The Roosevelts: Two exceptionally influential Presidents of the United States, 5th cousins from two different political parties, and key players in the United States’ involvement in both World Wars. Theodore Roosevelt negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War and won the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize. He also campaigned for America’s immersion in the First World War. Almost 25 years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt came into office during the calamitous aftermath of the Great Depression, yet during his 12-year presidency he contributed to the drop in unemployment rates from 24% when he first took office, to a staggering mere 2% when he left office in 1945. Furthermore, the first lady Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged discussion and implementation of women’s rights, World War II refugees, and civil rights of Asian and African Americans even well-after her husband’s presidency and death. Witness the lives of these illustrious figures through this slideshow, and take a look at the first half of 20th century American history through the lives of the Roosevelts.

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Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University, where he served as provost from 2003 to 2009.  His new book, Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a compact biography that elegantly blends FDR’s personal life with his professional one, providing a lens into the president’s struggles with polio and his somewhat distant relationship with the first lady. Below we have excerpted Brinkley’s introduction.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt may be the most chronicled man of the twentieth century.  He led the United States through the worst economic crisis in the life of the nation and through the greatest and most terrible war in human history.  His extraordinary legacy, compiled during dark and dangerous years, remains alive in our own, troubled new century as an inspiring and creative model to many, and as a symbol of excessive government power to many others.

My own awareness of Roosevelt began when I was a child growing up in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, where the image of FDR was still very much alive.  My father, a journalist, had attended some of Roosevelt’s Oval Office press conferences during World War II, and for the rest of his life he remembered them as among the most memorable events of his very eventful life.  My mother, a Washington native, never met Roosevelt, but she nevertheless considered him and important figure in her life.  I remember her devouring the three volumes of Arthur Schlesinger’s The Age of Roosevelt – which I avidly read as well, years later.  Whenever we drove down Pennsylvania Avenue, she would point out the plain granite block in front of the National Archives with the words “Franklin Delano Roosevelt” – and nothing else- inscribed on it.  He had requested that it be his only monument in Washington.  (Beginning in 1997, it was overshadowed by the elaborate Roosevelt  Memorial near the National Mall)

When I was in college, working on a senior thesis, I made my first trip to the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York – the nation’s oldest presidential library, built during Roosevelt’s lifetime.  I was struck by its modesty.  It was nothing like the grandiose marble and glass structures of many subsequent presidential sites, but a simple fieldstone structure sprawling across the pasture in front of the house in which Roosevelt had grown up.  The house was, and still is, open to the public, and it suggests some of the contradictions in Roosevelt’s life.  It was clearly the home of a wealthy and aristocratic family, and thus very different from the homes of the millions of common people who idolized him. It was furnished by his mother in expensive, Parisian style, but on its walls were dozens of framed political cartoons and pictures of political events.  And to his mother’s dismay, there were often large gatherings of rumpled politicians, smoking, drinking, and talking loudly. Throughout the rooms and the grounds, there were also ramps, constructed to allow Roosevelt to move around his property in a wheelchair because his lifeless legs – unbeknownst to most of his contemporaries – could no longer carry him.  A person of wealth and privilege in his youth, he grew up to be a disabled man who made his way to greatness through will power, empathy, and commitment.

During the years in which I have been a historian, I have written about many people, including some of Roosevelt’s most implacable opponents.  But I have found myself drawn again and again to the story of this enigmatic m