The American Past

Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody of Salem lived their lives in a splendid period of splendid personalities, among which they moved with vigor, charm and brilliance. The great New England names of the middle of the century -- Horace Mann, Emerson, Channing, Hawthorne, Melville - were the names of husband and friend, mentor and neighbor of the three sisters. Sophia, the artist, married Nathaniel Hawthorne, here is the Hawthorne love story for the first time. Elizabeth and Mary charmed Horace Mann, but it was Mary he married. Emerson was Elizabeth's friend, Alcott her adversary till the passing years and Elizabeth's greatness of heart overcame him. From girlhood the sisters had to make ends meet financially, and they did it by rolling up the parlor rug and teaching little children. Elizabeth at the age of four had resolved to spend her leisure in reading; Mary, school out, liked to play, or to sing; Sophia, brought up by a mother who decided she was an "invalid," only after her marriage was allowed to become the happy, normal girl she really was. The artists Elizabeth brought to meet Sophia were impressed with her talent, and she did her share to help Lizzie work for her independence by copying oil paintings for Boston parlors, though she longed to create her own landscapes. Elizabeth Peabody, who ran a one-woman publishing house, and wrote transcendentalist

Biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes who became a Supreme Court Justice, with information on several generations of ancestors and descendants.

The greatest political story ever told-the epic clash between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, as captured in Theodore White's dramatic and groundbreaking chronicleThe Making of the President 1960 is the book that revolutionized-even created-modern political journalism. Granted intimate access to all parties involved, Theodore White crafted an almost mythic story of the battle that pitted Senator John F. Kennedy against Vice-President Richard M. Nixon-from the decisive primary battles to the history-making televised debates, the first of their kind. Magnificently detailed and exquisitely paced, The Making of the President 1960 imbues the nation's presidential election process with both grittiness and grandeur, and established a benchmark against which all new campaign reporters would measure their work. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction-and the first entry in White's influential four-volume "narrative history of American politics in action"-this classic account remains the keystone of American political journalism.