In AMERICAN CRUCIFIXION, Alex Beam tells how Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of Mormonism, went from charismatic leader to public enemy: How his most seismic revelation --- the doctrine of polygamy --- created a rift among his people; how that schism turned to violence; and how, ultimately, Smith could not escape the consequences of his ambition and pride.

Michael Korda paints a vivid and admiring portrait of Robert E. Lee as a brilliant general, devoted family man, and principled gentleman who disliked slavery and disagreed with secession, yet who refused command of the Union Army in 1861 because he could not "draw his sword" against his beloved Virginia. CLOUDS OF GLORY analyzes Lee's command during the Civil War and explores his failed strategy for winning the war.

In the fall of 1943, André Boulloche became de Gaulle’s military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the nine northern regions of France only to be betrayed by one of his associates, arrested, wounded by the Gestapo, and taken prisoner. His parents and oldest brother were arrested and shipped off on the last train from Paris to Germany before the liberation, and died in the camps. This is the first time the Boulloche family has cooperated with an author to recount their extraordinary ordeal.

In A DREADFUL DECEIT, award-winning historian Jacqueline Jones traces the lives of six African Americans to illustrate the strange history of “race” in America. In truth, Jones shows, race does not exist, and the very factors that we think of as determining it --- a person’s heritage or skin color --- are mere pretexts for the brutalization of powerless people by the powerful. These stories expose the fluid, contingent and contradictory idea of race, and the disastrous effects it has had, both in the past and in our own supposedly post-racial society.

In 1856, two intrepid adventurers, Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke, set off to unravel mankind’s greatest geographical mystery: finding the source of the Nile River. To better understand their motivations and ultimate success, Martin Dugard guides readers through the seven vital traits that Burton and Speke, as well as many of history’s legendary explorers, called upon to see their impossible journeys through to the end.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English writer, physician and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, HOW TO LIVE, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind.

Fred Kaplan brings into focus the dramatic life of John Quincy Adams --- the little known and much misunderstood sixth president of the United States and the first son of John and Abigail Adams --- and persuasively demonstrates how Adams's inspiring, progressive vision guided his life and helped shape the course of America.

One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In THE LONG SHADOW, historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the 20th century.

Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s protégé and the political leader of India, believed Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand. But in August 1946, exactly a year before Independence, Calcutta erupted in street-gang fighting, and a cycle of riots spiraled out of control. From jihadi terrorism to nuclear proliferation, the searing tale told in MIDNIGHT'S FURIES explains all too many of the headlines we read today.

In THE NIXON DEFENSE, former White House Counsel John W. Dean, one of the last major surviving figures of Watergate, draws on his own transcripts of almost a thousand conversations, a wealth of Richard Nixon’s secretly recorded information, and more than 150,000 pages of documents in the National Archives and the Nixon Library to provide the definitive answer to the question: What did President Nixon know and when did he know it?

ONCE UPON A TIME IN RUSSIA is the untold true story of the larger-than-life billionaire oligarchs who surfed the waves of privatization to reap riches after the fall of the Soviet regime: “Godfather of the Kremlin” Boris Berezovsky, a former mathematician whose first entrepreneurial venture was running an automobile reselling business, and Roman Abramovich, his dashing young protégé who built a multi-billion-dollar empire of oil and aluminum.

Rinker Buck’s bestseller is an epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way --- in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn’t been attempted in a century --- which also chronicles the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.

For the Dauntless dive-bomber crews of the USS Enterprise returning to their home base on Oahu, Sunday, December 7, 1941 was a morning from hell. Flying directly into the Japanese ambush at Pearl Harbor, they lost a third of their squadron and witnessed the heart of America’s Navy broken and smoldering on the oil-slicked waters below. Drawing on dozens of new interviews and oral histories, author Stephen L. Moore brings to life inspiring stories of individual sacrifice and bravery --- and the sweeping saga of one of America’s greatest triumphs.

Finding and identifying a pirate ship is the hardest thing to do under the sea. But two men --- John Chatterton and John Mattera --- are willing to risk everything to find the Golden Fleece, the ship of the infamous pirate Joseph Bannister. Soon, however, they realize that cutting-edge technology and a willingness to lose everything aren’t enough to track down Bannister’s ship. They must travel the globe in search of historic documents and accounts of the great pirate’s exploits, face down dangerous rivals, and battle the tides of nations, governments and experts.

Queen Victoria is Britain’s queen of contradictions. In her combination of deep sentimentality and bombast; cultural imperialism and imperial compassion; fear of intellectualism and excitement at technology; romanticism and prudishness, she became a spirit of the age to which she gave her name. Matthew Dennison's QUEEN VICTORIA is a compelling assessment of Victoria’s mercurial character and impact, written with the irony, flourish and insight that this Queen and her rule so richly deserve.

Catherine de' Medici was a ruthless pragmatist and powerbroker who dominated the throne for 30 years. Her youngest daughter, Marguerite, was a passionate free spirit, the only adversary whom her mother could neither intimidate nor control. When Catherine forces the Catholic Marguerite to marry her Protestant cousin Henry of Navarre against her will, and then uses her opulent Parisian wedding as a means of luring his followers to their deaths, she creates not only savage conflict within France but also a potent rival within her own family.

The four captivating Russian Grand Duchesses were much admired for their happy dispositions, their looks, the clothes they wore and their privileged lifestyle. With this treasure trove of diaries and letters from the grand duchesses to their friends and family, we learn that they were intelligent, sensitive and perceptive witnesses to the dark turmoil within their immediate family and the ominous approach of the Russian Revolution.

The image of a scorpion surrounded by a ring of fire, stinging itself to death, was widespread among antislavery leaders before the Civil War. It captures their long-standing strategy for peaceful abolition: they would surround the slave states with a cordon of freedom, constricting slavery and inducing the social crisis in which the peculiar institution would die. The image opens a fresh perspective on antislavery and the coming of the Civil War, brilliantly explored here by one of our greatest historians of the period.

In November 1596, a woman signed a document that would nearly destroy the career of William Shakespeare. Who was this woman who played such an instrumental, yet little known, role in Shakespeare's life? Never far from controversy when she was alive, Lady Elizabeth Russell, the self-styled Dowager Countess of Bedford, has been edited out of public memory, yet the chain of events she set in motion would make Shakespeare the legendary figure we all know today.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, Virginia’s Prince Edward County refused to obey the law. Rather than desegregate, the county closed its public schools. Kristen Green grew up in Farmville and attended Prince Edward Academy, which didn’t open its doors to black students until 1986. Thirty-four years after the Supreme Court ended school segregation, Green first began to learn the truth about her hometown’s shameful history. As she peels back the layers of this haunting period in our nation’s past, her own family’s role comes to light.

Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. As she gradually learned about the extent of her father’s brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet. In 1967 she shocked the world by defecting to the United States, leaving her two children behind. With access to KGB, CIA and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana’s incredible life.

WHEN THE UNITED STATES SPOKE FRENCH offers a fresh perspective on the tumultuous years of America as a young nation, when the Atlantic world’s first republican experiments were put to the test. It explores the country’s formative period from the viewpoint of five distinguished Frenchmen who took refuge in America after leaving their homes and families in France, crossing the Atlantic, and landing in Philadelphia. Through their stories, we see some of the most famous events of early American history in a new light.