H.W. Brands Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Foreign Relations and the Presidency Books

Publication Order of Presidential Rhetoric and Political Communication Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

H. W. Brands
Henry William Brands Jr. was born in Portland, Oregon on August 7, 1953 and is an American historian. He grew up in the Portland metropolitan area.

He went to Jesuit High School, where he was a National Merit Scholar and a three sport athlete. He enrolled at Stanford University and studied history and mathematics, getting an undergrad degree in history in the year 1975.

After he graduated he worked for one year doing sales in the family cutlery business working as a traveling salesman, with a territory that spanned across the West from the Pacific and on to Colorado. His wanderlust diminished after he took several trips across the Great Basin, and he took to sales of a different kind.

Before going back to Jesuit to be a math teacher, working their for the next five years. As he did so, he earned an MA in Liberal Studies from Reed College in the year 1978, which was followed by an MS in Mathematics from Portland State in the year 1981.

It was during this time he came to realize that he wanted to make a living as a writer, and determined that his love of history might just provide an avenue for him to do so.

Then he enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin so that he could study under historian Robert A. Divine. He penned his dissertation on the Eisenhower administration and its foreign policy during the Cold War, and earned a PhD in History in the year 1985.

He holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin, which he started teaching at in the year 2005. He works as the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History and Professor of Government.

As he worked on his doctorate, he taught math and social studies, courses including Algebra II, calculus, world history, and American history at Austin Community College District and Kirby Hall School for four years. He preferred to ride his bicycle while commuting between classes at the University of Texas and his teaching duties at the college preparatory school on the fringe of the UT campus and ACC’s Rio Grande location in Central Austin.

During his first year after he completed his doctorate, he worked as an oral historian at the University of Texas School of Law. The year after that he taught at Vanderbilt University. In the year 1987 he took a job at Texas A&M University, where he stayed for a total of seventeen years. He made the daily trip from his home in Austin to teach in College Station.

Brands has authored around thirty books on US history, which have twice been selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, once for “The First American” and for “Traitor to His Class”. He’s also co-written some books with T. H. Breen, and edited a few others.

“What America Owes the World” was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize in international affairs. “The Age of Gold” was a Washington Post Best Book of 2002. His book on Andrew Jackson was a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the year 2005. “The Wages of Globalism was a Choice Outstanding Academic Book winner, and “Lone Star Nation” won the Deolece Parmalee Award.

In addition to his books on US history, Brands’ books about the economic development of the United States and his biographies about key leaders in corporate America, on people such as Benjamin Franklin, Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Jackson, Ronald Reagan, and Theodore Roosevelt. Brands’ books are all known for their narrative thrust and their readability.

Brands is also a member of different honorary societies, which includes the Philosophical Society of Texas and the Society of American Historians. He regularly does guest spots on national television and radio programs, and frequently gets interviewed by the foreign and American press. Brands’s writing has been published in many countries, and has been translated into Korean, Russian, Japanese, German, Chinese, and French.

Brands takes a progressive view on the nation’s founders and the US Constitution, arguing that the founding fathers were radicals at heart that were willing to challenge the status quo to find a better future. That said, he also believes that Americans today shouldn’t be constrained only by the views of self-government that are held by the founders.

By revering them, he believes, we undervalue ourselves and end up sabotaging our own efforts to make the necessary improvements in the republican experiment that the started. It is our love of the founders that leads us to abandon and betray the principles which they fought so hard for.

Brands also believes that the framers wouldn’t want the Constitution to be interpreted by the idea of original intent, and it is his belief that we are wrong to think of the founders in a “deified” sort of way. The only thing that they did was to have the audacity to challenge the conventional wisdom.

His articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the American Historical Review, the National Interest, and the International Herald Tribune, as well as many other magazines, journals, and newspapers.

Brands has also appeared in documentaries like “The Presidents”, “America: The Story of Us”, “10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America”, “The Men Who Built America”, “The Eighties”, and “The World Wars”.

Brands has a son, named Hal, who is a scholar of US foreign policy.

“Dreams of El Dorado” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2019. Brands tells the story of the settling of the American West. He takes us from John Jacob Astor’s fur trading outpost located in Oregon and on to the Texas Revolution. From the Oklahoma land rush to the California gold rush.

He shows the reader how the migrants’ dreams pushed them to feats of perseverance and bravery that put their stay-at-home cousins to shame. And how these same dreams drove them to outrageous violent acts toward the indigenous population as well as each other.

The West was where riches would end up rewarding the miner’s persistence, the railroad man’s enterprise, and the cattleman’s bravery, however El Dorado was at the very least equally elusive in the West as it was back East.