Truman, whose presidency included momentous events from the atomic bombing of Japan to the outbreak of the Cold War and the Korean War, told by America’s beloved and distinguished historian.The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouri” who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.

    From his sickly childhood to charging up San Juan Hill to waving his fist under J.P. Morgan's rubicund nose, Theodore Roosevelt offers the intimate history of a man who continues to cast a magic spell over the American imagination.As the twenty-sixth president of the United States, from 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt embodied the overwheliming confidence of the nation as it entered the American Century. With fierce joy, he brandished a "Big Stick" abroad and promised a "Square Deal" at home. He was the nation's first environmental president, challenged the trusts, and, as the first American leader to play an important role in world affairs, began construction of a long-dreamed canal across Panama and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for almost singlehandedly bringing about a peaceful end to the Russo-Japanese War.In addition to following Roosevelt's political career, Theodore Roosevelt looks deeply into his personal relations to draw a three-dimensional portrait of a man who confronted life-wrenching tragedies as well as triumphs. It is biography at its most compelling.

    Drawing on extensive research, Ferling depicts a reluctant revolutionary, a leader who was deeply troubled by the warfare that he helped to make, and a fiercely independent statesman.

    It includes recreated images of Lincoln and his contemporaries from photographs, daguerreotypes, prints and cartoons of the day.

    government officials who lied about their fate for half-a-century, keeping a lid on the most disgraceful cover-up in American history. Soldiers of Misfortune reveals for the first time that top U.S. officials, from Roosevelt to Bush, made the determination to write off America's missing sons, secretly held hostage in the Soviet Union. In an explosive revelation, Colonel Philip Corso, an intelligence aide to President Dwight Eisenhower, revealed exclusively to the authors that the president personally made the decision to abandon hundreds, perhaps thousands, of U.S. POWs from the Korean War. More than six years ago, Jim Sanders began his lonely quest for the truth about American POWs "liberated" by Soviet troops in Germany and Eastern Europe near the end of World War II. Then Mark Sauter and R. Cort Kirkwood joined in the search - sifting through thousands of formerly classified documents, interviewing military brass and escapees from Russia, and evaluating chilling eyewitness accounts. As the authors neared the truth, top level Pentagon officials attempted to "neutralize" and silence them in a desperate attempt to bury the truth from the public. At the same time a newspaper office and Sanders's car were surreptitiously entered, his apartment ransacked and crucial documents stolen. A secret covenant of the 1945 Yalta agreement provided that the U.S. and Britain would return Soviet citizens residing in the West. In exchange, Stalin promised to return Western soldiers who had been liberated by the Red Army. After the war, American and British authorities breached that agreement by secretly permitting Soviets to remain in the West. Stalin learned about the deception and retaliated by holding 23,500 American and 30,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers captive in the vast Soviet gulag system. The authors trace the fate of Ameri

    The collection includes Gilbert Stuart, Albert Bierstadt, Charles Bird King, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, and Georgia O'Keeffe. First released in 1992 and updated in 2008, this third edition contains a supplement detailing acquisitions in the last ten years by America’s most famous modern painters, such as Roy Lichtenstein, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alma Thomas. This award-winning volume, lavishly illustrated, presents short essays by the art historian William Kloss on a selection of more than 100 works and extended essays on the collection itself by the art historians John Wilmerding, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry as well as a catalog compiled by the White House Office of the Curator.The collection of fine art at the White House belongs to the nation but, like the house itself, serves a domestic, even personal, purpose, for each first family. The collection began with mostly presidential portraits, commissioned or purchased by Congress, or donated by presidential families. In the era before photography, some early presidents invited painters to set up studios in the White House to record significant events. In the late nineteenth century a few landscape paintings were acquired for the White House, but not until the Kennedy administration was the collection formally and permanently established. Since that time it has grown exponentially, under the guidance of a professional curatorial staff and it now includes more than 500 works of chiefly American art, selected for their value as historical documents and their importance in reflecting the nation’s values and achievements.Visitors to the White House see only a small selection from the collection on the walls at any one time. With this authoritative catalog, now completely up to date, all Americans can appreciate this distinctive collection that honors the nation’s rich artistic and political heritage.Journalist Hugh Sidey wrote, "The White House is its own canvas, never completed nor meat to be, but a changing portrait of America . . . our book is an eclectic assembly, including paintings, drawings, and sculpture, another chapter in the great American story that will be displayed and sheltered within the White House; a constant reminder to all who walk therein of where we have been and where we are going."