H. W. Brands

Henry William Brands (born August 7, 1953) is an American educator, author and historian. He has authored 25 books on U.S. history and biography. He is the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History and a Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned his Ph.D. in history in 1985. His works have twice been selected as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

Early life and education

Born in 1953, Brands grew up in Oregon in the Portland metropolitan area. He attended Jesuit High School, where he was a three-sport athlete and National Merit Scholar. Brands enrolled at Stanford University studying mathematics and history, receiving his undergraduate degree in history in 1975. Following graduation he worked for a year doing sales in his family's cutlery business before returning to Jesuit to teach mathematics. He taught at the high school for the next five years. While doing so he earned a M.A. in Liberal Studies from Reed College in 1978, followed by a M.S. in Mathematics from Portland State in 1981. During this period he came to realize that he wanted to write for a living, and determined his love of history might provide an avenue for him to do so. He enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin to study under historian Robert A. Divine. He wrote his dissertation on the Eisenhower administration and its foreign policy during the Cold War, earning his Ph.D. in History in 1985.

Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845) was the seventh President of the United States (1829–37). He was born near the end of the colonial era, somewhere near the then-unmarked border between North and South Carolina, into a recently immigrated Scots-Irish farming family of relatively modest means. During the American Revolutionary War Jackson, whose family supported the revolutionary cause, acted as a courier. He was captured, at age 13, and mistreated by his British captors. He later became a lawyer. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and then to the U.S. Senate. In 1801, Jackson was appointed colonel in the Tennessee militia, which became his political as well as military base. Jackson owned hundreds of slaves who worked on the Hermitage plantation which he acquired in 1804. He killed a man in a duel in 1806, over a matter of honor regarding his wife Rachel. Jackson gained national fame through his role in the War of 1812, most famously where he won a decisive victory over the main British invasion army at the Battle of New Orleans. In response to conflict with the Seminole in Spanish Florida, Jackson invaded the territory in 1818. This led directly to the Adams–Onís Treaty, which formally transferred Florida from Spain to the United States.

University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin, informally UT Austin, UT, University of Texas, or Texas in sports contexts, is a public research university and the flagship institution of The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883 as "The University of Texas," its campus is located in Austin—approximately 1 mile (1,600 m) from the Texas State Capitol. The institution has the fifth-largest single-campus enrollment in the nation, with over 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students and over 24,000 faculty and staff. The university has been labeled one of the "Public Ivies," a publicly funded university considered to provide a quality of education comparable to those of the Ivy League.

UT Austin was inducted into the American Association of Universities in 1929, becoming only the third university in the American South to be elected. It is a major center for academic research, with research expenditures exceeding $550 million for the 2013–2014 school year. The university houses seven museums and seventeen libraries, including the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum and the Blanton Museum of Art, and operates various auxiliary research facilities, such as the J. J. Pickle Research Campus and the McDonald Observatory. Among university faculty are recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Emmy Award, and the National Medal of Science, as well as many other awards.