Ronald C. White Jr. Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Ronald C. White Jr.
Ronald C. White Jr. was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 22, 1939 and is an American author, historian, and lecturer. He is the son of Evelyn Pearson and Ronald C. White. He was educated at R. D. White Elementary School, Lincoln Elementary School in Salinas, California, and Woodrow Wilson Junior High School. He graduated from Glendale High School in Glendale, California in the year 1957.

Ronald, who had an interest in both journalism and speech, enrolled in Northwestern University in 1957, before transferring to UCLA the next year, where he majored in American history. He graduated with honors in the year 1961 with BA.

That same year, he entered Princeton Theological Seminary and graduated with an M. Div. Degree, winning the Seminary Prize in History in 1964.

From 1964 to 1968, as he served as a minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, he taught in the history department at Colorado College. From 1966 to 1967, he served as a World Council of Churches Scholar in England, where he studied English church history at Lincoln Theological College in Lincoln, England. Going back to Colorado Springs, he became founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Education Fund, which was created in April of 1968 in response to King’s assassination.

Ronald studied both in the history department with Arthur S. Link and James M. McPherson and in the religion department with Horton Davies and John F. Wilson after being accepted into the PhD program at Princeton University in 1968. Under their mentorship, he wrote a dissertation called “The Social Gospel and the Negro in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920”, and got his PhD from Princeton in the year 1972.

From 1972 until 1974, Ronald taught at Rider College and later at Whitworth College from 1974 until 1981. In 1975, he co-authored a book with C. Howard Hopkins titled “The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America”. It is still in print and pushed the boundaries topically and chronologically of the traditional interpretation of the Social Gospel to include Jews, the South, women, and African Americans.

He served as director of continuing education and taught church history at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1981 until 1988.

Ron is married to Cynthia Conger White and lives in La Canada, California, and has two adult kids from a previous marriage.

“A. Lincoln” was honored as one of the best books of 2009 by the Christian Science Monitor, History Book Club, the Washington Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Barnes & Noble. It also won a Christopher Award which salutes books which affirm the highest values of the human spirit.

“A. Lincoln” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2009. Everybody wants to define the man that signed his name “A. Lincoln”. During his lifetime and ever since, foe and friend have taken it upon themselves to characterize him according to their own libel or label. In this book, White offers up a compelling and fresh take of Lincoln as being a man of integrity, what today’s commentators might call authenticity. And whose own moral compass holds the very key of understanding the man’s life.

Through some meticulous research of the newly finished Lincoln Legal Papers, and the recently found photos and letters, White is able to show a portrait of Lincoln’s political, personal, and moral evolution. He shows Lincoln as a man that would leave a trail of thoughts behind in his wake, jotting down ideas on pieces of paper and filing them away in his top hat or the bottom drawer of his desk.

He was a country lawyer that asked questions in order to figure out his own thinking on a certain issue, just as much to argue the case. He was a hands on commander in chief that, while sailors and soldiers looked on in amazement, commandeered a boat and ordered the attack on Confederate shore batteries at the tip of the Virginia peninsula. Lincoln was a man that struggled with immorality of slavery and as president acted both privately and publicly to outlaw it for good. Lastly, he was a president involved in a religious odyssey that wrote, for his own eyes only, a profound meditation on “the will of God” in the Civil War which would become the basis for his finest address.

Most enlightening of all is the Abraham Lincoln that comes into focus in this magnificent narrative as a person of intellectual curiosity, comfortable with ambiguity, and unafraid to “think and act anew”.

“American Ulysses” is a non-fiction book that was released in the year 2016. During his time, Ulysses S. Grant was routinely group in with George Washington and Lincoln in the “Trinity of Great American Leaders”. However the battlefield commander-turned-commander-in-chief fell out of favor during the twentieth century. Here, Ronald argues that we need to once again revise our estimates of the man during the twenty-first.

Based off seven years of research with primary documents, some of which never examined by previous Grant scholars, this is certain to become the Grant bio of our time. Ronald shows Grant to be a curious, generous, and introspective man and a leader, a willing delegator with a natural talent for managing the rampaging egos of each of his fellow officers. Julia Dent Grant, his wife, who has long been marginalized in the historic record, emerges in her own right as being an influential and spirited partner.

Not only was Grant a brilliant general but a passionate defender of equal rights in the post-Civil War America. After winning the election to the White House in 1868, he used the federal government’s power to fight the KKK. He was the first president to state that the government’s policy toward the American Indians was immoral, and the first of the ex-presidents to embark on a world tour, and cemented his own reputation for courage by racing against death to finish his Personal Memoirs. The book is widely thought to be the greatest autobiography by an American leader, however its place in Grant’s own life story was never explored. Until now.