This work examines the year 1898 as the crucial precursor year to the twentieth century, The American Century. It covers the war in Spain; the acquisition of territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific; Theodore Roosevelt; and numerous other personalities who were part of the times.

Just as essential to Theodore Roosevelt's accession to the Presidency as his charge up San Juan Hill was his election as Governor of New York four months later. A defeat would have seriously set back and perhaps even destroyed his chances to gain the White House. Yet, until A Rough Ride to Albany, no book has devoted itself primarily to that hard-fought uphill campaign, which he barely won only after a series of energetic whistle stoptours, and in which he displayed for the first time a unique power to stir audiences that has rarely been seen in American politics. The book also describes how...

As historian James McPherson has written in endorsing this book: "The first political confrontation between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas occurred not in the famous debates of 1858" but four years earlier. This book is the first complete account of those 1854 debates. As that year dawned, Lincoln's political future looked dim. His single term in the House of Representatives six years earlier seemed to have marked both the beginning and the end of his national political career. But the unexpected repeal of the Missouri Compromise's prohibition of slavery in the western territories...