I'm reading Patrick O'Brien's series of novels about Jack Aubrey, Stephen Maturin and the Napoleonic Wars; I just finished "The Mauritius Command" and am getting stuck into "Desolation Island". Fifteen more to go!

Ellenpoly, you might start on your American presidents research project with Carl Sandberg's biography of Abraham Lincoln, written in the 1930s, and the recent (2003) biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt by Conrad Black.