T.J. Stiles

The extraordinary death of George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn hides an important truth: He polarized the public long before the battle, standing as the symbol of all the arguments Americans waged over the future of the United States. Stiles draws on his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Custer's Trials to show how this surprisingly talented yet self-destructive figure lived as well as made history, from hand-to-hand combat against Confederates and Lakotas, to the subtle alliance and power struggle across the boundary of race between his wife Libbie and his household manager, Eliza Brown, to his fraught efforts to take part in the new America of mass media, financial markets, civil rights, and westward expansion.

T.J. Stiles received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The First Tycoon, which follows the extraordinary life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, one of the architects of the modern corporate economy. In this talk, Stiles describes how American capitalism arose through business and political battles that defined American values and the global economy, as Vanderbilt made himself into one of the richest and most powerful individuals in history.

Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, T.J. Stiles's first biography, redefined the way we understand an American icon. In this lecture he describes how the legendary Robin Hood figure actually began as a Confederate guerrilla in the Civil War, and won widespread support as a bandit by making himself into a political figure in his bitterly divided home state of Missouri. A dark and dramatic story about the truth behind the myth.