By Joseph Nathan Kane, Janet Podell, and Steven Anzovin

Written for both general readers and researchers, this volume will be one of the most widely consulted works in your reference collection. Facts About the Presidents delivers information about the lives, backgrounds, and terms in office of every American president, George Washington to George W. Bush, plus facts about the Executive Office itself.

What's New in the Seventh Edition:

• New chapter on George W. Bush, covering the disputed election and the beginning of the Bush administration thorough June 2001

• Updating of the chapter on Bill Clinton, with complete information on his entire term as president

• Extensively updated information on all the First Ladies

• Revised data on the Vice Presidents

• Expansion of the bibliographies at the end of each president's chapter

• The comparative data, which constitutes a quarter of the book, was updated to reflect the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

A separate chapter on each of the 43 U.S. Presidents

Part I presents a chapter for each president in chronological sequence, featuring data on the president’s background, life and administration. Here you’ll find uniformly arranged data on birth, family, education, nomination and election, congressional sessions, cabinet and Supreme Court appointments, Vice Presidents, First Lady, and more—plus highlights both personal and political. Bibliographies guide readers to additional information on each President.

Part II presents over 160 pages of fascinating statistics in a collective arrangement so that a reader can compare presidents on the basis of such matters as early occupation, previous political career, type of education, military experience, family background, religious affiliation, age at death, literary output, and other factors.

Part II also delivers important facts about the office of the presidency, including salaries and pensions, cabinet officers, party alignments of the Congresses, presidential vetoes, electoral and popular votes in every election since 1789, third-party electoral votes, presidential succession, and the many other facets of the nation’s highest office.

The volume also features a handy name/subject index to make it easy to pinpoint exactly the information you need.

◘ 721 pp.
◘ Illustrated with portraits of each President
◘ 2001
◘ ISBN 0-8242-1007-7
◘ $140
◘ $160 (outside U.S. and Canada)

Facts About the Presidents answers thousands of questions like these:

Q. Who was the first President not born a British subject?
A. Martin Van Buren (p. 28)

Q. What were the closest elections?
A. Six elections have been extremely close. The 1880, 1884, 1960, and 1968 elections were won with margins of less than 1% of the popular vote. The 1888 and 2000 elections had similarly narrow margins but in those elections the winner of the popular vote lost the vote in the electoral college and so did not become president.

The 1824 and 1876 elections were also close, in the sense that they were thrown into the House of Representatives when no candidate won in the electoral college. Again, the popular vote did not determine the outcome. (p. 73, p. 641)

Q. How many bachelors have been elected President?
A. Two: James Buchanan and Grover Cleveland. Buchanan never married; Cleveland married while he was president. (p. 158, p. 238)

Q. Was any President an only child?
A. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, and William Clinton were the only children of their parents' marriages. However, Ford and Clinton grew up with younger half-brothers from their mothers' second marriages, and Roosevelt had an older half-brother from his father's first marriage. (p. 552)

Q. Which Presidents never exercised the veto?
A. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, William Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, and James Garfield. (p. 669)

Q. Who delivered the shortest inaugural address?
A. George Washington, at his second inauguration—135 words. (p. 664)

Q. Which sons of Presidents fought in the Civil War? On which side?
A. Union: Robert Todd Lincoln (served in a noncombatant position), Frederick Dent Grant, Charles Johnson, and Robert Johnson.
Confederacy: David Gardiner Tyler, John Alexander Tyler, Tazewell Tyler (army surgeon), and Richard Taylor. (p. 576-577)

Q. Which First Lady danced the polka in the White House?
A. Julia Gardiner Tyler, a famous belle (p. 111)

Q. Who was the first President to use the Internet?
A. William Clinton (p. 521)

Q. How many Vice Presidents have there been?
A. Richard Cheney is the 46th Vice President. (p. 689-692)

Q. How many Presidents didn’t attend college?
A. Eight: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and Grover Cleveland. (p. 583)

Q. How many Presidents were left-handed?
A. Six: James Garfield, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and William Clinton. (p. 601)

Q. Who was the tallest President?
A. Lincoln—at 6 feet, 4 inches. (p. 600)