American Histories

Brenda Wineapple is the author of several books including Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, named a best book of 2013 by The New York Times. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Society of American Historians and also regularly contributes to major publications such as the New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation. With profound insights and making use of extensive research, in The Impeachers (Random House) Brenda Wineapple evokes a pivotal period in American history, when the country was rocked by the first-ever impeachment of a sitting American president. Vice-President Andrew Johnson became “the Accidental President” when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. Congress was divided over how the Union should be reunited, including when and whether black men should be given the vote. Many white Southerners hoped to restore a pre–Civil War society, if without slavery, and Johnson seemed to share their goals. With the unchecked power of executive orders, Johnson ignored Congress, pardoned rebel leaders, promoted white supremacy, opposed civil rights, and called Reconstruction unnecessary. It fell to Congress and complicated visionaries like Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, and Ulysses S. Grant, to stop the American president who acted like a king. Their goal was to make the Union free, fair, and whole. The New York Times’s review noted that “The relevance of this riveting and absorbing book is clear enough . . . literary and incisive . . . vivid and perceptive.”

Rick Atkinson is the bestselling author of the Liberation Trilogy―An Army at Dawn (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history), The Day of Battle, and The Guns at Last Light―as well as The Long Gray Line and other books. His many additional awards include a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, the George Polk Award, and the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award.  He is a former staff writer and senior editor at The Washington Post. He is author of The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (Henry Holt and Co.), the extraordinary first volume of his new trilogy about the American Revolution. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, American militiamen and then the ragged Continental Army take on the world’s most formidable fighting force. It is a gripping saga alive with astonishing characters. The story is also told from the British perspective, making the mortal conflict between the redcoats and the rebels all the more compelling. Full of riveting details and untold stories, The British Are Coming is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Rick Atkinson has given stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation drama.