William E. Leuchtenburg is William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He studied at Cornell and Columbia, and taught for many years at Columbia before moving to Chapel Hill. His Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, from which this excerpt is taken, won both the Bancroft Prize and the Francis Parkman Prize in American history. His other books include The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932; In the Shadow of FDR; The Supreme Court Reborn; and The FDR Years.
