Reference Library of American Men

Four deluxe volumes — a comprehensive look at the lives of 650 men whose enduring contributions to culture and society earned international recognition.

About the Series

The four-volume Reference Library of American Men, the companion set to the Reference Library of American Women, provides a unique, comprehensive look at the lives of 650 men who have gained international recognition for their enduring contributions to human culture and society. Both contemporary and historic figures are featured, covering a wide range of occupations and fields of endeavor.

Arranged alphabetically, each authoritative article begins with a brief paragraph that provides a capsule identification and a statement of the man's significance. A narrative essay, generally about 800 words in length, follows with a substantial treatment of the individual's life. Each essay ends with a “Further Reading” section and, when applicable, a list of additional sources. Other features include photographs and two indexes that help researchers identify subjects by name and occupation.

Figures Profiled

Look for such renowned personalities as Muhammad Ali, Bob Dylan, Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Tiger Woods, Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, William Randolph Hearst, Frank Sinatra, and Cesar Chavez — statesmen and scientists, athletes and artists, inventors and entrepreneurs, drawn from every American community and era.

In the Classroom and Library

The 800-word essay format is ideal for a single class period: long enough for substance, short enough to finish and discuss. Our lesson plans guide builds its biography sketch project on this set and its companion, and our research database page shows the entry format students can imitate in their own writing. For primary-source extensions, the National Archives education portal offers free document-analysis tools that pair well with figures from any era.

The roster's deliberate breadth is the point. Statesmen share alphabet space with blues musicians, labor organizers with industrialists, ballplayers with poets — and the selection crosses every American community, so Cesar Chavez and Muhammad Ali stand beside Thomas Jefferson as a matter of course. The set quietly models the thesis of the whole collection: American achievement has never had a single face.

Reading Pathways

Used alone, the set anchors biography units; used alongside its companion, it teaches something subtler. The paired-lives route assigns each student one figure from this set and one from the American Women library working in the same field and era — then asks what differed in their paths to recognition. The comparison is consistently one of the most revealing exercises the two sets support. The occupation route uses the occupation index to build cohorts — inventors, jurists, athletes — for group research projects. The era route slices the set chronologically, assembling a portrait of, say, the Gilded Age or the civil-rights era through five lives lived across it.

The Further Reading sections deserve explicit teaching time: they model how a researcher climbs from a reference essay to full biographies and primary sources, the source-laddering skill described in our lesson plans guide.

Reference Details

Format

4 deluxe hardcover volumes; appendix, bibliography, glossary, index

Length

Approximately 1,300 pages; photographs throughout

ISBN

0-7876-6259-3 (0787662593)

Reading level

Middle and high school; teacher resource for elementary grades

To find this set in a library near you, search WorldCat by title or ISBN. See also the rest of the series guide or the complete 31-volume collection.