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The friendship of the bachelor politicians James Buchanan (1791–1868) of Pennsylvania and William Rufus King (1786–1853) of Alabama has excited much speculation through the years. Why did neither one ever marry? Might they have been gay, or was their relationship a nineteenth-century version of the modern-day “bromance”? Then, as now, they have intrigued by the many mysteries surrounding them. In Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King, Thomas Balcerski explores the lives of these two politicians and discovers one of the most significant collaborations in American political history. Unlikely companions from the start, they lived together as messmates in a Washington, DC, boardinghouse. They developed a friendship that blossomed into a significant political partnership. Before the Civil War, each man was elected to high executive office: William Rufus King as vice president in 1852, and James Buchanan as the nation’s fifteenth president in 1856. This book recounts the story of their bosom friendship through a dual biography of Buchanan and King. Special attention is given to their early lives, the circumstances of their boardinghouse friendship, and the political gossip that has circulated about them ever since. In addition, the author traces their many contributions to the Jacksonian political agenda, manifest destiny, and the debates over slavery, while finding their style of politics to have been disastrous for the American nation. Ultimately, Bosom Friends demonstrates that intimate male friendships among politicians were, and continue to be, an important part of success in the clubby world of American politics.

Late nineteenth-century San Francisco was an ethnically diverse but male-dominated society bustling from a rowdy gold rush, earthquakes, and explosive economic growth. Within this booming marketplace, some women stepped beyond their roles as wives, caregivers, and homemakers to start businesses that combined family concerns with money-making activities. The author of this book traces the experiences of these women entrepreneurs, exploring who they were, why they started businesses, how they attracted customers and managed finances, and how they dealt with failure. Using a unique sample of bankruptcy records, credit reports, advertisements, city directories, census reports, and other sources, she argues that women were competitive, economic actors, strategizing how best to capitalize on their skills in the marketplace. Their boardinghouses, restaurants, saloons, beauty shops, laundries, and clothing stores dotted the city's landscape. By the early twentieth century, however, technological advances, new preferences for name-brand goods, and competition from large-scale retailers constricted opportunities for women entrepreneurs at the same time that new opportunities for women with families drew them into other occupations. The author's analysis demonstrates that these businesswomen were intimately tied to the fortunes of the city over its first seventy years.