Representative Americans ─ The Romantics

Like the preceeding books in The Representative Americans series, The Romantics makes history human by putting tissue on the skeletal framework of names and dates. It treats people whose principal contributions fell in the first half of the nineteenth century. And while certain individuals may be unfamiliar to readers-the slaves Prince and Fed; Free Frank, a black farmer of Kentucky and Illinois; and the 'Lowell Girls,' Lucy Lacom and Sarah Bagley-the majority of the figures studied are well-known, such as Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Horace Mann, and Catharine Beecher. Tying it all together is the prevailing spirit of American Romanticism.

Norman K. Risjord is emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he taught for over three decades. He is the author of Chesapeake Politics, 1781-1800 and Jefferson's America, 1760-1815. He is general editor of the American Profiles series for Madison House.