Historians have sometimes been scoffed at as mere list-makers and fact-stackers, compulsive, nearsighted antiquarians. But as ambitious scholars venture to survey vast landscapes, they avidly recruit nearby disciplines: neuroscience for deep human history, genetics and linguistics for population movements, geography for the struggles over resources and terrain, biology for disease resistance and plagues, economics for the means of production and commerce and trade, technology for warfare, transportation, and discovery. And so on.

Whatever the pursuit, and however stratospheric the overview, historians also never escape chronology and detail that brings them back down to earth. Nor do they dodge biography. Knowing how a life unfolds often explains why individuals’ lives followed particular courses.

Historians and biographers have profitably mined theories of personal psychology that illuminated the way their subjects thought and felt and how they saw themselves at crucial and consequential turning points.

Psychology as a Feature of Biography

And so psychological biographies of pivotal, world-historical figures such as Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther, Vincent Van Gogh and Mohandas Gandhi, Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler show how the sorely beset individual, for the inspirationally better or for the catastrophically worse, has changed life for the rest of us.

Sources and Subjects

In the case of United States presidents, those colorful, powerful, often inspiring, and sometimes tormented souls, biographers find that psychological theory helps them mine rich veins of explanation.

In this connection the writings, contemporary reports, and recollections of significant and complicated personalities of past presidents such as Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon have attracted........

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