"An ever-present figure in the early days of the nation, Gouverneur Morris left an indelible mark on the country's future development. While in the New York State legislature, he was part of the committee that wrote the state's constitution. He went on to write some of the most critical documents of the Second Continental Congress, gaining the enduring admiration of George Washington, who later appointed him minister to France. At the Office of Finance he helped to develop the basic plan for the coinage system that remains in use today, and in private business he was instrumental in the planning and establishment of the Bank of North America.".

In The Statesman as Thinker, Daniel J. Mahoney provides thoughtful and elegant portraits of statesmen who struggled to preserve freedom during times of crisis: Cicero using all the powers of rhetoric to preserve republican liberty in Rome against Caesar’s encroaching autocracy; Burke defending ordered liberty against Jacobin tyranny in revolutionary France; Tocqueville defending liberty and human dignity against blind reaction, democratic impatience, and revolutionary fanaticism; Lincoln preserving the American republic and putting an end to chattel slavery; Churchill defending liberty and law and opposing Nazi and Communist despotism; de Gaulle defending the honor of France during World War II; and Havel fighting Communism before 1989 and then leading the Czech Republic with dignity and grace. Mahoney makes sense of the mixture of magnanimity and moderation that defines the statesman as thinker at his or her best. That admirable mixture of greatness, courage, and moderation owes much to classical and Christian wisdom and to the noble desire to protect the inheritance of civilization against rapacious and destructive despotic regimes and ideologies.

In a dual biography covering the last ten years of the lives of friends and contemporaries, writer Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) and statesman John Hay (who served as secretary of state under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt), The Statesman and the Storyteller not only provides an intimate look into the daily lives of these men but also creates an elucidating portrait of the United States on the verge of emerging as a world power. And just as the narrative details the wisdom, and the occasional missteps, of two great men during a tumultuous time, it also penetrates the seat of power in Washington as the nation strove to make itself known internationally--and in the process committed acts antithetical to America’s professed ideals and promises. The country’s most significant move in this time was to go to war with Spain and to eventually wrest control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In what has to be viewed as one of the most shameful periods in American political history, Filipinos who believed they had been promised independence were instead told they were incapable of self-government and then violently subdued in a war that featured torture and execution of native soldiers and civilians. The United States also used its growing military and political might to grab the entirety of the Hawaiian Islands and a large section of Panama. As secretary of state during this time, Hay, though a charitable man, was nonetheless complicit in these misdeeds. Clemens, a staunch critic of his country’s imperialistic actions, was forced by his own financial and family needs to temper his remarks. Nearing the end of their long and remarkable lives, both men found themselves struggling to maintain their personal integrity while remaining celebrated and esteemed public figures. Written with a keen eye--Mark Zwonitzer is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker--and informed by the author’s deep understanding of the patterns of history, The Statesman and the Storyteller has the compelling pace of a novel, the epic sweep of historical writing at its best, and, in capturing the essence of the lives of Hay and Twain, the humanity and nuance of masterful biography.

In 1953, Winston Churchill received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In fact, Churchill was a professional writer before he was a politician, and published a stream of books and articles over the course of two intertwined careers. Now historian Peter Clarke traces the writing of the magisterial work that occupied Churchill for a quarter century, his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples.As an author, Churchill faced woes familiar to many others; chronically short of funds, late on deadlines, scrambling to sell new projects or cajoling his publishers for more advance money. He signed a contract for the English-Speaking project in 1932, a time when his political career seemed over. The magnum opus was to be delivered in 1939, but in that year, history overtook history-writing. When the Nazis swept across Europe, Churchill was summoned from political exile to become Prime Minister. The English-Speaking Peoples would have to wait.The book would indeed be written and become a bestseller, after Churchill left public life. But even before he took office, the massive project was shaping his worldview, his speeches and his leadership. In these pages, Peter Clarke follows Churchill's monumental quest to chronicle the English-Speaking Peoples - a quest that helped to define the enduring 'special relationship' between Britain and America. In the process, Clarke gives us not just an untold chapter in literary history, but a fresh perspective on this iconic figure: a life of Churchill the author.

In the 1980s, Willis McGlascoe Carter’s handwritten memoir turned up unexpectedly in the hands of a midwestern antiques dealer. Its twenty-two pages told a fascinating story of a man born into slavery in Virginia who, at the onset of freedom, gained an education, became a teacher, started a family, and edited a newspaper. Even his life as a slave seemed exceptional: he described how his owners treated him and his family with respect, and he learned to read and write. Tucked into its back pages, the memoir included a handwritten tribute to Carter, written by his fellow teachers upon his death. Robert Heinrich and Deborah Harding’s From Slave to Statesman tells the extraordinary story of Willis M. Carter’s life. Using Carter’s brief memoir--one of the few extant narratives penned by a former slave--as a starting point, Heinrich and Harding fill in the abundant gaps in his life, providing unique insight into many of the most important events and transformations in this period of southern history. Carter was born a slave in 1852. Upon gaining freedom after the Civil War, Carter, like many former slaves, traveled in search of employment and education. He journeyed as far as Rhode Island and then moved to Washington, DC, where he attended night school before entering and graduating from Wayland Seminary. He continued on to Staunton, Virginia, where he became a teacher and principal in the city’s African American schools, the editor of the Staunton Tribune, a leader in community and state civil rights organizations, and an activist in the Republican Party. Carter served as an alternate delegate to the 1896 Republican National Convention, and later he helped lead the battle against Virginia’s new state constitution, which white supremacists sought to use as a means to disenfranchise blacks. As part of that campaign, Carter traveled to Richmond to address delegates at the constitutional convention, serving as chairman of a committee that advocated voting rights and equal public education for African Americans. Although Carter did not live to see Virginia adopt its new Jim Crow constitution, he died knowing that he had done all in his power to stop it. From Slave to Statesman fittingly resurrects Carter’s all-but-forgotten story, adding immeasurably to our understanding of the journey that he and men like him took out of slavery into a world of incredible promise and powerful disappointment.

As US power grew after WWI, officials and nonprofits joined to promote citizen participation in world affairs. David Allen traces the rise and fall of the Foreign Policy Association, a public-education initiative that retreated in the atomic age, scuttling dreams of democratic foreign policy and solidifying the technocratic national security model.