Meet Sarah Polk, a Partner to the President
Historian Amy Greenberg reveals the first lady’s political power outside of the public’s eye as part of the In Pursuit essay series.
Historian Amy Greenberg was deep into researching the U.S.-Mexican War for her book A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico when another unexpected and mostly unknown historic figure kept cropping up—President James Polk’s wife, Sarah.
Fascinated, Greenberg set out to learn more about the first lady only to find that no other scholar had written about her.
“As a historian, this was exactly the kind of little mystery and challenge that I wanted to follow up on,” Greenberg tells East Wing Magazine in a recent phone interview. “The more I got into researching who Sarah Polk was, looking at her relationships with men, political men, looking at relationships with her family, I just got so excited about her.”
That drove Greenberg to write the very first scholarly biography about the former first lady, Lady First: The World of First Lady …
