David Rubel has made a career of bringing history alive for readers of all ages.

Recognized nationally as an author, speaker, and historian, David has written fifteen books and edited a dozen more during his twenty-five years in publishing. Most of these titles focus on making American history accessible to a broad audience. Working with many of the country’s finest historians—including Pulitzer Prize–winners Joseph J. Ellis and James M. McPherson and Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein—David has created enduring books that make first-rate scholarship understandable and compelling.

David’s most recent book, If I Had a Hammer: Building Homes and Hope with Habitat for Humanity, features a collaboration with President Jimmy Carter. Folk legend Pete Seeger, whose classic song gave the book its title, calls If I Had a Hammer “an inspiring book, telling how ideas starting on a little farm in Georgia have grown to a worldwide movement.”

Adults and children alike have embraced David’s work. The Indianapolis Star has called The Coming Free: The Struggle for African-American Equality “a magnificent accounting of the civil rights activism of blacks” with a visual presentation that is “stunning and memorable.” His children’s books The Scholastic Encyclopedia of the Presidents and Their Times and The Scholastic Atlas of the United States have both become grade-school standards, selling more than half a million copies each in multiple editions.

As the president of Agincourt Press, a book production company in Chatham, New York, David works with his wife and partner, Julia Rubel, to conceive and develop projects for numerous publishers. Some of these he writes himself; others, he edits. For all, he coordinates the text, image research, and graphic design so that the narratives leap off the page.

A 1983 graduate of Columbia University, where he was sports editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator, David began h