American Heritage: Great Minds of History

In a series of interviews that are as valuable as they are engrossing, today's best and brightest historians weigh in on the crucial moments in American history. In the book's casual forum, the legacies of history shine through with electric urgency as Roger Mudd's highly knowledgeable questions illuminate five truly first-rate minds: Stephen Ambrose, discussing the turbulent years between World War II and the world we inhabit today, eloquently underscores the immense achievement and consequence of D-day - "the pivot point of the twentieth century" - and candidly discusses history's complex assessments of Eisenhower and Nixon. David McCullough not only enlarges the traditional vision of the Industrial Era - that tumultuous epoch of brilliant lights and dark shadows that gave birth to the modern world - but goes beyond that to explain why he finds history intimate, compelling, and fresh: "There is no such thing as the past." James McPherson tells how his experience with the civil rights movement of the 1960s led to his career as a student of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and his examination of the ideology that drove the Confederacy enriches our understanding of how the bitter legacy of defeat has shaped events both North and South ever since. Richard White, discussing westward expansion, traces the evolution of how historians have viewed the American frontier, from a cherished national legend of intrepid pioneers taming an empty wilderness to a complex and often violent story of the melding of many different cultures. Gordon Wood takes our Revolution from its enshrinement as an inevitable civic event and shows what a chancy, desperate business it really was, along the way offeringcrisp, telling details about the very human Founding Fathers, and reminding us that, above all, the conflict was a sweeping social revolution whose consequences continue to remake the entire world.