Just who was John Philip Sousa?

This intimate portrait brings Sousa to Life—who he was, why he was driven to succeed, his love of country—and explores his life and times through hundreds of photos, cartoons, short stories, news clippings, quotes, sheet music covers, and magazine ads collected in family scrapbooks, the Sousa Archive in the Library of Congress, and the U.S. Marines archives.

This book reveals a quintessentially American story: It is the story of being born to poor immigrant ...