United States Presidents

History remembers John Adams as a Founding Father and our country’s second president. But in the tense years before the American Revolution, he was still just a lawyer, fighting for justice in one of the most explosive murder trials of the era. On the night of March 5, 1770, shots were fired by British soldiers on the streets of Boston, killing five civilians. The Boston Massacre has often been called the first shots of the American Revolution.

Here's what we now know: John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by Mafia contract killers hired by Louisiana mob boss Carlos Marcello. Kennedy was killed in that city because it was the only place in the country where a crime of that magnitude could be committed without fear of punishment. Long-time local district attorney Henry Wade, an LBJ crony who would have sole jurisdiction over the prosecution of those responsible, had been corrupted by the local Civello crime family. Lyndon B. Johnson, while a U.S. senator during the 1950s, had accepted bribes from the same mobsters so that they could avoid deportation.

Taking place during the most critical period of our nation’s birth, The First Conspiracy tells a remarkable and previously untold piece of American history that not only reveals George Washington’s character, but also illuminates the origins of America’s counterintelligence movement that led to the modern day CIA. In 1776, an elite group of soldiers were handpicked to serve as George Washington’s bodyguards. Washington trusted them; relied on them. But unbeknownst to Washington, some of them were part of a treasonous plan.

No American president has been more enthusiastic in appreciating the wilderness and in conserving our nation’s natural treasures than Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). And no other president wrote more about nature and his explorations of it than T. R., in scattered books, such as African Wilderness, and in his countless letters, including those collected in The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt).

In this autobiography, Jimmy Carter details the youth and experiences that led him to seek the highest office in the land. He describes his idyllic childhood, his naval career, his strong Christian underpinnings, and the values of his mother and father.

This audiobook exists at the tense intersection of the conflict between politics and prophecy - of whether we embrace political resolution or moral redemption to fix our fractured racial landscape.

This collection includes all the major speeches from President John F. Kennedy's Presidency (1961-63) in his own voice. Speeches are digitally remastered to achieve crystal clear sound. Speeches include the famous "City Upon a Hill" speech, the "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, and the announcement of the goal of sending a person to the moon. Key speeches such as State of the Unions and addresses to the United Nations are also included. As well as speeches on key events that include the Berlin Crisis, the nuclear test ban treaty, and the Cuba Crisis.

Today the United States is the world’s great super­power, and yet we also wrestle with the government Franklin and Washington created more than two centuries ago - the power of the executive branch, the principle of checks and balances, the electoral college - as well as the wounds of their compromise over slavery. Now, as the founding institutions appear under new stress, it is time to understand their origins through the fresh lens of Larson’s Franklin & Washington, a major addition to the literature of the founding era.

"In December 1776, a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins a dazzling narrative account of Benjamin Franklin's French mission, the most exacting, and momentous, eight years of his life.

When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation's capital. In setting up his household, he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary, and eight slaves, including Ona Judge, about which little has been written. As he grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn't get his arms around: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Washington decided to circumvent the law.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy's champion, was an aristocratic Southern slave owner while Adams, the overachiever from New England's rising middling classes, painfully aware he was no aristocrat, was a skeptic about popular rule and a defender of a more elitist view of government.

The UFO enigma has been part of our culture since the 1940s and is building to a worldwide explosion of acceptance today. Now, as governments around the world open their files and records on internal UFO investigations, the US remains steadfast in its denial of interest in the UFO issue. As more of the world's population accepts the possibility of an extraterrestrial presence, the demand is building for disclosure from the United States.

John's mission takes him to his boyhood home of New York City and then into the executive mansion in Washington, DC. Crudder learns the president wants him to find the people responsible for the most devastating financial crisis the country has ever faced. John finds these enemies of the country are also personal enemies of his. And they hurt one of the people most important to him.

World War II loomed over the twentieth century, transforming every level of American society and international relationships and searing itself onto the psyche of an entire generation, including that of seven American presidents: John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. In Presidents at War, bestselling author of America's Reluctant Prince Steven Gillon examines what these men took away from the war and how they then applied it to Cold War policies that proceeded to change America, and the world, forever.

Washington's rise constitutes one of the greatest self-reinventions in history. In his mid-20s, this third son of a modest Virginia planter had ruined his own military career thanks to an outrageous ego. But by his mid-40s, that headstrong, unwise young man had evolved into an unassailable leader chosen as the commander in chief of the fledgling Continental Army. By his mid-50s, he was unanimously elected the nation's first president. How did Washington emerge from the wilderness to become the central founder of the United States of America?

What made FDR a more successful leader during the Depression crisis than Hoover? Why was Eisenhower more effective as supreme commander during World War II than he was as president? Why was Grant one of the best presidents of his day, if not in all of American history? What drove Bobby Kennedy into the scrum of electoral politics? Find the surprising and revelatory answers to these questions and more in this collection of new essays by great historians.

For all the talk of the Civil War "pitting brother against brother", until now there has never been a single book that traces the story of one family ravaged by that conflict. And no family could better illustrate the personal toll the war took than Lincoln's own. Mary Todd Lincoln was one of 14 siblings who were split between the Confederacy and the Union. Three of her brothers fought, and two died, for the South.

As the 2012 presidential campaign begins: Profiles of 12 men who have run for the presidency and lost, but who, even in defeat, have had a greater impact on American history than many of those who have served as president - from Henry Clay to Stephen Douglas, William Jennings Bryan to Al Gore - Plus, mini-profiles on 22 "honorable mentions."

Kennedy family biographer Christopher Andersen makes The Day John Died available for the first time as an ebook. Andersen draws on important sources - many talking here for the first time - to recreate in vivid and startling detail the events leading up to that fateful night off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. An inspiring, sympathetic, and compelling look at one of the most remarkable young men of our time, The Day John Died is more than just the definitive biography of JFK Jr. It is a bittersweet saga of triumph, love, loss, fate - and promise unfulfilled.

Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an 1853 novel by the author and playwright William Wells Brown. Set in the early 19th century, it is the story of Clotel and her sister Althesa, who are fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson. It is considered the first novel published by an African American and explores the destructive effects of slavery on African American families, the difficult lives of mixed-race people, and the degraded and immoral condition of the relationship between master and slave.