Ron Chernow tells the story of a man who overcame all odds to shape, inspire, and scandalize the newborn America. Few figures in American history have been more hotly debated or more grossly misunderstood than Alexander Hamilton. Chernow's biography argues that the political and economic greatness of today's America is the result of Hamilton's countless sacrifices to champion ideas that were often wildly disputed during his time. Chernow here recounts...

The author plunges us into the fascinating, scandal-ridden world of ancient Rome in its most glorious heyday-when senators were endlessly filibustering legislation and exposing one another's sexual escapades to discredit the opposition. Accessible to us through his legendary speeches but also through an unrivaled collection of unguarded letters to his close friend Atticus, Cicero comes to life as a witty and cunning political operator, the most eloquent...

"Hamilton" is the acclaimed new hip-hop musical about the scrappy young immigrant Alexander Hamilton, the $10 Founding Father who forever changed America with his revolutionary ideas and actions. During his life cut too short, he served as George Washington's chief aide, was the first Treasury Secretary of the United States, a loving husband and father, despised by his fellow Founding Fathers, and shot to death by Aaron Burr in a legendary duel.

"From his early career as a printer and journalist, to his scientific work and his role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth he had to make his way through a harsh colonial world where he fought many battles: with his rivals, but also with his wayward emotions. Taking Franklin to the age of forty-one, when he made his first electrical discoveries, Bunker...

"An outstanding new edition of Plutarch, the inventor of biography, focused on five lives that remade the Roman world. Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus, Antony: the names still resonate across thousands of years. Major figures in the civil wars that brutally ended the Roman republic, they haunt us with questions of character and authority: how to safeguard a republic from the flaws of its leaders. Plutarch's rich, vivid profiles show character shaping...