Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin looks to past leaders for lessons on the present

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN LIVES SURROUNDED BY American history. Her home in Concord, Mass., is minutes from the site of one of the first battles of the American Revolution. The house itself, cool on a day that broke heat records in nearby Boston, is full of history too. What was once a three-car garage is now a library. Abraham Lincoln books are in there, and Franklin Roosevelt is nearby. The section on Theodore Roosevelt is upstairs. A small room with exercise bikes is devoted to memoir. Fiction has its place too. And at the end of one hallway, there’s a section that might surprise visitors to the home of one of the nation’s most famous historians: business and psychology books on leadership.

That section is new. These—and the papers in dozens of colorful three-ring binders