Abraham Lincoln once remarked that "the strength of a nation lies in the homes of its people." Author Elizabeth Smith Brownstein, former Director of Research for the Emmy Award-winning series "Smithsonian World," proves him right and gives new meaning to the old saying "If these walls could talk..." In this book they do, and the stories they tell are fascinating. The result of an intensive nationwide search that took the author across deserts and plains, into ghost towns, legendary mansions, and secret compartments, "If This House Could Talk."..opens the doors to some of America's most significant, surprising houses and to the lives of the extraordinary men and women whose stories they tell: from the only house in America with a throne room, where a doomed monarch ruled for just two years, to a beloved poet's simple New Hampshire farm; from a rare and remote plantation complex built by America's greatest architect to the multicolored mansion of an Indian chief; from the house of an innocent victim, of the Salem witch trials in 1692 to the only house our greatest president ever owned. What stories lie hidden behind the gleamin