Thank you for not smoking ... It was called the “coffin nail,” the “little white slaver,” the “little white hearse plume"—and as early as 1923 you could be arrested for smoking it in public in some states. It was the cigarette, and beginning more than eighty years before the Surgeon General issued his warning against smoking in 1964, it was the target of a national crusade whose vehemence rivaled that of the Prohibitionists.

By chaos out of dream . . . Pulitzer prize - winning novelist and historian Wallace Stegner explores the exploration of America—from Columbus to John Wesley Powell, from the uses of myth to the continuing quest of a nation in search of its deepest meanings.

The foibles and furies of Parson Weems . . . What did the story of George Washington and the cherry tree really mean? Carry Wills offers a surprising answer.

The love letters of Abraham Lincoln ... Discovered in 1928, they confirmed, once and for all, the shadowy, tragic romance between Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge. Or did they? Don E. Fehrenbacher, winner of the 1979 Pulitzer prize for history, recounts one of the greatest literary detective stories of the twentieth century.

Plus ... Dog days on the overland trails; John Lukacs on Owen Wister; Paul Lancaster on Ernie PyIe; the first authentically dated photographic portrait; and much more, lavishly illustrated.