The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced --- in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some 75 newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames. This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons --- a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own.

Rose Pastor arrived in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia. Two years later, she swept headlines when she married James Graham Phelps Stokes, scion of New York high society. Together, this unusual couple moved among the liveliest group of Socialist activists and dreamers this country has ever seen, including Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs, Margaret Sanger and W.E.B. Du Bois. Rose stirred audiences to tears, led labor strikes, and distributed birth control information alongside the country’s earliest feminists. President Woodrow Wilson called her “one of the dangerous influences of the country.” REBEL CINDERELLA unearths the rich, overlooked life of a social justice campaigner truly ahead of her time.

For three years in the 1930s, the world watched, riveted, as the Spanish Civil War became the battleground in a fight between freedom and fascism that would soon take on global proportions. Confronting a right-wing coup led by Francisco Franco and heavily aided by Hitler and Mussolini, volunteers flooded in to support Spain’s democratic government. Among them were nearly 3,000 Americans, called by their convictions to lend a hand in a brutal conflict their government wanted no part of. In SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS, Adam Hochschild weaves together the stories of some dozen foreigners to reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war.