Winston S. Churchill, Churchill's grandson and the son of Randolph Churchill and Pamela Harriman, has lovingly brought together and connected the American material in the series so that it hangs together with a strong binding energy as a marvelous whole, ripe for discovery by a new generation of Americans. Churchill embarks from the discovery of America by Europe in the Age of Discovery; reckons with the rise and growth of the American colonies their increasing division from England, and their involvement in the French-and-Indian War; and recreates the personalities and events of the Revolutionary War in stirring fashion. He brilliantly explains the rise of the American Constitution and places it in the context of the heritage of British Common Law and the Parliamentary System out of which it emerged. He follows the growing pains of the new nation, including the War of 1812, and then increasing factional strife over westward expansion, industrialization and the slavery question. He recreates the American Civil War with vivid accounts of battles and still-unsurpassed portraits of the major figures, North and South, in one of themost stirring and profound short histories of the conflict ever written. He follows America through its painful Reconstruction, Westward expansion to the Pacific, and swelling economic might; and finally, he reckons with America's emergence as a preeminent power on the world stage in the days before World War I.