Famous Men of Modern Times

Famous Men of Modern Times, by John H. Haaren and A. B. Poland, is the last of their elementary history readers and carries the same method into the period from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth century. Each chapter is a short life used to mark a larger stretch of history. It begins with Lorenzo the Magnificent and the Italian Renaissance, then follows the age of exploration through Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand of Aragon, and Vasco da Gama. Chevalier Bayard, Cardinal Wolsey, Charles V, Solyman the Sublime, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Henry of Navarre cover the Reformation era, the rise of Spain and the Ottoman Empire, and the English and French struggles of the sixteenth century.

The later chapters move from the wars of religion into the age of science, revolution, and national unification. Wallenstein, Gustavus Adolphus, and Cardinal Richelieu stand for the Thirty Years’ War and the making of absolute monarchy; Galileo and Isaac Newton for the new science; Oliver Cromwell, Louis XIV, William III, Sobieski, Peter the Great, Charles XII, and Frederick the Great for the great powers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. William Pitt, George Washington, Robespierre, Napoleon, Nelson, and Kosciusko carry the story through the American and French revolutions and the Napoleonic wars. The book closes with Abraham Lincoln, Garibaldi, Gladstone, and Bismarck, treating the American Civil War, Italian unification, British reform, and the rise of Germany as the last great chapters of modern times. As in the earlier volumes, the writing is plain narrative for young readers, and history is told through famous men rather than through institutions or ideas alone.