<div>"Anyone who wants to understand the United States' racial divisions will learn a lot from reading Kaplan's richly researched account of one of the worst periods in American history and its chilling effects today in our cities, legislative bodies, schools, and houses of worship." &#8212; St. Louis Post-DispatchThe acclaimed biographer Fred Kaplan returns with a controversial exploration of how Abraham Lincoln&#8217;s and John Quincy Adams&#8217; experiences with slavery and race shaped their differing viewpoints, providing perceptive insights into these two great presidents and a revealing perspective on race relations in modern AmericaThough the Emancipation Proclamation, limited as it was, ultimately defined his presidency, Lincoln was a man shaped by the values of the white America into which he was born. While he viewed slavery as a moral crime abhorrent to American principles, he disapproved of antislavery activists. Until the last year of his life, he advocated &#8220;voluntary deportation,&#8221; concerned that free blacks in a white society would result in centuries of conflict. In 1861, he reluctantly took the nation to war to save it. While this devastating struggle would preserve the Union, it would also abolish slavery&#8212;creating the biracial democracy Lincoln feared.Years earlier, John Quincy Adams had become convinced that slavery would eventually destroy the Union. Only through civil war, sparked by a slave insurrection or secession, would slavery end and the Union be preserved. Deeply sympathetic to abolitionists and abolitionism, Adams believed that a multiracial America was inevitable. Lincoln and the Abolitionists, a frank look at Lincoln, &#8220;warts and all,&#8221; including his limitations as a wartime leader, provides an in-depth look at how these two presidents came to see the issues of slavery and race, and how that understanding shaped their perspectives.Its supporting cast of characters is colorful, from the obscure to the famous: Dorcas Allen, Moses Parsons, Usher F. Linder, Elijah Lovejoy, William Channing, Wendell Phillips, Rufus King, Hannibal Hamlin, Andrew Johnson, Abigail Adams, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and Frederick Douglass, among scores of significant others. In a far-reaching historical narrative, Kaplan offers a nuanced appreciation of the great men&#8212;Lincoln as an antislavery moralist who believed in an exclusively white America, and Adams as an antislavery activist who had no doubt that the United States would become a multiracial nation&#8212;and the events that have characterized race relations in America for more than a century, a legacy that continues to haunt us all.</div>

Lincoln and the Abolitionists

<div>&#8220;There is much to praise in this extensively researched book, which is certainly one of the finest biographies of a sadly underrated man. . . . [Kaplan is] a master historian and biographer. . . . If he could read this biography, Adams would be satisfied that he had been fairly dealt with at last.&#8221; &#8212;Carol Berkin, Washington PostIn this fresh and illuminating biography, Fred Kaplan, the acclaimed author of Lincoln, brings into focus the dramatic life of John Quincy Adams&#8212;the little-known and much-misunderstood sixth president of the United States and the first son of John and Abigail Adams&#8212;and reveals how Adams' inspiring, progressive vision guided his life and helped shape the course of America.Kaplan draws on a trove of unpublished archival material to trace Adams' evolution from his childhood during the Revolutionary War to his brilliant years as Secretary of State to his time in the White House and beyond. He examines Adams' myriad sides: the public and private man, the statesman and writer, the wise thinker and passionate advocate, the leading abolitionist and fervent federalist. In these ways, Adams was a predecessor of Lincoln and, later, FDR and Obama. This sweeping biography makes clear how Adams' forward-thinking values, his definition of leadership, and his vision for the nation's future is as much about twenty-first-century America as it is about Adams' own time.Meticulously researched and masterfully written, John Quincy Adams paints a rich portrait of this brilliant leader and his vision for a young nation.</div>

