Why on earth should the nail-by-nail building of a house hold any fascination for anyone? Because when you put a lawyer, an architect, and a hippie builder together, that spells trouble. Kidder tells his story so well that you can't help but take sides.

John Ransom was a young Union soldier when he was captured by Confederate forces and taken to Andersonville, the worst of the brutal Civil War prison camps. Insightful, adventurous, and powerful, his diary preserves a rare portrait of the harsh life of the Confederate prisons. Yet it also sings with the hope of a man who loves life and manages to keep his sense of humor and compassion even as he suffers.

In 1846, a young Harvard graduate named Francis Parkman set out to explore life in the uncivilized West. With his friend Quincy Adams Shaw, he traveled up the Oregon Trail to the camps of the Pawnee and the Sioux. Parkman's journal is an authentic record of life on the trail, an exciting eyewitness account of the Mormons and outlaws, trappers and Native Americans, pioneers and adventurers who tried to conquer the frontier.

"From the poverty and obscurity in which I was born I have raised myself up." In his own words Benjamin Franklin steps off the pages of history, brimming with candor, bright ideas, and common sense, and with something of an eye for the ladies.

Words of Wisdom from America's shrewdest observer of mankind and its ways. Includes: Choice of a Mistres; Reflections on Love and Marriage; Treaty with a Lady Polly Baker; Ephemera; Apology for Printers; Politeness of Savages; On Wine; Emigrants; Cold Air Baths

He was a publisher, printer, scientist and inventor, but Ben Franklin's greatest success lay in his work as a diplomat. In this unique recording of his account of his experiences as a spokesman for the Colonies, we listen in on the secret political transactions and undercover dealings of colonial America, filtered through Franklin's inimitable wit.

"Behold! Human beings living in an underground den. Like ourselves, they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave." With that statement, Plato - one of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind - introduces one of his of most important philosophical constructs: the relationship between truth and the image of truth.

The unnamed narrator of Henry James' novella is an editor and literary critic obsessed with the life and work of Jeffrey Aspern, a long-deceased American poet, who died at an appropriately Romantic and tragic young age. No one is going to prevent him from bringing the secrets hidden in the paper to light for a curious public, least of all an old world spinster living out her last days in Venice, and her mousy young niece, Miss Tina. This cat-and-mouse game continues, detailed in James' ini...

"When my country, into which I had just set foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir," wrote Paine. This pamphlet, which he had published in 1776, put into print the word every man was thinking but no man dared say: Independence! It captured the imagination of the colonists as no other document had.