A. G. (Albert Gallatin) Riddle

Born in Monson, Massachusetts, in 1816 and raised in Ohio, Albert Gallatin Riddle built an unusually varied career as a lawyer, journalist, politician, diplomat, and author. He served as prosecuting attorney in Geauga County, sat in the Ohio legislature, and represented Ohio in the U.S. House during the Civil War.

Alongside his public work, he wrote extensively. His books included fiction as well as memoir and historical writing, and he is especially remembered for Recollections of War Times, which drew on his direct experience of national politics in the 1860s. That mix of public life and literary work gives his writing an eyewitness quality that still makes it interesting.

Riddle died in Washington, D.C., in 1902. For listeners curious about nineteenth-century America, he offers more than one perspective at once: a practicing lawyer, an insider to wartime government, and a writer trying to make sense of a fast-changing country.