Dear Mr. President: Letters to the Oval Office from the Files of the National Archives

This carefully selected collection of letters, spanning from the earliest days of the Republic to the present, were pulled from the extensive holdings of the National Archives. Archivists searched through hundreds of letters held throughout their network, which includes all of the Presidential libraries. Dear Mr. President reproduces 75 letters from everyday citizens and some quite famous people: John Glenn, Elvis Presley, Walt Disney, Ho Chi Minh, Nikita Kruschev, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, Robert Kennedy, and many more.

An introduction by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams and essays by Dwight Young illuminate and expand the tenor of the times in which the letters were written. Full-size facsimiles of the letters are reproduced with transcripts of the text for easy reading, and letters are grouped thematically: Civil rights, the cold war, physical fitness, joblessness, World War II, the space race, western expansion, among many other topics.

Dear Mr. President is a charming walk through American history through the eyes of ordinary and extraordinary people writing to their President.

Dwight Young has been actively involved in historic preservation for almost 30 years. He joined the staff of the National Trust in 1977, and moved to Trust headquarters in Washington in 1992. He is the author of Alternatives to Sprawl,and Saving America's Treasures. He is best known as author of the "Back Page" feature in Preservation magazine. In 2003, the National Trust published a collection of these essays titled Road Trips Through History.

Brian Williams became the anchor of NBC Nightly News in 2004, taking over for Tom Brokaw, the first such announced change in major network news anchors in two decades. He was the NBC News Chief White House correspondent, and was the anchor and managing editor of the Saturday edition of NBC Nightly News for six years. Williams has been awarded three Emmys, and in over 20 years of broadcasting, Williams has reported from 23 countries on countless stories of national and international importance.