James MacGregor Burns

For decades, James MacGregor Burns has been one of the great masters of the study of power and leadership in America. Now he turns his eye to an institution of government that he believes has become more powerful-and more partisan-than the Founding Fathers ever intended: the Supreme Court. Much as we would like to believe that the Court remains aloof from ideological politics, Packing the Court reveals how often justices behave like politicians in...

In this engaging history, James MacGregor Burns brings to vivid life the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, during which audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, bringing down governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments that would ultimately reach every corner of the globe. Unlike most historians, Burns pays particular attention to America's intellectual...

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian James MacGregor Burns's definitive look at the power of transformational leadership, from Moses to Machiavelli to Martin Luther King Jr. Historian and political scientist James MacGregor Burns has spent much of his career documenting the use and misuse of power by leaders throughout history. In this groundbreaking study, Burns examines the qualities that make certain leaders-in America and elsewhere-succeed as transformative...

James MacGregor Burns's stunning trilogy of American history, spanning the birth of the Constitution to the final days of the Cold War In these three volumes, Pulitzer Prize–­ and National Book Award–winner James MacGregor Burns chronicles with depth and narrative panache the most significant cultural, economic, and political events of American history. In The Vineyard of Liberty, he combines the color and texture of early American life with...

The authorized biography of John F. Kennedy offers a fresh and candid look at what shaped the man America came to love and admire, just as he was on the cusp of the presidency Historian, political scientist, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author James MacGregor Burns wrote Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox, the first volume of his highly acclaimed biography of FDR, in 1956. Two years later, Burns ran for a seat in Congress and became close friends with...

The first volume of Burns's stunning account of American history, from the birth of the Constitution to the dawn of the Civil War The years between 1787 and 1863 witnessed the development of the American Nation-its society, politics, customs, culture, and, most important, the development of liberty. Burns explores the key events in the republic's early decades, as well as the roles of heroes from Washington to Lincoln and of lesser-known figures....