A fresh look at this astute, likably quirky statesman, by the author of the Pulitzer Award-winning Founding Brothers. 'The most lovable and most laughable, the warmest and possibly the wisest of the founding fathers, John Adams knew h...

Through portraits of four figures—Charles Willson Peale, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, William Dunlap, and Noah Webster—Joseph Ellis provides a unique perspective on the role of culture in post-Revolutionary America, both its high expe...

For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight--and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for reti...

A Washington Post Notable BookA Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the YearThe summer months of 1776 witnessed the most consequential events in the story of our country's founding. While the thirteen colonies came together and agr...

The author of seven highly acclaimed books, Joseph J. Ellis has crafted a landmark biography that brings to life in all his complexity the most important and perhaps least understood figure in American history, George Washington. With...

In lesser hands the fractious disputes and hysterical rhetoric of these contentious nation-builders might come across as hyperbolic pettiness. Ellis knows better, and he unpacks the real issues for his readers, revealing the driving a...

The award-winning author of Founding Brothers and The Quartet now gives us a deeply insightful examination of the relevance of the views of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams to some of the most divisiv...

In this rich and engrossing account, John and Abigail Adams come to life against the backdrop of the Republic's tenuous early years. Drawing on over 1,200 letters exchanged between the couple, Ellis tells a story both personal and pa...

In The Quartet, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph Ellis tells the unexpected story of why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate thems...