The mud-filled, blood-soaked trenches of the Low Countries and North-Eastern Europe were essential battlegrounds during the First World War, but the war reached many other corners of the globe, and events elsewhere significantly affected its course. Covering the 12 months of 1916, eminent historian Keith Jeffery uses 12 moments from a range of locations and shows how they reverberated around the world.

Before Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany, there was 1924. This was the year of Hitler's final transformation into the self-proclaimed savior and infallible leader who would interpret and distort Germany's historical traditions to support his vision for the Third Reich. Everything that would come --- the rallies and riots, the single-minded deployment of a catastrophically evil idea --- crystallized in one defining year. Peter Ross Range depicts the stories and scenes of a year vital to understanding the man and the brutality he wrought in a war that changed the world forever.

How did the Vietnam War change the way we think of ourselves as a people and a nation? Christian G. Appy, author of the widely praised oral history of the Vietnam War, PATRIOTS, now examines the relationship between the war’s realities and myths, and its impact on our national identity, conscience, pride, shame, popular culture and postwar foreign policy.

BAND OF GIANTS brings to life the founders who fought for our independence in the Revolutionary War. Here, Jack Kelly captures the fraught condition of the war --- the bitterly divided populace, the lack of supplies, the repeated setbacks on the battlefield, and the appalling physical hardships. That these inexperienced warriors could take on and defeat the superpower of the day was one of the most remarkable feats in world history.

Martin Luther King, Jr. died in one of the most shocking assassinations the world has known, but little is remembered about the life he led in his final year. New York Times bestselling author and award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley recounts the final 365 days of King's life, revealing the minister's trials and tribulations, all of which he had to rise above in order to lead and address the racism, poverty and militarism that threatened to destroy our democracy.

Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded The Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a "Modern Moses," becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process. Drawing on dozens of interviews and extensive archival research, Ethan Michaeli brings to life the reporters who braved lynch mobs and policemen’s clubs to do their jobs.

From before the dawn of the 20th century until the arrival of the New Deal, one of the most protracted and deadly labor struggles in American history was waged in West Virginia. The fight for unionization and civil rights sparked a political crisis verging on civil war that stretched from the creeks and hollows to the courts and the US Senate. In THE DEVIL IS HERE IN THESE HILLS, celebrated labor historian James Green tells the story of West Virginia and coal like never before.

It was a time of unregulated madness. And nowhere was it madder than in Chicago at the dawn of the Roaring Twenties. As Model Ts rumbled down Michigan Avenue, gang war shootings announced Al Capone’s rise to underworld domination. Bedecked partygoers thronged to the Drake Hotel’s opulent banquet rooms, corrupt politicians held court in thriving speakeasies, and the frenzy of stock market gambling was rampant. Enter a slick, smooth-talking, charismatic lawyer named Leo Koretz, who enticed hundreds of people to invest as much as $30 million in phantom timberland and nonexistent oil wells in Panama.

Harris County, Georgia, 1912. A white man, the beloved nephew of the county sheriff, is shot dead on the porch of a black woman. Days later, the sheriff sanctions the lynching of a black woman and three black men, all of them innocent. In trying to figure out what led to this unthinkable crime, Karen Branan --- the great-granddaughter of that sheriff --- was forced to confront her own deep-rooted beliefs surrounding race and family, a process that came to a head when she learned a shocking truth: she is related not only to the sheriff, but also to one of the four who were murdered.

A FIFTY-YEAR-SILENCE is the deeply involving account of Miranda Richmond Mouillot's journey to find out what happened between her grandmother, a physician, and her grandfather, an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials, who refused to utter his wife's name aloud after she left him. To discover the roots of their embittered and entrenched silence, Miranda moves to their stone house; immerses herself in letters, archival materials and secondary sources; and teases stories out of her reticent grandparents.

Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam, a 12-story-high concrete structure just 50 miles north of Los Angeles, suddenly collapsed, releasing a devastating flood that roared 53 miles to the Pacific Ocean, destroying everything in its path. What caused this unexpected catastrophe, and why are the facts largely missing from history books? With research gathered over more than two decades, award-winning writer and filmmaker Jon Wilkman revisits the deluge that claimed nearly 500 lives.

Building on fresh evidence --- including a detailed record of slave escapes secretly kept by Sydney Howard Gay, one of the key organizers in New York --- Eric Foner elevates the underground railroad from folklore to sweeping history. It eventually took a civil war to destroy American slavery, but here at last is the story of the courageous effort to fight slavery by "practical abolition" --- person by person, family by family.

During his first term as president, George Washington decided that the only way to fulfill the Revolution was to take the new federal government directly to the people. He organized an extraordinary journey carrying him to all 13 states. If the nation fragmented, as it had almost done after the war, it could never become the strong, independent nation for which Washington had fought. In scores of communities, he communicated a powerful and enduring message --- that America was now a nation, not a loose collection of states. And the people responded to his invitation in ways that he never could have predicted.

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt came out of retirement to challenge his close friend and handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, for the Republican Party nomination. To overcome the power of the incumbent, TR seized on the idea of presidential primaries, telling bosses everywhere to “Let the People Rule.” The cheers and jeers of rowdy supporters and detractors echo from Geoffrey Cowan’s pages as he explores TR’s fight-to-the-finish battle to win popular support.

THE LOST TUDOR PRINCESS is the first biography of Margaret Douglas, the beautiful, cunning niece of Henry VIII of England who used her sharp intelligence and covert power to influence the succession after the death of Elizabeth I. Drawing on decades of research and myriad original sources --- including many of Margaret’s surviving letters --- Alison Weir brings this captivating character out of the shadows and presents a strong, capable woman who operated effectively and fearlessly at the very highest levels of power.

Following the Civil War, Union veterans --- tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions --- tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age. Mining previously untapped archives, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan uncovers anguished letters and diaries, essays by amputees, and gruesome medical reports, all deeply revealing of the American psyche.

After their father’s death, Harry, Frank and Pierce Fukuhara moved to Hiroshima, their mother’s ancestral home. Eager to go back to America, Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Harry was sent to an internment camp until a call came for Japanese translators, and he dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, Frank and Pierce became soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army. Before the Fukuharas would have to face each other in battle, the U.S. detonated the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, gravely injuring tens of thousands of civilians, including members of their family.

During the almost six years England was at war with Nazi Germany, Winifred and Bernard Schlesinger, Ian Buruma’s grandparents, and the film director John Schlesinger's parents, were, like so many others, thoroughly sundered from each other. Their only recourse was to write letters back and forth. And write they did, often every day. Now, in a labor of love that is also a powerful act of artistic creation, Buruma has woven his own voice in with theirs to provide the context and counterpoint necessary to bring to life not just a remarkable marriage, but a class and an age.

Combining big-picture World War II history with a little-known event in American history that has long been kept quiet, THE TRAIN TO CRYSTAL CITY reveals the war-time hysteria against the Japanese and Germans in America, the secrets of FDR’s tactics to rescue high-profile POWs in Germany and Japan, and how the definition of American citizenship changed under the pressure of war.

New Guinea was a battleground far more deadly than the most fanatical of enemy troops. Japanese forces numbering some 600,000 men began landing in January 1942, determined to seize the island as a cornerstone of the Empire’s strategy to knock Australia out of the war. Allied Commander-in-Chief General Douglas MacArthur committed 340,000 Americans, as well as tens of thousands of Australian, Dutch and New Guinea troops, to retake New Guinea at all costs. What followed was a four-year campaign that involved some of the most horrific warfare in history.

The Duke of Wellington remarked that Waterloo was “a damned nice thing,” meaning uncertain or finely balanced. He was right. For his part, Napoleon reckoned “the English are bad troops and this affair is nothing more than eating breakfast.” He was wrong, and this gripping and dramatic narrative history by veteran historian Gordon Corrigan --- in time for the bicentennial in 2015 --- shows just how wrong.