Max Byrd

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Thomas Jefferson was an enigma to everyone he met. A century and a half after his death, one writer strives to understand, if not the man himself, then at least the world as it knew him. 

The Brief History of a Historical Novel

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Max Byrd says that biographer Jon Meacham sums up Andrew Jackson's antithetical personality: "commanding, shrewd, intuitive yet not especially articulate, alternately bad-tempered and well-mannered."

Captain America

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Maps are not always works of dutiful representation — sometimes they are tickets to flights of the imagination.

This Is Not a Map

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To many of Jefferson's contemporaries, his greatest scandal had nothing to do with Sally Hemings.

Man on the Run

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For centuries, the passionate and sometimes persecuted Irish have felt a peculiar sympathy with Europe’s self-anointed capital of sophistication.

The Irish in Paris

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A peculiar experiment inspired by the Enlightenment sheds light on the age-old question of what makes us human.