A University of Massachusetts historian, Professor Richards provides the back-story on the fight in 1864 and 1865 to pass a Constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, when even many in the North would have been content to restore the Union with slavery intact below the Mason- Dixon Line.

You may be impressed with Bill Gates who has a net worth of nearly $80 billion and is Forbes’ richest man in the world, but Gates has a smaller share of the world’s wealth today than Jacob Fugger had at the end of the 15th century and the start of the 16th.  'The Richest Man Who Ever Lived' is a fascinating tale of the man who helped provoke Martin Luther into rebellion.  

After a long stretch of reading plenty about the Gilded Age in preparing my forth-coming book, The Triumph of William McKinley: Why The Election of 1896 Matters, I just finished a delightful book on how Shakespeare’s plays were rescued from oblivion by the playwrights, friends, and fellow actors who collected what scripts they could find and published them seven years after the Bard’s death. 

In a particularly vivid work, Doris Kearns Goodwin tells a rollicking tale about two presidents - their friendship, its destruction, and their subsequent rivalry - in a rapidly changing country with even more rapidly evolving media and politics.  Goodwin has a gifted eye for detail and insight.