John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

Fred Kaplan, the acclaimed, award-winning creator of Lincoln, returns with John Quincy Adams, an illuminating biography of probably the most neglected presidents in American historical past—a frontrunner of sweeping perspective whose progressive values helped form the course of the nation.

On this recent and full of life biography wealthy in literary evaluation and new historic element, Fred Kaplan brings into focus the dramatic lifetime of John Quincy Adams—the little identified and far misunderstood sixth president of the US and the primary son of John and Abigail Adams—and persuasively demonstrates how Adams’s inspiring, progressive imaginative and prescient guided his life and helped form the course of America.

Kaplan attracts on a trove of unpublished archival materials to hint Adams’s evolution from his childhood in the course of the Revolutionary Battle to his sensible years as Secretary of State to his time within the White Home and past. He examines Adams’s myriad sides: the private and non-private man, the statesman and author, the smart thinker and passionate advocate, the main abolitionist and fervent federalist who believed strongly in each particular person liberty and the federal government’s function as an engine of progress and prosperity. In these methods—and in his vitality, empathy, sharp mind, and highly effective reward with phrases each spoken and written—he was a predecessor of Lincoln and, later, FDR and Obama. Certainly, this sweeping biography makes clear how Adams’s forward-thinking values, his definition of management, and his imaginative and prescient for the nation’s future is as a lot about twenty-first century America as it’s about Adams’s personal time.

Meticulously researched and masterfully written, John Quincy Adams paints a wealthy portrait of this sensible chief and his significance to the nation and our personal lives.