This A-Z encyclopedia provides carefully selected entries covering the people, events, and concepts relevant to Andrew Johnson's life.

Andrew Johnson was-and is-an American paradox. He never attended school, yet fought for public education. He was a Southern slaveholder who opposed secession and enforced emancipation. Born into poverty, he became the 17th president of the United States-and the first U.S. president to be impeached.

This new volume thoroughly examines the troubled career of our most unpopular president-not to resuscitate his reputation, but because his personal contradictions reflected those of his country: a democratic nation conceived in liberty, yet existing half slave and half free; an economy of yeoman farmers and independent artisans being swept into industrialization and a market system; a country fond of tradition, but caught up in social, economic, and political revolution.