John Adams, a war hero and high tech pioneer who is near death, attempts to use the fortune he has accumulated to set up a new kind of college to train virtuous and disinterested leaders.
Amanda Bahringer, a bright, impressionable student at a prestigious boarding school, struggles to measure up to everyone's demands, from her mother to her instructors, as she tries to gain the credentials needed for admission to Dartmouth.
The author presents a political biography on the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant and his attempts to reunite the Union after a bitter war and near impeachment of his predecessor and maintains that history has unjustly portrayed Grant's term in office as ineffective and corrupt.