David S. Brown

David S. Brown is a writer and the Horace E. Raffensperger professor of history at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of several books, including The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams, Paradise Lost: A Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Brown holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Toledo. His latest biography, The First Populist: The Defiant Life of Andrew Jackson, was published by Scribner in 2022.

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Andrew Jackson: Our First Populist, November/December 2022 | Vol. 68, No. 6

Was he the era’s greatest Democrat or its elected autocrat? A hero or a scoundrel? Balancing Andrew Jackson’s legacy is a problematic exercise, complicated by his many contradictions.

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