Welcome to American National Biography Online
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
- Learn about our editors and the Letter from the General Editor Miroslava Chávez-García.
Featured
Harper Lee
Harper Lee (1926–2016) wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the most beloved, best-selling novels of the twentieth century. Published in July 1960, it spent 88 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and premiered in 1962 as a movie starring Gregory Peck. In Lee’s lifetime, To Kill a Mockingbird sold 40 million copies and became a fixture in American classrooms.
Featured
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) was an activist and journalist who fought against the lynching of African Americans in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. After white violence ran her out of the South, Wells-Barnett moved to New York City and continued to write and lecture about the horrors of lynching, racial segregation, and discrimination against women. Wells viewed her work as "a contribution to truth, an array of facts, the perusal of which it is hoped will stimulate this great American Republic to demand that justice be done though the heavens fall."
In this update, ANB publishes six new articles.
Explore the full list of what has been recently published and revised on American National Biography.
