The Quiet Americans

"He [Peter Sichel] paused, folded his hands neatly on the table before him. "And we also didn't think about history. If we had, we would have remembered that crusades always end badly." 

Expansionist Views

In Larry Gara's The Presidency of Franklin Pierce, he makes clear how the United States has long entertained "expansionist views", especially when it comes to various countries both north and south of our present borders. Strange, but true.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

"Indeed, a limited civil war was already raging in Kansas." -- Larry Gara

So could the violence and bloodshed that resulted from passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act maybe have been avoided had President Pierce been more even-handed in his policies toward the new territories? 

Indians

 

  

"Fighting Indians provided a considerable amount of the United States' early nineteenth-century military experience, and much of that activity occurred during the Pierce years."

The Election of 1852

 Gara's opening sentence in chapter 2 had me comparing our distance from the events of WWII to the distance of Franklin Pierce's election from the American Revolution.

Free Soilers & More

Free Soilers, Barnburners, Hunkers, Whigs, Democrats...oh my! How does anyone even begin to grasp the complexities of mid-19th century American politics! Evidently Larry Gara does in his "The Presidency of Franklin Pierce."

Franklin Pierce

Name just one thing you can remember learning about Franklin Pierce's presidency? Right. Well, you probably have a better memory than I have, 'cause I couldn't think of a single thing when I spotted this 1991 publication on my local library's shelf. So here goes one man's attempt to rescue Pierce from almost total obscurity.

Braude & Gara

Another trek to the library, this time to pick up Mark Braude's just recently released book and, while I was there, Larry Gara's biography of Franklin Pierce, first published way back in 1991.