John Quincy Adams

From an award-winning and leading Founding Fathers historian, a biography of a towering figure in America’s formative years

He fought for Washington, served with Lincoln, and sounded the clarion call against slavery on the eve of the Civil War. He negotiated an end to the War of 1812, engineered the annexation of Florida, and won the Supreme Court decision that freed the African captives of The Amistad. He served his nation as minister to six countries, secretary of state, senator, congressman, and president.

John Quincy Adams was all of these things and more. In this masterful biography, award-winning historian Harlow Giles Unger reveals Quincy Adams as a towering character in the nation’s formative years and one of the most courageous figures in American history. He even ranked first in John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Profiles in Courage.

A magisterial biography and a sweeping panorama of American history from the Washington to Lincoln eras, Unger’s John Quincy Adams follows one of America’s most important yet least-known statesmen.

A former Distinguished Visiting Fellow in American History at George Washington's Mount Vernon, Harlow Giles Unger is a veteran journalist, broadcaster, educator, and historian. He is the author of twenty books, including six biographies of America's Founding Fathers and two other histories of the early republic.