Every historian is indebted to the scholarship of those who came before them. I provided a lengthy bibliographical essay at the end of Who Is James K. Polk, but I wanted to highlight a few books that were crucial to its structure and arguments.
Robert Elder, Calhoun: American Heretic (Basic Books, 2021).
Amy S. Greenberg, Lady First: The World of First Lady Sarah Polk (Knopf, 2019).
Jon Grinspan, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (UNC Press, 2016).
Christopher J. Leahy, President without a Party: The Life of John Tyler (LSU Press, 2020).
Benjamin E. Park, Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier (Liveright, 2020).
Three books that I wished had been out in time for me to use are James Bradley’s biography of Martin Van Buren (under contract with Oxford Univ. Press), Amrita Chakrabarti Myers’ The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn (UNC Press, 2023), and Allison M. Stagg’s Prints of a New Kind: Political Caricature in the United States, 1789–1828 (Penn State Univ. Press, 2023).
Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics 