Watch our recent webinar featuring historian and biographer C.W. Goodyear where we discussed his latest book, “President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier,“ which The Washington Post regards as one of the best nonfiction books of 2023.
Discover the remarkable story of President Garfield, a leader who dedicated his life to uniting a divided nation. We explored President Garfield’s two decades in Congress, his role during America’s Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, and his tragic assassination.
This book follows Garfield’s journey as an impoverished boy working his way from the frontier to the Presidency; a progressive statesman, trying to raise a more righteous, peaceful Republic out of the ashes of civil war; the tragically imperfect course of that reformation, and the man himself; a martyr-President, whose death succeeded in nudging the country back to cleaner, calmer politics.
C.W. Goodyear is an author and historian based in Washington, DC. He was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, and grew up abroad before graduating from Yale University. He graduated in 2016 with a degree in Global Affairs, then moved to Washington, DC.
Goodyear’s first book project was a collaboration with former naval officer Chris Fussell. He subsequently worked in Washington as a ghostwriter, before beginning his work on the life of President Garfield.
He currently lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
In “the most comprehensive Garfield biography in almost fifty years” (The Wall Street Journal), C.W. Goodyear charts the life and times of one of the most remarkable Americans ever to win the Presidency. Progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser; Union war hero and founder of the first Department of Education; Supreme Court attorney and abolitionist preacher; mathematician and canalman; crooked election-fixed and clean-government champion; Congressional chieftain and gentleman-farmer; the last president to be born in a log cabin; the second to be assassinated. James Abram Garfield was all these things and more.
Over nearly two decades in Congress during a polarized era—Reconstruction and the Gilded Age—Garfield served as a peacemaker in a Republican Party and America defined by divisions. He was elected to overcome them. He was killed while trying to do so.
President Garfield is American history at its finest. It is about an impoverished boy working his way from the frontier to the Presidency; a progressive statesman, trying to raise a more righteous, peaceful Republic out of the ashes of civil war; the tragically imperfect course of that reformation, and the man himself; a martyr-President, whose death succeeded in nudging the country back to cleaner, calmer politics.
