Granted special access by Queen Elizabeth II to her parents’ letters and diaries and to the papers of their close friends and family, Sally Bedell Smith brings the love story of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to vibrant life. This deeply researched and revealing book shows how a loving and devoted marriage helped the King and Queen meet the challenges of World War II, lead a nation, solidify the public’s faith in the monarchy, and raise their daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.

The Roaring Twenties has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson. Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman --- Madge Oberholtzer --- who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.

Part memoir, part courtroom drama, and part primer for advocates fighting assaults on free speech, STIFLED LAUGHTER is the story of one woman's efforts to restore literary classics to the classrooms of rural north Florida. Updated with a new introduction, Claudia Johnson's honest, often hilarious, first-person account of censorship in its modern form provides valuable insight into why the books children read at school remains a controversial issue, and why free speech in America remains a precarious right. Johnson fights tirelessly to keep texts like Lysistrata and “The Millers Tale” in Florida school textbooks regardless of a preacher’s efforts to take them out. Readers are given a glimpse into the courtroom and all the drama, passion and hard work that follows.

Corrie ten Boom was a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place straight out of a spy novel to shelter Jews and refugees from the Nazis during Gestapo raids. Even though the Nazis knew what the ten Booms were up to, they were never able to find those sheltered within the house when they raided it. Corrie stopped at nothing to face down the evils of her time and overcame unbelievable obstacles and odds. But even more remarkable than her heroism and survival was Corrie’s attitude when she was released. Miraculously, she was able to eschew bitterness and embrace forgiveness as she ministered to people in need around the globe.

The heroine of A NOBLE CUNNING --- Bethan Glentaggart, Countess of Clarencefield, a persecuted Catholic noblewoman --- is determined to try every possible means of saving her husband Gavin's life with the help of a group of devoted female friends. Amid the turbulence of the 1715 Rebellion against England's first German king, George I, Bethan faces down a mob attack on her home, travels alone from the Scottish Lowlands to London through one of the worst snowstorms in many years, and confronts a cruel king before his court to plead for mercy for Gavin. As a last resort, Bethan and her friends must devise and put in motion a devilishly complex scheme featuring multiple disguises and even the judicious use of poison to try to free Gavin.

An industrious immigrant who built her business from the ground up, Madame Restell was a self-taught surgeon on the cutting edge of healthcare in pre-Gilded Age New York. Her bustling “boarding house” provided birth control, abortions and medical assistance to thousands of women --- rich and poor alike. Unfortunately for Madame Restell, her rise to the top of her field coincided with a campaign to curtail women’s power by restricting their access to both healthcare and careers of their own. By unraveling the misogynistic and misleading lies that put women’s lives in jeopardy, Jennifer Wright simultaneously restores Restell to her rightful place in history and obliterates the faulty reasoning underlying the very foundation of what has since been dubbed the “pro-life” movement.

Journalist Nina Siegal, who grew up in a family that had survived the Holocaust in Europe, had always wondered about the experience of regular people during World War II. She had heard stories of the war as a child and Anne Frank’s diary, but the tales were either crafted as moral lessons --- to never waste food, to be grateful for all you receive, to hide your silver --- or told with a punchline. The details of the past went untold in an effort to make it easier to assimilate into American life. When Siegal moved to Amsterdam as an adult, those questions came up again, as did another horrifying one: Why did 75% of the Dutch Jewish community perish in the war, while in other Western European countries the proportions were significantly lower?

Environmental activist Satish Kumar is well known for his epic walk for world peace in his youth in the 1960s from India to the nuclear capitals of Moscow, Paris, London and Washington, DC. Wherever he traveled, he found that human beings were capable of a love that could overcome hatred and division. Settling down in the UK, he married his wife, June Mitchell, and founded eco-university Schumacher College in Devon, eventually becoming a leading figure in the UK green movement. RADICAL LOVE distills the author's lifetime of experience as a lover, parent, activist and educator into simple lessons on transforming our time of ecological crisis, conflict and scarcity into one in which we experience harmony with nature, safety and abundance.

The Black Power movement, often associated with its iconic spokesmen, derived much of its energy from the work of people whose stories have never been told. STAYED ON FREEDOM brings into focus two unheralded Black Power activists who dedicated their lives to the fight for freedom. Zoharah Simmons and Michael Simmons fell in love while organizing tenants and workers in the South. Their commitment to each other and to social change took them on a decades-long journey that traversed first the country and then the world. In centering their lives, historian Dan Berger shows how Black Power united the local and the global across organizations and generations.

Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, however, the city was far from a beacon of equality. In NO RIGHT TO AN HONEST LIVING, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small: a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Before, during and after the Civil War, white abolitionists and Republicans refused to secure equal employment opportunity for Black Bostonians, condemning most of them to poverty. Still, Jones finds, some Black entrepreneurs ingeniously created their own jobs and forged their own career paths.