John Quincy Adams

<div>&#8220;A fine, invaluable book. . . . Certain to become essential to our understanding of the 16th president. . . . Kaplan meticulously analyzes how Lincoln&#8217;s steadily maturing prose style enabled him to come to grips with slavery and, as his own views evolved, to express his deepening opposition to it.&#8221; &#8212; Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book WorldFor Abraham Lincoln, whether he was composing love letters, speeches, or legal arguments, words mattered. In Lincoln, acclaimed biographer Fred Kaplan explores the life of America's sixteenth president through his use of language both as a vehicle to express complex ideas and feelings and as an instrument of persuasion and empowerment.This unique and engrossing account of Lincoln's life and career highlights the shortcomings of the modern presidency, reminding us, through Lincoln's legacy and appreciation for language, that the careful and honest use of words is a necessity for successful democracy.</div>

Lincoln

<div>The engaging biography of one of the most celebrated and enduring authors of Western literature Charles Dickens grew up in harsh poverty and became one of the world&rsquo;s most beloved authors. Biographer Fred Kaplan takes a brilliant, multifaceted approach in his examination of Dickens&rsquo;s life: his fraught marriage and relationships; the ever-present effects of his humble beginnings; his extensive, but carefully managed, public life; and his friendships with famous writers. Dickens unearths the complex passions that drove both the man and his work, illuminating why the legendary author&mdash;just like the characters in his fiction&mdash;has remained a mammoth figure in Western literature.</div>

Buy From US

Kobo

Google

Barnes & Noble

Apple

Amazon

Dickens

<div>An absorbing study of the evolution of sentiment in Victorian life and literature What is sentimentality, and where did it come from? For acclaimed scholar and biographer Fred Kaplan, the seeds were planted by the British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The Victorians gained from them a theory of human nature, a belief in the innateness of benevolent moral instincts; sentiment, in turn, emerged as a set of shared moral feelings in opposition to both scientific realism and the more ego-driven energies of Romanticism. Sacred Tears investigates the profound ways in which seminal writers Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Thomas Carlyle were influenced by the philosophies of David Hume and Adam Smith, and by novelists of the same period. Exploring sentiment in its original context&mdash;one often forgotten or overlooked&mdash;Kaplan&rsquo;s study is a stimulating fusion of intellectual history and literary criticism, and holds no small importance for questions of art and morality as they exist today.</div>

Overdrive

Sacred Tears

<div>This &ldquo;fascinating&rdquo; biography of an iconic American author and public intellectual &ldquo;is so full of incident and celebrity . . . a pageant of entertaining stories&rdquo; (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). Few writers of recent memory have distinguished themselves in so many fields, and so consummately, as Gore Vidal. A prolific novelist, Vidal also wrote for film and theater, and became a classic essayist of his own time, delivering prescient analyses of American society, politics, and culture. Known for his rapier wit and intelligence, Vidal moved with ease among the cultural elite&mdash;his grandfather was a senator, he was intimate with the Kennedys, and one of his best friends was Tennessee Williams. For this definitive biography, Fred Kaplan was given access to Vidal&rsquo;s papers and letters. The result is an insightful and entertaining portrait of an exceptional and mercurial writer.</div>

Gore Vidal

<div>A stunning biography of the magisterial author behind The Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors Henry James is an absorbing portrait of one of the most complex and influential nineteenth-century American writers. Fred Kaplan examines James&rsquo;s brilliant and troubled family&mdash;from his brother, a famous psychologist, to his sister, who fought with mental illness&mdash;and charts its influence on the development of the artist and his work. The biography includes a fascinating account of James&rsquo;s life as an American expatriate in Europe, and his friendships with Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad. Compressing a wealth of research into one engrossing and richly detailed volume, Henry James is a compelling exploration of its subject.</div>

Henry James

<div>Pulitzer Prize finalist: &ldquo;The definitive biography&rdquo;of the Victorian-era writer and historian (The Times Literary Supplement). A Pulitzer finalist that draws upon years of research and unpublished letters, Thomas Carlyle examines the life of the Victorian genius. Carlyle was the author of Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution: A History, and he possessed one of literature&rsquo;s most flamboyant prose styles. Despite a childhood beset by anxiety and illness, Carlyle was indefatigable in his literary production. Fred Kaplan delves into the author&rsquo;s intense personal life, which includes his turbulent marriage to author Jane Baillie Welsh and his disillusionment with religion. Kaplan is a devoted and sensitive explicator, vividly resurrecting both Carlyle and his Victorian setting.</div>

