Genevieve Stump Foster was born in Oswego, New York, on 13 April 1893. After the death of her father, John William Stump, in 1894, she moved with her mother, Jessie Starrin Stump, to the Starrin home in Whitewater, Wisconsin. Three years later her grandfather died, leaving Genevieve, her mother, grandmother, and an aunt to fill a twenty-odd-room house. Both her grandmother and this home, according to Foster, had a great influence on her. Growing up among the memories of the four generations who had inhabited the house gave her a sense of stability, of deep roots, and of a feeling for the continuity of past and present.

Foster would go on to establish her reputation as a creative craftswoman from the materials of history and her youth. That reputation has since afforded her international recognition in the fields of biography and history, especially the interpretation of American history in its relation...