From a leading historian and Founding Fathers biographer comes a masterful treatment of a towering figure of America's formative years.

He fought for Washington, served with Lincoln, lived with Franklin, studied with Jefferson, dined with Lafayette and Wellington, walked with Russia's czar, and talked with Britain's king; he shook hands with Dickens, taught at Harvard, and was American minister to six countries; he ended the War of 1812, freed the prisoners on the Amistad, served sixteen years in the House of Representatives, restored free speech in Congress, and led the antislavery movement -- and he was the sixth president of the United States.

A towering figure in the formative years of the American nation, John Quincy Adams was the only son of a Founding Father president to become president himself, and the first one to serve in Congress after his term. Pushed by his parents, John and Abigail Adams, to climb to the heights of their ambitions for him, John Quincy Adams surpassed their expectations -- not only as president of the United States but also as an ambassador, a powerful voice before the Supreme Court, a fearless secretary of state, a fighting congressman, and America's first champion of human rights.

A witness to sixty-five years of critical American history, John Quincy Adams bequeathed to the nation one of its greatest yet least known treasures -- his diary. Started when he was only ten, his eyewitness testament remains the most complete day-to-day historic record of events and life in the young nation, from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the eve of the Civil War. A sweeping panorama of American history from the Washington to Lincoln eras, Harlow Giles Unger's John Quincy Adams follows one of the key figures in American history.