Best of
Presidents

1946

The Roosevelt I Knew


Frances Perkins - 1946
    Cabinet. When Frances Perkins first met Franklin D. Roosevelt at a dance in 1910, she was a young social worker and he was an attractive young man making a modest debut in state politics. Over the next thirty-five years, she watched his career unfold, becoming both a close family friend and a trusted political associate whose tenure as secretary of labor spanned his entire administration. FDR and his presidential policies continue to be widely discussed in the classroom and in the media, and "The Roosevelt I Knew" offers a unique window onto the man whose courage and pioneering reforms still resonate in the lives of Americans today.

Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man: Mathew B. Brady


Roy Meredith - 1946
    With his assistants and his horse-drawn photographic wagon, Brady accompanied the troops and recorded the war firsthand. His war pictures are among the greatest war photographs ever taken, and constitute a prized pictorial record of American history.A photographer much in demand by statesmen and celebrities, Brady amassed a gallery of distinguished portraits. Most famous of these is the "Brady Lincoln," the photograph used for the engraving of the Lincoln head on the five-dollar bill. There are even photographs of Brady himself. But the heart of the book is the Civil War photographs: Battle Smoke, Union Wounded at Fredericksburg, Burnside's Bridge over the Antietam, Death of a Rebel Sniper, Remains of the Dead at Chancellorsville, Embalming Surgeon at Work, Atlanta Ga. Just After Its Capture, and others. Meredith's text tells the story behind many of the photographs and gives a lively account of Brady's life and times.In this Dover edition almost all the photographic prints have been reproduced directly from negatives and photographs on file at the Library of Congress — they are sharper and clearer than the reproductions in the first edition; numbers for all negatives are now included — a great boon to Brady picture research; and corrections have been made in the attributions of some of the photographs.

The Age of Jackson


Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. - 1946
    While working in the Kennedy White House, he found time to review movies for Show magazine. He also admitted his mistakes. One, he said, was neglecting to mention President Jackson’s brutal treatment of the Indians in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Age of Jackson.” It was published when he was 27, and is still standard reading. The book rejected earlier interpretations linking the rise of Jacksonian democracy with westward expansion. Instead, it gave greater importance to a coalition of intellectuals and workers in the Northeast who were determined to check the growing power of business. The book sold more than 90,000 copies in its first year and won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for history.