He inherited a sense of entitlement (and obligation) from his family, yet eventually came to see his own class as suspect. He was famously militaristic, yet brokered peace between Russia and Japan. He started out an archconservative, yet came to champion progressive causes. These contradictions are not evidence of vacillating weakness: instead, they were the product of a restless mind bend on a continuous quest for self-improvement. In Theodore Roosevelt, historian Kathleen Dalton reveals a man with a personal and intellectual depth rarely seen in our public figures. She shows how Roosevelt’s struggle to overcome his frailties as a child helped to build his character, and offers new insights into his family life, uncovering the important role that Roosevelt’s second wife, Edith Carow, played in the development of his political career. She also shows how TR flirted with progressive reform and then finally commited himself to deep reform in the Bull Moose campaign of 1912. Incorporating the latest scholarship into a vigorous narrative, Dalton reinterprets both the man and his times to create an illuminating portrait that will change the way we see this great man and the Progressive Era.

President Theodore Roosevelt called himself a “book lover” and for good reason. From his boyhood days in the 1860s to the very end of his life in 1919, Roosevelt had a deep-seated passion for reading books. Wherever he went, he brought books with him. Whether he was rounding up cattle on a ranch in North Dakota, giving campaign speeches from the back of a train, governing the nation from the White House, or exploring an uncharted tributary of the Amazon River, he always made time to read books. Theodore Roosevelt and His Library at Sagamore Hill includes an overview of Roosevelt’s life as a reader, a discussion of the role that reading particular books played in shaping his life and career, and a short history of his personal library. The book also provides researchers and others interested in Roosevelt’s life with a complete list of Roosevelt’s books that are currently located at Sagamore Hill, his home in Oyster Bay, New York. The books in his personal library reflect his love of classic works of literature, his interest in history, and his fascination with the natural sciences. Theodore Roosevelt and His Library at Sagamore Hill concludes with an essay that Roosevelt wrote near the end of his life in which he reflected on his reading habits and commented on some of his favorite books.

"Richard White Jr. situates young Roosevelt within the exciting events of the Gilded Age, the Victorian era, and the gay nineties. He describes Roosevelt's relationships with family, friends, colleagues, and adversaries.

The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics," Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Like only a handful of American historians before him—Frederick Jackson Turner and Charles A. Beard are examples—Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.