In this authoritative and engrossing full-scale biography, Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of Einstein and Steve Jobs, shows how the most fascinating of America's founders helped define our national character.
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us, the one who seems made of flesh rather than marble. In a sweeping narrative that follows Franklin's life from Boston to Philadelphia to London and Paris and...

Describes the life and notable accomplishments of the eighteenth-century American printer, statesman, writer, and inventor.

Profiles the intertwined lives of seven of America's founding fathers, including John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.

A biography of the noted statesman and inventor, featuring excerpts from his letters, pamphlets, essays, scientific papers, and autobiography.

Surveys the life of the American statesman, lawmaker, writer of the Federalist Papers, and first secretary of treasury under George Washington.

A series of studies of the men who came to be known as the Founding Fathers. Each life is considered in the round, but the thread that binds the work together is the idea of character as a lived reality for these men. For these were men, Wood shows, who took the matter of character very seriously. They were the first generation in history that was self-consciously self-made, men who considered the arc of lives, as of nations, as being one of moral...

"For the past three decades, Colin Powell has been among America's most trusted and admired leaders. This biography demonstrates that Powell's decades-long development as an exemplary subordinate is crucial to understanding his astonishing rise from a working-class immigrant neighborhood to the highest echelons of military and political power. Once an aimless, ambitionless teenager who barely graduated from college, Powell became an extraordinarily...

Collection of programs exploring the personalities, the battles, the bravery, the losses, and the romance of the early days of the United States. Founding fathers and Founding brothers examine the relationships of the men who risked their fortunes and lives for independence. The Revolution recounts the battles, losses, and victories. Ben Franklin and Benedict Arnold look at the roles played by both men, and Washington the warrior and The crossing...