The leafy Avenue Foch, one of the most exclusive residential streets in Nazi-occupied France, was Paris's hotbed of daring spies, murderous secret police, amoral informers and Vichy collaborators. So when American physician Sumner Jackson found himself drawn into the Liberation network of the French resistance, he knew the stakes were impossibly high. Drawing upon a wealth of primary source material and extensive interviews with Sumner’s son, Phillip, Alex Kershaw recreates the City of Light during its darkest days.

One of our finest narrative historians, Lawrence James has written a genuinely new biography of Winston Churchill, one focusing solely on his relationship with the British Empire. As a young army officer in the late 19th century serving in conflicts in India, South Africa and the Sudan, his attitude toward the Empire was the Victorian paternalistic approach --- at once responsible and superior. This ground-breaking volume reveals the many facets of Churchill’s personality: a visionary leader with a truly Victorian attitude toward the British Empire.

Since the American Revolution itself, smuggling had tested the patriotism of the American people. Distrusting foreign goods, Congress instituted high tariffs on most imports. Protecting the nation was the custom house, which waged a “war on smuggling,” inspecting every traveler for illicitly imported silk, opium, tobacco, sugar, diamonds and art. The Civil War’s blockade of the Confederacy heightened the obsession with contraband, but smuggling entered its prime during the Gilded Age. CONTRABAND explores the history of smuggling to illuminate the broader history of the United States, its power, its politics and its culture.

By the end of the 15th century, Florence was well established as the home of the Renaissance. As generous patrons to the likes of Botticelli and Michelangelo, the ruling Medici embodied the progressive humanist spirit of the age, and in Lorenzo de' Medici they possessed a diplomat capable of guarding the militarily weak city in a climate of constantly shifting allegiances between the major Italian powers. However, in the form of Savonarola, an unprepossessing provincial monk, Lorenzo found his nemesis. The battle between these two men would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures.

Acclaimed historian Paul Johnson chronicles Dwight D. Eisenhower's modest childhood in Kansas, his college years at West Point, and his rapid ascent through the military ranks, culminating in his appointment as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II. Many elements of Eisenhower’s presidency speak to American politics today, including his ability to balance the budget and skill in managing an oppositional Congress.

The years 1939-45 might be the most revered, deplored and replayed in modern history. Yet India’s extraordinary role has been concealed, from itself and from the world. Raghu Karnad retrieves the story of a single family --- a story of love, rebellion, loyalty and uncertainty --- and, with it, the greater revelation that is India’s Second World War. FARTHEST FIELD narrates the lost epic of India’s war, in which the largest volunteer army in history fought for the British Empire, even as its countrymen fought to be free of it.

The Hundred Years War was fought between 1337 and 1453 over English claims to both the throne of France by right of inheritance and large parts of the country that had been at one time Norman or, later, English. The fighting ebbed and flowed, but despite their superior tactics and great victories at Crécy, Poitiers and Agincourt, the English could never hope to secure their claims in perpetuity: France was wealthier and far more populous, and while the English won the battles, they could not hope to hold forever the lands they conquered.

Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. GIVE US THE BALLOT tells this story for the first time. In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day.

In this harrowing history of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Paul Ham argues against the use of nuclear weapons, drawing on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to prove that the bombings had little impact on the eventual outcome of the Pacific War. HIROSHIMA NAGASAKI presents the grizzly unadorned truth about the bombings, blurred for so long by postwar propaganda, and transforms our understanding of one of the defining events of the 20th century.

In INFIDEL KINGS AND UNHOLY WARRIORS, award-winning scholar Brian Catlos puts us on the ground in the Mediterranean world of 1050-1200. We experience the sights and sounds of the region just as enlightened Islamic empires and primitive Christendom began to contest it. We learn about the siege tactics, theological disputes and poetry of this enthralling time. And we see that people of different faiths coexisted far more frequently than we are commonly told.

The bestselling author of NIXONLAND has written a dazzling portrait of America on the verge of a nervous breakdown in the tumultuous political and economic times of the 1970s. Against a backdrop of melodramas from the Arab oil embargo to Patty Hearst to the near-bankruptcy of America’s greatest city, THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE asks the question: What does it mean to believe in America? To wave a flag --- or to reject the glibness of the flag wavers?

Examining Henry Kissinger's own writings, as well as a wealth of newly declassified documents, Greg Grandin reveals how Richard Nixon's top foreign policy advisor, even as he was presiding over defeat in Vietnam and a disastrous, secret and illegal war in Cambodia, was helping to revive a militarized version of American exceptionalism centered on an imperial presidency. Believing that reality could be bent to his will, Kissinger anticipated, even enabled, the ascendance of the neoconservative idealists who took America into crippling wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

On July 12, 1862, Abraham Lincoln spoke for the first time of his intention to free the slaves. On January 1, 1863, he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, doing precisely that. In between, however, was a tumultuous six months, an episode during which the 16th president fought bitterly with his generals, disappointed his cabinet, and sank into painful bouts of clinical depression. Todd Brewster focuses on this crucial time period to ask: Was it through will or by accident, intention or coincidence, personal achievement or historical determinism that Lincoln freed the slaves?

Dianne Hales became obsessed with finding the real Mona Lisa on repeated trips to Florence. Here, she takes readers with her to meet Lisa’s descendants; uncover her family’s long and colorful history; and explore the neighborhoods where she lived as a girl, a wife and a mother. In the process, we can participate in Lisa’s daily rituals; understand her personal relationships; and see, hear, smell and taste “her” Florence.

From the racetracks of Seoul to the battlegrounds of the Korean War, Reckless was a horse whose strength, tenacity and relentless spirit made her a hero amongst a regiment of U.S. Marines fighting for their lives on the front lines. Tom Clavin, the bestselling co-author of THE HEART OF EVERYTHING THAT IS, tells the unlikely story of this racehorse who was beloved by the Marine Corps and decorated for bravery.

On the afternoon of September 8, 1900, 200-mile-per-hour winds and 15-foot waves slammed into Galveston, the prosperous and growing port city on Texas’s Gulf Coast. By dawn the next day, when the storm had passed, the city that existed just hours before was gone. Shattered, grief-stricken survivors emerged to witness a level of destruction never before seen: 8,000 corpses littered the streets and were buried under the massive wreckage. In less than 24 hours, one storm destroyed a major American metropolis --- and awakened a nation to the terrifying power of nature.

The legacy of imperial Spain was shaped by many hands. But the dramatic human story of the extraordinary projection of Spanish might in the second half of the 16th century has never been fully told --- until now. In WORLD WITHOUT END, Hugh Thomas chronicles the lives, loves, conflicts and conquests of the complex men and women who carved up the Americas for the glory of Spain.