From Missouri to New York and back again, this work chronicles the amazing road trip of a former president and his wife and their amusing, failed attempts to keep a low profile.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 On January 20, 1953, President Harry Truman signed a letter to James A. Campbell, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the federal civil service system. He decried the recent reckless attacks on civil servants. #2 The inauguration of Dwight D. Eisenhower as president was a snub to Truman, who did not want to step foot inside the White House until he was the executive. Truman was furious, but he walked outside and greeted Eisenhower with all the fake warmth he could muster. #3 After a brief prayer, Eisenhower began his inaugural address. My fellow citizens, he intoned. The world and we have passed the midway point of a century of continuing challenge. We sense with all our faculties that forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history. #4 The 1944 Democratic National Convention in Chicago saw Vice President Henry Wallace removed from the ticket. Truman was chosen to replace him, and the Truman-Roosevelt ticket won the election in a landslide.

An extraordinary yet almost unknown chapter in American history is revealed in this extensively researched expose. On July 1, 1893, President Grover Cleveland boarded a friend's yacht and was not heard from for five days. During that time, a team of doctors removed a cancerous tumor from the president's palate along with much of his upper jaw. When an enterprising reporter named E. J. Edwards exposed the secret operation, Cleveland denied it and Edwards was consequently dismissed as a disgrace to journalism. Twenty-four years later, one of the president's doctors finally revealed the incredible truth, but many Americans simply would not believe it. After all, Grover Cleveland's political career was built upon honesty--his most memorable quote was "Tell the truth"--so it was nearly impossible to believe he was involved in such a brazen cover-up. This is the first full account of the disappearance of Grover Cleveland during that summer more than a century ago.

Strange as it sounds, during the 1870s and 1880s, America’s most popular spectator sport wasn’t baseball, football, or horseracing—it was competitive walking. Inside sold-out arenas, competitors walked around dirt tracks almost nonstop for six straight days (never on Sunday), risking their health and sanity to see who could walk the farthest—more than 500 miles. These walking matches were as talked about as the weather, the details reported in newspapers and telegraphed to fans from coast to coast. This long-forgotten sport, known as pedestrianism, spawned America’s first celebrity athletes and opened doors for immigrants, African Americans, and women. But along with the excitement came the inevitable scandals, charges of doping and insider gambling, and even a riot in 1879. Pedestrianism chronicles competitive walking’s peculiar appeal and popularity, its rapid demise, and its enduring influence.

An almost unknown chapter of sporting—and American—history Tracing the history of the National Football League during World War II, this book delves into the severe player shortage during the war which led to the merging of the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles, creating the “Steagles.” The team’s center was deaf in one ear, its wide receiver was blind in one eye (and partially blind in the other), and its halfback had bleeding ulcers. One player was so old he’d never before played football with a helmet. Yet somehow, this group of players—deemed unfit for military service due to age or physical ailment—posted a winning record in the league, to the surprise of players and fans alike. Digging into the history of the war paralleled by the unlikely story of the Steagles franchise, both sports fans and history buffs will learn about the cultural significance of this motley crew of ball players during a trying time in United States history.

President Harry Truman was a disappointment to the Democrats, and a godsend to the Republicans. Every attempt to paint Truman with the grace, charm, and grandeur of Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been a dismal failure: Truman's virtues were simpler, plainer, more direct. The challenges he faced--stirrings of civil rights and southern resentment at home, and communist aggression and brinkmanship abroad--could not have been more critical. By the summer of 1948 the prospects of a second term for Truman looked bleak. Newspapers and popular opinion nationwide had all but anointed as president Thomas Dewey, the Republican New York Governor. Truman could not even be certain of his own party's nomination: the Democrats, still in mourning for FDR, were deeply riven, with Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond leading breakaway Progressive and Dixiecrat factions. Finally, with ingenuity born of desperation, Truman's aides hit upon a plan: get the president in front of as many regular voters as possible, preferably in intimate settings, all across the country. To the surprise of everyone but Harry Truman, it worked. Whistle Stop is the first book of its kind: a micro-history of the summer and fall of 1948 when Truman took to the rails, crisscrossing the country from June right up to Election Day in November. The tour and the campaign culminated with the iconic image of a grinning, victorious Truman holding aloft the famous Chicago Tribune headline: "Dewey Defeats Truman."

In the winter of 1967-68, Robert F. Kennedy, then a US Senator from New York, ventured deep into the heart of Appalachia on what was dubbed a "poverty tour." He toured a strip mine, visited one-room schoolhouses and dilapidated homes, and held a public hearing in a ramshackle high school gymnasium. As acting chairman of a Senate subcommittee on poverty, RFK went to eastern Kentucky to gauge the progress of the War on Poverty. He was deeply disillusioned by what he found. Kennedy learned that job training programs were useless, welfare programs proved insufficient, and jobs were scarce and getting scarcer. Before he'd even left the state, Kennedy had determined the War on Poverty was a failure--and he blamed Lyndon Johnson. Robert Kennedy wasn't merely on a fact-finding mission, however; he was considering challenging Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination, but he needed support from rural white voters to win it. His trip to eastern Kentucky was an opportunity to test his antiwar and antipoverty message with hardscrabble whites. Kennedy encountered deep resentment in the mountains, and a special disdain for establishment politicians. "We can't eat your fancy promises," read a large banner that greeted Kennedy at one stop. A month after his visit, RFK officially announced he was challenging Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Four months after his visit, he was murdered. He was 42. All This Marvelous Potential meticulously retraces RFK's tour of eastern Kentucky, visiting the places he visited and meeting with the people he met with. The similarities between then and now are astonishing: vicious, divisive politics; bitter racial strife; economic uncertainty; environmental alarm. Author Matthew Algeo explains how and why the region has changed since Robert Kennedy visited the area in 1968; how and why it hasn't; and why it matters--immensely--for the rest of the country. Kennedy, for all his faults--and there were many--was a politician who gave people hope, and he was unafraid to stand up to a president from his own party.