No fight for civil liberties ever stays won, wrote Roger Baldwin (1884-1981) in 1971. He was in a position to know. After working hard to preserve the right of Americans to free expression during World War I, he founded the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. The ACLU quickly became, and remains to this day, the staunchest defender of American civil liberties. Woody Klein has selected from Baldwin's vast writings those essays that are most pertinent to the civil liberties debate today. In each chapter these writings focus on a particular theme, such as national security or invasion of...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian recounts the tale of the unwanted president who ran afoul of Congress over Reconstruction and was nearly removed from office

Andrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office.

Johnson faced a nearly impossible task--to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds after the Civil War, and to work with a Congress controlled by the so-called Radical Republicans. Annette...

The judicious statesman who won victories abroad but suffered defeat at home, whose wisdom and demeanor served America well at a critical time

George Bush was a throwback to a different era. A patrician figure not known for eloquence, Bush dismissed ideology as "the vision thing." Yet, as Timothy Naftali argues, no one of his generation was better prepared for the challenges facing the United States as the Cold War ended. Bush wisely encouraged the liberalization of the Soviet system and skillfully orchestrated the reunification of Germany. And following Iraq's invasion of...