Thomas Carlyle

<div>A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize The inside story of the small group of soldier-scholars who&#8212;against fierce resistance from within their own ranks&#8212;changed the way the Pentagon does business and the American military fights wars. The Insurgents is the inside story of the small group of soldier-scholars, led by General David Petraeus, who plotted to revolutionize one of the largest, oldest, and most hidebound institutions&#8212;the United States military. Their aim was to build a new Army that could fight the new kind of war in the post&#8211;Cold War age: not massive wars on vast battlefields, but &#8220;small wars&#8221; in cities and villages, against insurgents and terrorists. These would be wars not only of fighting but of &#8220;nation building,&#8221; often not of necessity but of choice. Based on secret documents, private emails, and interviews with more than one hundred key characters, including Petraeus, the tale unfolds against the backdrop of the wars against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the main insurgency is the one mounted at home by ambitious, self-consciously intellectual officers&#8212;Petraeus, John Nagl, H. R. McMaster, and others&#8212;many of them classmates or colleagues in West Point&#8217;s Social Science Department who rose through the ranks, seized with an idea of how to fight these wars better. Amid the crisis, they forged a community (some of them called it a cabal or mafia) and adapted their enemies&#8217; techniques to overhaul the culture and institutions of their own Army. Fred Kaplan describes how these men and women maneuvered the idea through the bureaucracy and made it official policy. This is a story of power, politics, ideas, and personalities&#8212;and how they converged to reshape the twenty-first-century American military. But it is also a cautionary tale about how creative doctrine can harden into dogma, how smart strategists&#8212;today&#8217;s &#8220;best and brightest&#8221;&#8212;can win the battles at home but not the wars abroad. Petraeus and his fellow insurgents made the US military more adaptive to the conflicts of the modern era, but they also created the tools&#8212;and made it more tempting&#8212;for political leaders to wade into wars that they would be wise to avoid.</div>

The Insurgents

<div>&ldquo;An important, disturbing, and gripping history&rdquo; (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), the never-before-told story of the computer scientists and the NSA, Pentagon, and White House policymakers who invent and employ cyber wars&#8212;where every country can be a major power player and every hacker a mass destroyer. In June 1983, President Reagan watched the movie War Games, in which a teenager unwittingly hacks the Pentagon, and asked his top general if the scenario was plausible. The general said it was. This set in motion the first presidential directive on computer security. From the 1991 Gulf War to conflicts in Haiti, Serbia, Syria, the former Soviet republics, Iraq, and Iran, where cyber warfare played a significant role, Dark Territory chronicles a little-known past that shines an unsettling light on our future. Fred Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-top-secret cyber units in the Pentagon, the &#8220;information warfare&#8221; squads of the military services, and the national security debates in the White House to reveal the details of the officers, policymakers, scientists, and spies who devised this new form of warfare and who have been planning&#8212;and (more often than people know) fighting&#8212;these wars for decades. &#8220;An eye-opening history of our government&#8217;s efforts to effectively manage our national security in the face of the largely open global communications network established by the World Wide Web&#8230;.Dark Territory is a page-turner [and] consistently surprising&#8221; (The New York Times).</div>

Fred Kaplan
Follow this author

Books By Fred Kaplan (10 Books)

Lincoln and the Abolitionists

John Quincy Adams

Lincoln

Dickens

Sacred Tears

Gore Vidal

Henry James

Thomas Carlyle

The Insurgents

Dark Territory

Get weekly updates and deals from Early Bird Books

More from

Corporate

© 2024 OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Fred KaplanFollow this author