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The life of a nation is told by the lives of its people
- Over 19,000 biographies of significant, influential or notorious figures from American history written by prominent scholars
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What's new
What's new: May 2020
This update features seven new essays, with a focus on significant figures in twentieth-century political history. Highlights include controversial Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry; secretary of State of New Mexico Soledad Chavez Chacón; Raymond Telles, the first Mexican-American mayor of an American city; John Seigenthaler, journalist and administrative assistant; congressmen John B. Anderson and Melvin Laird; and Birch Bayh, Indiana Senator.
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Marion Barry
Marion Barry (1936–2014), four-term mayor of Washington, D.C., staged one of the more remarkable comebacks in American history in 1994 by winning his fourth term as mayor. In life and in death, Barry came to symbolize that complicated and contradictory time in D.C. history that residents remember as the era of “Chocolate City,” when the city’s large African American majority and the return of local political control created the potential for unprecedented black political power.
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