H.W. Brands Books In Order
Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.Publication Order of Foreign Relations and the Presidency Books
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
Cold Warriors: Eisenhower's Generation and the Making of American Foreign Policy | (1988) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
India and the United States: The Cold Peace | (1990) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Specter of Neutralism: The United States and the Emergence of the Third World, 1947-1960 | (1990) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Inside the Cold War: Loy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire 1918 - 1961 | (1991) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines | (1992) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War | (1993) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Into The Labyrinth: The U.S. And The Middle East 1945-1993 | (1993) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s | (1995) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Wages of Globalism: Lyndon Johnson and the Limits of American Power | (1995) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Since Vietnam: The United States in World Affairs, 1973-1995 | (1995) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
T.R.: The Last Romantic | (1997) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy | (1998) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson: Beyond Vietnam | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Masters of Enterprise: Giants of American Business from John Jacob Astor and J.P. Morgan to Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey | (1999) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Strange Death of American Liberalism | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Lone Star Nation: How a Ragged Army of Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence - And Changed America | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War Over the American Dollar | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
American Stories: A History of the United States | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
American Stories: A History of the United States, Volume 2 | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
American Dreams: The United States Since 1945 | (2009) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It | (2011) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Murder of Jim Fisk for the Love of Josie Mansfield: A Tragedy of the Gilded Age | (2011) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
America Since 1945 [with MySearchLab & eText Access Code] | (2011) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Theodore Roosevelt and His Sagamore Hill Home: Historic Resource Study Sagamore Hill National Historic Site | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Revel for American Stories: A History of the United States, Combined -- Access Card | (2014) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Reagan: The Life | (2015) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War | (2016) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants | (2018) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West | (2019) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Haiku History: The American Saga Three Lines at a Time | (2020) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom | (2020) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Gus M. Hodges: An Oral History Interview | (2021) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Our First Civil War: Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution | (2021) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Last Campaign | (2022) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics | (2023) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Presidential Rhetoric and Political Communication Books
Critical Reflections on the Cold War: Linking Rhetoric and History | (2000) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Moral Rhetoric of American Presidents | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of The American Presidents Books
Theodore Roosevelt | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
James Madison | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Grover Cleveland | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
John Quincy Adams | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Rutherford B. Hayes | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Dwight D. Eisenhower | (2002) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Thomas Jefferson | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
James K. Polk | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
William McKinley | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Abraham Lincoln | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Woodrow Wilson | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
John Adams | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
George H. W. Bush | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Franklin Delano Roosevelt | (2003) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Warren G. Harding | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
James Buchanan | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
George Washington | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
George Washington | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Chester Alan Arthur | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Ulysses S. Grant | (2004) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Martin Van Buren | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Benjamin Harrison | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
James Monroe | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Andrew Jackson | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
James A. Garfield | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Calvin Coolidge | (2006) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Gerald R. Ford | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Richard M. Nixon | (2007) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Herbert Hoover | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Zachary Taylor | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Harry S. Truman | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
John Tyler | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Andrew Johnson | (2008) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Millard Fillmore | (2009) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Franklin Pierce | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Lyndon B. Johnson | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
John F. Kennedy | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Jimmy Carter | (2010) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
William Henry Harrison | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
William Howard Taft | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
George W. Bush | (2015) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Ronald Reagan | (2016) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Bill Clinton | (2017) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Publication Order of Anthologies
The American Story | (2001) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The Louisiana Purchase and American Expansion, 1803-1898 | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
Voices of America Past and Present | (2005) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
The National Interest (November/December 2012 Book 122) | (2012) | Hardcover Paperback Kindle |
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.
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