This is the enthralling story of the last hundred years in the life of the United States, and the story of the twentieth century. In this century America did not simply become the largest economic and military power, send man to the moon or jeans to Red Square, but sustained Western civilization by acts of courage, generosity and vision unparalled in the history of man. The twentieth century is the American century by the power of an idea - the idea of freedom. The award-winning editor and journalist Harold Evans documents and celebrates these epic years in a manner brilliantly suited to the richness of the age. It is a newsreel of our times, vivid in its images, swift and compelling in its language, immensely stimulating in its commentaries. More than 900 original photographs, cartoons and illustrations, illuminate and illustrate the central politically personalities and dramas, the triumph and the scandals. Here are the President, nineteen of them from a Civil War general to a movie star: muscle-flexing, idealistic, devious, smug, magnetic, saintly, brave and brilliant. Here are Al Capone and J. Edgar Hoover, Martin Luther King and the Ku Klux Klan. Here is America at peace in the twenties and at war with itself in the sixties.