0-446-58009-0/978-0-446-58009-0
$30.00 (In Canada: $33.00)
384 pages; 6 x 9
History / World

The first major biography to view two of the great leaders of the 19th century as self-made men, written by Harvard University professor John Stauffer, winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize.

They were the preeminent self-made men of their time. Abraham Lincoln was born dirt poor, had less than one year of formal schooling, and became the nation's greatest president. Frederick Douglass spend the first twenty years of his life as a slave, had no formal schooling – in fact, his masters forbade him to read or write – and became of the nation’s greatest writers and activists. Award-winning scholar John Stauffer describes the dramatic transformations in the lives of these giants during a major shift in cultural history, when men rejected the status quo and embraced new ideals of personal liberty.