American Lives is a two-volume collection of forty-four biographical essays of both well-known and lesser-known historical figures, each chapter a succinct portrait of an important American. Selections are based according to gender, ethnicity, geographical region and historical period. Each essay begins with a brief consideration of the historical context and concludes with provocative questions for thought and discussion and suggestions for further reading. Subjects of the biographies run the gamut of American experience from politics to social activism to professional life to literature and popular culture.

Table of Contents:

Volume One:

1. Christopher Columbus
2. Anne Marbury Hutchinson
3. Teedyuscung
4. Tom Quick
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. William Franklin
7. Tadeusz Kosciuszko
8. George Washington
9. Margaret Shippen Arnold
10. Abigail Adams
11. Thomas Jefferson
12. Tecumseh
13. Charles Grandison Finney
14. Sam Houston
15. James Forten
16. Harriet Beecher Stowe
17. Annie Turner Wittenmyer
18. Abraham Lincoln
19. Robert E. Lee
20. Charlotte Forten

Volume Two:

1. Mark Twain
2. Sitting Bull
3. Myra Colby Bradwell
4. Andrew Carnegie .
5. Thomas Alva Edison
6. Louis Sockalexis
7. W.E.B. DuBois
8. Eugene V. Debs
9. Woodrow Wilson
10. Theda Bara
11. Margaret Sanger
12. Huey Long
13. Eleanor Roosevelt
14. George Patton
15. Iva Toguri
16. Harry S Truman
17. Jack Kerouac
18. Rachel Carson
19. Cesar Chavez
20. Martin Luther King, Jr.
21. Robert S. McNamara
22. Richard Milhous Nixon
23. Sandra Day O'Connor
24. Toni Morrison