Benjamin Harrison, the “Centennial President,” failed to achieve many of his goals (for instance, he was unable to secure passage of federal leg­islation to ensure public school education and voting rights for African Americans in the South). Yet he successfully pressed Congress to pass the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to deal with the growing threat posed by cor­porate trusts and monopolies.

Republican President William McKinley transformed America during his two terms as president. Although he does not register large in either public memory or in historians' rankings, in this revealing account, Robert W. Merry offers "a fresh twist on the old tale . . . a valuable education on where America has been and, possibly, where it is going" (The National Review).

President Franklin Pierce took steps to build new commercial relation­ships abroad, revamp the military, and restructure the federal courts. After an unprecedented landslide in the 1852 presidential election gave him supermajorities in the House and Senate, Pierce seemed poised for a productive presidency.

This new biography of Van Buren—the first full-scale portrait in four decades—charts his ascent from a tavern in the Hudson Valley to the presidency, concluding with his late-career involvement in an antislavery movement. Offering vivid profiles of the day's leading figures (Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, John Quincy Adams, DeWitt Clinton, James K. Polk), James Bradley's book depicts the struggle for power in the tumultuous decades leading up to the Civil War.

America was made by the railroads. The opening of the Baltimore & Ohio line—the first American railroad—in the 1830s sparked a national revolution in the way that people lived thanks to the speed and convenience of train travel. Built through heroic effort, the American railroad network was bigger in every sense than Europe's, and facilitated everything from long-distance travel to commuting and transporting goods to waging war. It united far-flung parts of the country, boosted economic development, and was the catalyst for America's rise to world-power status.