See photos for condition details. Slip cover in good condition with no notable flaws. Book itself has a small green stain on the front and a bit of wear.

Really cool book/gift for American history enthusiasts and collectors about George Washington’s life and accomplishments with full color photos and images.

EDITOR

Richard M. Ketchum

ART DIRECTOR

Murray Belsky

MANAGING EDITOR

Brenda Bennerup

PICTURE EDITOR

Maureen Dwyer

AMERICAN HERITAGE PUBLISHING CO., INC.

To a majority of his contemporaries, George Washington must have seemed the towering figure of his time. He was, to begin, an authentic frontier hero to a people for whom the wilderness and the menace it held were very real and present facts of life. As the military commander who led the new nation to victory, Washington - more than any other individual - personified the rebellion against British imperial authority. And in the aftermath of that triumph, he was the only conceivable choice to be the first Chief Executive of the republic.

Yet we may wonder how many of his countrymen ever caught a glimpse of him in the flesh - how many of them heard him utter a word. Only a relative handful, of course, and all too often those who did were so awed by the presence that their recorded impressions add little or nothing to our knowledge of Washington the human being. Possibly the worst disservice done him was by the mythmakers who, in the wake of his death, determined to make an unimpeachable, godlike figure of him - majestic and remote. In fact, Washington in later life was a rather distant and very private person, not given to revealing much of himself, and the result - as the historian Marcus Cunliffe has suggested, was that it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between Washington the man and Washington the monument.

It may be that the illustrations in this volume will bring us closer to terms with George Washington. Not since his death has an effort been made to portray the man and the world he knew entirely through paintings, drawings, prints, and the incunabula of the eighteenth century. So far as can be determined, every illustration reproduced here was made during the lifetime of George Washington or earlier; individually and collectively they reflect the stage upon which he walked, as seen through the eyes of contemporaries.

Their chief virtue is less one of artistry than that of revealing the man and his century in terms familiar to him.