Charles Lindbergh was the quintessential Lone-Eagle American hero, the handsome, modest Midwesterner who was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. His record-setting flight took thirty-three hours and thirty minutes, making him the first person in history to be in New York one day and Paris the next - and propelling him to international fame. Lindbergh remains a compelling figure today, admired for his epic flight, the grace and power of his prize-winning prose, and his environm...

As Allied commander during World War II and later as president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower gave America the strength of a great reputation, a fine character, and an abiding sense of mission. He also provided Americans the chance to live up to their best. Few presidents have ever given more. Here, from the eminent historian Kenneth S. Davis, is Eisenhower's remarkable story with recollections from the men who knew him best - Milton S. Eisenhower, Edgar Eisenhower, General Mark W...

Here, six eminent biographers explain the pleasures and problems of their craft of reconstructing other people's lives. The result is a book rich in anecdote and in surprising new information about a variety of famous Americans. David McCullough takes us along on the exhilarating journey to Missouri to find "The Unexpected Harry Truman." Richard B. Sewall describes his twenty-year search for the elusive poet, Emily Dickinson. Paul C. Nagel tells us about "The Adams Women" - four generation...

John F. Kennedy glimmers through history as the young, idealistic president whose Camelot administration promised a new dawn for America. He did a great deal in his 1,000-day presidency, from embracing civil rights and starting the Peace Corps to negotiating a nuclear test ban and facing down the Soviets on the brink of nuclear war. But fifty years after he was murdered, it's hard to separate the real JFK, with all his faults, from the many myths about him. This is his story - and why he m...

We remember Thomas Alva Edison as the craggy, rumpled inventor of the light bulb and the phonograph - a prodigy, the affable "Wizard of Menlo Park." But he also was a visionary entrepreneur who changed the world. What Edison invented was the modern age. Here is his unforgettable story.

". . . rarely have inventor and invention been better served than in this book." New York Times Book Review. Here, Edwin Grosvenor, American Heritage's publisher and Bell's great-grandson, tells the dramatic story of the race to invent the telephone and how Bell's patent for it would become the most valuable ever issued. He also writes of Bell's other extraordinary inventions: the first transmission of sound over light waves, metal detector, first practical phonograph, and early airplanes,...

Christopher Columbus did more than discover a new world. He changed the Old World. Through his adventures, he launched Europe's most powerful nations into an era of exploration and colonization - and, in the process, touched off a brutal period of genocide and slavery that would continue for centuries. But while we all think we know everything we need to know about Columbus, he remains an enigmatic figure. Only scholars are familiar with some parts of his remarkable life. Here, from histor...

It is no exaggeration to say that Margaret Thatcher remade Britain in her own image. She deregulated industry, brought the unions to their knees, privatized state-owned enterprises, waged war to defend the Falkland Islands, and teamed up with Ronald Reagan to win the Cold War. Her courage was remarkable and her character larger than life. She was a woman who brooked no fools, and her tongue could be rapier sharp. Here is the inspiring story of Britain's first and only woman prime minister....

The relationship between Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton is like that of two complementary stages of a rocket. Galileo, the argumentative "wrangler" who demanded that the universe be examined through a telescope rather than by means of a philosophy book, provided the first liftoff, and Newton, the secretive mathematician who searched among his notes to find a mislaid proof for universal gravitation, put the world into orbit. Here, from award-winning journalist William Bixby, are their sto...

Letters from Amelia began with the discovery of four neglected cardboard boxes in an attic in Berkeley, California. Inside were more than 100 revealing letters the legendary pilot wrote to her beloved mother. The first was a four-year-old's thank-you note. The last, three short lines, was written just prior to her final 1937 flight when she vanished into a Pacific mist of conjecture. Fitted together, they portray the evolution to adulthood of a warm, sensible, fun-loving tomboy who would b...

He was one of America's greatest presidents and certainly our most colorful. Theodore Roosevelt, known to all but his friends as Teddy, was born a sickly child but transformed himself into an outdoorsman, a cowboy, and a warrior who led his Rough Riders up the San Juan Heights of Cuba in a charge that still ranks among the world's military legends. But Roosevelt was also a man of letters who churned out some forty books, a gifted politician who charmed the nation, and a statesman who could...

". . . the greatest war of all time told as it is best told - by the people who lived it." - The Washington Post. All first-person accounts of great events have their own fascination, but the editors of American Heritage have discovered that people writing about World War II seem to tell their own story with particular passion and eloquence. That is one reason American Heritage has published so many of them - and why noted military historian Stephen W. Sears has selected the most compellin...