Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation's Leaders

Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip

Matthew Algeo · 262 pages

From Missouri to New York and back again, this recounting of an amazing journey chronicles the road trip of a former president and his wife and their amusing, failed attempts to keep a low profile. Diners, bellhops, and cabbies shouted out “Hiya, Harry!” whenever they recognized the former president, and, out for his daily constitutional on the streets of New York, Harry even stumbled into the sid

Assassination Vacation

Sarah Vowell

A tour of key historic sites in America where incidents of political violence have occurred reveals lesser-known points of interest pertaining to each and shares information about how history has been shaped by popular culture and tourism.

How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country

Daniel O'Brien · 254 pages

"Make no mistake: Our founding fathers were more bandanas-and-muscles than powdered-wigs-and-tea. As a prisoner of war, Andrew Jackson walked several miles barefoot across state lines while suffering from smallpox and a serious head wound received when he refused to polish the boots of the soldiers who had taken him captive. He was thirteen years old. A few decades later, he became the first popul

Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Robert F. Kennedy

The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War

H.W. Brands · 480 pages

"From master storyteller and historian H.W. Brands, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, comes the riveting story of how President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur squared off to decide America's future in the aftermath of World War II. At the height of the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman committed a gaffe that sent shock waves around the world. When asked by a reporter about t

The Making of the President 1968

Theodore H. White · 459 pages

Two Miserable Presidents: Everything Your Schoolbooks Didn't Tell You About the Civil War

Steve Sheinkin · 265 pages

Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan

Del Quentin Wilber · 305 pages

On March 30, 1981, after giving a lunchtime speech, President Ronald Reagan walked out of a hotel in Washington, D.C., and heard gunfire. Hustled into his limousine, Reagan didn't immediately realize that he had been injured. But soon he -- and the world -- learned that he had been shot and badly wounded. For years, few people knew the truth about how close the president came to dying, and no one

Kennedy's Last Days: The Assassination That Defined a Generation

Bill O'Reilly · 335 pages

A historical narrative of the events surrounding the death of the 35th president is set against the backdrop of an escalating Cold War and describes the many political challenges Kennedy was facing before his assassination, in an account that also describes Lee Harvey Oswald's story and the events surrounding his death. Adapted from the historical thriller KILLING KENNEDY, this book provides, thr

His Excellency: George Washington

Joseph J. Ellis · 352 pages

The author of seven highly acclaimed books, Joseph J. Ellis has crafted a landmark biography that brings to life in all his complexity the most important and perhaps least understood figure in American history, George Washington. With his careful attention to detail and his lyrical prose, Ellis has set a new standard for biography.Drawing from the newly catalogued Washington papers at the Universi

Colonel Roosevelt

Edmund Morris · 775 pages

This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize -- and National Book Award -- winning author of The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Rex, marks the completion of a trilogy sure to stand as definitive. Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third politic

The Path to Power

Robert A. Caro · 882 pages

Traces Johnson's life from his Texas childhood through his rise to political power and his successful 1948 senatorial campaign.

The Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln · 32 pages

The most famous speech in American history. President Lincoln gave this very brief one-page address at the dedication of the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg, PA on November 19, 1863, four months after the battle. This publication contains the final speech and a transcription of one of the several known early drafts.

Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship

Jon Meacham · 518 pages

The President and the Assassin: McKinley, Terror, and Empire at the Dawn of the American Century

Scott Miller · 422 pages

The era leading up to the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 was defined by enormous expansion in American industry and muscle-flexing abroad as well as the potent rise of labor unrest and revolutionary ideas such as anarchy. The growth of railroads, steel output, consumer goods, patents and sheer American ingenuity enriched the captains of industry, while the laborers, assembly-l

The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War

Daniel Stashower · 368 pages

In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a "clear and fully matured" threat of assassination as he traveled by train from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Over a period of thirteen days the legendary detective Allan Pinkerton worked feverishly to detect and thwart the plot, assisted by a captivating young widow named Kate Warne, America'

Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy

Vincent Bugliosi · 1,632 pages

Polls reveal that over 75 percent of Americans believe there was a conspiracy behind Lee Harvey Oswald; some even believe Oswald was entirely innocent. In this absorbing and historic book--the first ever to cover the entire case--Vincent Bugliosi shows how we have come to believe such lies about an event that changed the course of history. Bugliosi is perhaps the only man in America capable of "pr

Whistlestop: My Favorite Stories from Presidential Campaign History

John Dickerson · 439 pages

"Whistlestop tells the human story of nervous gambits hatched in first-floor hotel rooms, failures of will before the microphone, and the cross-country crack-ups of long-planned stratagems. At the bar at the end of a campaign day, these are the stories reporters rehash for themselves and embellish for newcomers. In addition to the familiar tales, Whistlestop ... is a ride through the American camp

The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941–1942

Nigel Hamilton

The Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House

Laton McCartney · 351 pages

Mix hundreds of millions of dollars in petroleum reserves; rapacious oil barons and crooked politicians; under-the-table payoffs; murder, suicide, and blackmail; White House cronyism; and the excesses of the Jazz Age. The result: the granddaddy of all American political scandals, Teapot Dome.In The Teapot Dome Scandal, acclaimed author Laton McCartney tells the amazing, complex, and at times ribal

In the Shadow of Liberty: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives

Kenneth C. Davis · 295 pages

Here are the stories of five enslaved people who witnessed the birth of America: Billy Lee, valet to George Washington; Ona Judge, who escaped from Martha Washington; Isaac Granger, servant of Thomas Jefferson; Paul Jennings, who witnessed the War of 1812 in James Madison's White House; and Alfred Jackson, "owned" by Andrew Jackson. These true stories explore our country's great, tragic contradict

1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History

Charles Bracelen Flood · 521 pages

Historian-biographer Charles Bracelen Flood brings to life the drama of Lincoln's final year, in which he oversaw the last campaigns of the Civil War, was reelected as president, and laid out his majestic vision for the nation's future in a reunified South and in the expanding West. In that crucial year, the Civil War was far from won: as the year began, Lincoln had yet to appoint Ulysses S. Grant

Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot

Bill O'Reilly, Martin Dugard · 325 pages

In January 1961, as the Cold War escalates, John F. Kennedy struggles to contain the growth of Communism while he learns the hardships, solitude, and temptations of what it means to be president of the United States. Along the way he acquires a number of formidable enemies, among them Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, and Alan Dulles, director of the Central Intelligenc

Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America

Chris Matthews · 400 pages