A patriot by birth, John Quincy Adams's destiny was foreordained. He was not only "The Greatest Traveler of His Age," but his country's most gifted linguist and most experienced diplomat. John Quincy's world encompassed the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the early and late Napoleonic Age. As his diplomat father's adolescent clerk and secretary, he met everyone who was anyone in Europe, including America's own luminaries Franklin and Jefferson. All this made coming back to America a great challenge. But though he was determined to make his own career he was soon embarked, as Washington's appointment, on his phenomenal work abroad, as well as on a deeply troubled though loving and enduring marriage. But through all the emotional turmoil, he dedicated his life to serving his country. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams is the definitive biography of the formative years of one of the most fascinating and towering early Americans.

Wife of one president and mother of another, Abigail Adams was an extraordinary woman living at an extraordinary time in American history. A tireless letter writer and diarist, her penetrating and often caustic impressions of most of the major persons of her day--including Ben Franklin, George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and King George III, among others--provide one of the best first-hand accounts of the American Revolution. This biography, researched and written over a fourteen-year period, is a fascinating portrait of a brilliant woman at the center of the founding of the American republic.