Lucky Number Eight?

The wheels of this project grind on, and as we move from Founding Fathers to the Great Blank Space Between Jackson and Lincoln, you can keep up by reading our next selection: Joel H. Sibley's Martin van Buren and the Emergence of American Popular Politics, our next presidential biography.

A funny story about the selection process for this book: when it's possible, I check out both my school's copy and the public library's copy of a book, so that E and I can both read at the same time. It's worked fine up until this point. But while I checked out the public library's copy of Sibley's book, I managed to check out Donald Cole's 1984 biography Martin van Buren and the American Political System. I didn't notice this for a month.

That's not exactly Marx Brother-level hysterics, but it should, if nothing else, give you an idea of van Buren's major contribution to American history.