin draws upon the four presidents she has studied most closely—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson (in civil rights)—to show how they recognized leadership qualities within themselves and were recognized as leaders by others. By looking back to their first entries into public life, we encounter them at a time when their paths were filled with confusion, fear, and hope. Leadership tells the story of how they all collided with dramatic reversals that disrupted their lives and threatened to shatter forever their ambitions. Nonetheless, they all emerged fitted to confront the contours and dilemmas of their times. At their best, all four were guided by a sense of moral purpose. At moments of great challenge, they were able to summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others. Does the leader make the times or do the times make the leader? “If ever our nation needed a short course on presidential leadership, it is now” (The Seattle Times). This seminal work provides an accessible and essential road map for aspiring and established leaders in every field. In today’s polarized world, these stories of authentic leadership in times of apprehension and fracture take on a singular urgency. “Goodwin’s volume deserves much praise—it is insightful, readable, compelling: Her book arrives just in time” (The Boston Globe).

In this brilliant and illuminating portrait of our sixteenth president, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner David Herbert Donald examines the significance of friendship in Abraham Lincoln's life and the role it played in shaping his career and his presidency. Though Abraham Lincoln had hundreds of acquaintances and dozens of admirers, he had almost no intimate friends. Behind his mask of affability and endless stream of humorous anecdotes, he maintained an inviolate reserve that only a few were ever able to penetrate. Professor Donald's remarkable book offers a fresh way of looking at Abraham Lincoln, both as a man who needed friendship and as a leader who understood the importance of friendship in the management of men. Donald penetrates Lincoln's mysterious reserve to offer a new picture of the president's inner life and to explain his unsurpassed political skills.

Examines the distinct leadership roles of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during the war years and discusses the dynamics of their marriage.

“Nixon raises all the timely questions about the present state of the world, and then answers them both systematically and thoroughly.” —The New York Times In this acclaimed national bestseller, Richard Nixon offers a comprehensive strategy for the West—a vital plan of action that will help ensure peace, prosperity, and freedom in the next century. From glasnost and summitry to arms control and “Star Wars,” from Nicaragua and China to Europe and Japan, he gives seasoned, no-nonsense advice on all tough foreign policy issues. The former President draws on a lifetime of experience in international affairs to examine the crucial challenges facing the United States and the West and how best to go forward in the 21st century.

“All forward thrust and hot-damn urgency…A brilliant, brawling epic. Screenwriter Tony Kushner blows the dust off history by investing it with flesh, blood, and churning purpose. . . . A great American movie.” –Peter Travers, Rolling Stone “Lincoln is a rough and noble democratic masterpiece. And the genius of Lincoln, finally, lies in its vision of politics as a noble, sometimes clumsy dialectic of the exalted and the mundane…And Mr. Kushner, whose love of passionate, exhaustive disputation is unmatched in the modern theater, fills nearly every scene with wonderful, maddening talk. Go see this movie.” –A.O. Scott, New York Times “A lyrical, ingeniously structured screenplay. Lincoln is one of the most authentic biographical dramas I’ve ever seen…grand and immersive. It plugs us into the final months of Lincoln’s presidency with a purity that makes us feel transported as if by time machine.” –Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly A decade-long collaboration between three-time Academy Award® winner Steven Spielberg and Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner, Lincoln is a revealing drama that focuses on the 16th President’s tumultuous final months in office. Having just won re-election in a country divided, Lincoln pursues a course of action designed to end the war, unite the country and abolish slavery. With the moral courage and fierce determination to succeed, his choices during this critical moment will change the fate of America, and generations, to come. Containing eight pages of color photos from the film and inspired by Doris Kearns Goodwin’s critically acclaimed Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln is now a major motion picture by DreamWorks starring two-time Academy Award® winner Daniel Day-Lewis. Tony Kushner's plays include Angels in America, Parts One and Two; A Bright Room Called Day; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols's film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg's Munich. Kushner is the recipient of a Pultizer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, and two Oscar nominations, among other honors. In 2008 he was the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award.

Hailed as the definitive portrait of the sixteenth president, Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame's impressive two-volume biography has been masterfully abridged and revised. Sixteenth president of the United States, the Great Emancipator, and a surpassingly eloquent champion of national unity, freedom, and democracy, Abraham Lincoln is arguably the most studied and admired of all Americans. Michael Burlingame's astonishing Abraham Lincoln: A Life, an updated, condensed version of the 2,000-page two-volume set that The Atlantic hailed as one of the five best books of 2009, offers fresh interpretations of this endlessly fascinating American leader. Based on deep research in unpublished sources as well as newly digitized sources, this work reveals how Lincoln's character and personality were the North's secret weapon in the Civil War, the key variables that spelled the difference between victory and defeat. He was a model of psychological maturity and a fully individuated man whose influence remains unrivaled in the history of American public life. Burlingame chronicles Lincoln's childhood and early development, romantic attachments and losses, his love of learning, legal training, and courtroom career as well as his political ambition, his term as congressman in the late 1840s, and his serious bouts of depression in early adulthood. Burlingame recounts, in fresh detail, the Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln marriage and traces the mounting moral criticism of slavery that revived his political career and won this Springfield lawyer the presidency in 1860. This abridgement delivers Burlingame's signature insight into Lincoln as a young man, a father, and a politician. Lincoln speaks to us not only as a champion of freedom, democracy, and national unity but also as a source of inspiration. Few have achieved his historical importance, but many can profit from his personal example, encouraged by the knowledge that despite a lifetime of troubles, he became a model of psychological maturity, moral clarity, and unimpeachable integrity. His presence and his leadership inspired his contemporaries; his life story will do the same for generations to come.