Spanning 350 years of American history and culture, a collection of more than two hundred letters, many never before published, reveals the personalities and feelings of Americans great and small, from Amelia Earhart to Elvis Presley to Malcolm X. Reprint.

In 1998, Andrew Carroll founded the Legacy Project, with the goal of remembering Americans who have served their nation and preserving their letters for posterity. Since then, over 50,000 letters have poured in from around the country. Nearly two hundred of them comprise this amazing collection -- including never-before-published letters that appear in the new afterword. Here are letters from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf war, Somalia, and Bosnia -- dramatic eyewitness accounts from the front lines, poignant expressions of love for family and country, insightful reflections on the nature of warfare. Amid the voices of common soldiers, marines, airmen, sailors, nurses, journalists, spies, and chaplains are letters by such legendary figures as Gen. William T. Sherman, Clara Barton, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernie Pyle, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Julia Child, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, and Gen. Benjamin O. Davis Sr. Collected in War Letters, they are an astonishing historical record, a powerful tribute to those who fought, and a celebration of the enduring power of letters.

In October 1947, two months after he became independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote the first of his fortnightly letters to the heads of the country’s provincial governments—a tradition he kept until a few months before his death. This carefully selected collection covers a range of themes and subjects, including citizenship, war and peace, law and order, governance and corruption, and India’s place in the world. The letters also cover momentous world events and the many crises the country faced during the first sixteen years after Independence. Visionary, wise and reflective, these letters are of great contemporary relevance for the guidance they provide for our current problems and predicaments.

A criticism of Christianity from the secularist point of view.

Writing in her native “Texlish,” Molly Ivins planted herself squarely in the tradition of plain-spoken and earthy American humor, the big river that runs from Mark Twain straight through to Will Rogers, Ring Lardner and George Carlin. Between 1982 and 2007, Ivins contributed seventeen consistently sharp and funny articles to The Nation, starting with what might be described as her “Letters From Texas,” in which she discussed political developments in the Lone Star State, whose zany politics were full of exotic people dubbed “The Gibber,” “The Breck Girl” and “Governor Goodhair.” Despite their humor, however, Ivins’s pieces always delivered trenchant political commentary. And she could also write highly accomplished and fascinating cultural essays and book reviews (such as “Ezra Pound in East Texas,” included in this eBook).

Like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, Jean Cocteau offers a powerful reminder to Americans of their own potential—and issues In 1949, Jean Cocteau spent twenty days in New York, and began composing on the plane ride home this essay filled with the vivid impressions of his trip. With his unmistakable prose and graceful wit, he compares and contrasts French and American culture: the different values they place on art, literature, liberty, psychology, and dreams. Cocteau sees the incredibly buoyant hopes in America’s promise, while at the same time warning of the many ills that the nation will have to confront—its hypocrisy, sexism, racism, and hegemonic aspirations—in order to realize this potential. Never before translated into English, Letter to the Americans remains as timely and urgent as when it was first published in France over seventy years ago.

Two series of letters described as "the wellsprings of nearly all ensuing debate on the limits of governmental power in the United States" address the whole remarkable range of issues provoked by the crisis of British policies in North America out of which a new nation emerged from an overreaching empire. Forrest McDonald is Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Alabama and author of States' Rights and the Union.

In his Philosophical Letters, Voltaire provides a pungent and often satirical assessment of the religion, politics, science, and arts of the England he observed during his nearly three-year exile. In addition to the Letters, this edition provides a translation of Voltaire's Proposal for a Letter about the English, a general Introduction, chronology, notes, and bibliography.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The remarkable memoir of an ambitious young photojournalist who went off to war as a twenty-two-year-old girl—and came back, four years and many adventures later, a woman “Eloquent and well observed, not only about the memoirist, but about the world: war, death, photojournalism and, of course, the worldwide battle between the sexes.” —The Washington Post Book World In 1988, fresh out of Harvard, Deborah Copaken Kogan moved to Paris with a small backpack, a couple of cameras, the hubris of a superhero, and a strong thirst for danger. She wanted to see what a war would look like when seen from up close. Naïvely, she figured it would be easy to filter death through the prism of her wide-angle lens. She was dead wrong. Within weeks of arriving in Paris, after begging to be sent where the action was, Kogan found herself on the back of a truck in Afghanistan, her tiny frame veiled from head to toe, the only woman—and the only journalist—in a convoy of rebel freedom fighters. Kogan had not actually planned on shooting the Afghan war alone. However, the beguiling French photographer she’d entrusted with both her itinerary and her heart turned out to be as dangerously unpredictable as, well, a war. Kogan found herself running from one corner of the globe to another, each linked to the man she was involved with at the time. From Zimbabwe to Romania, from Russia to Haiti, Kogan takes her readers on a heartbreaking yet surprisingly hilarious journey through a mine-strewn decade, her personal battles against sexism, battery, and even rape blending seamlessly with the historical struggles of war, revolution, and unfathomable abuse it was her job to record. In the end, what was once adventurous to the girl began to weigh heavily on the woman. Though she had finally been accepted into photojournalism’s macho fraternity, her photographs splashed across the front pages of international newspapers and magazines, Kogan began to feel there was something more she was after. Ultimately, what she discovered in herself was a person—a woman—for whom life, not death, is the one true adventure to be cherished above all.