The dark-eyed woman in the long black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. La Posada had been a grand Santa Fe home before it was converted to a hotel. Julia Schuster Staab, the wife of the home’s original owner, died nearly a century before the hauntings were first reported. In AMERICAN GHOST, Hannah Nordhaus traces the life, death and unsettled afterlife of her great-great-grandmother --- from her childhood in Germany to her years in the American West with her Jewish merchant husband.

In the autumn of 1944, as Patton’s army paraded through Paris, another Allied force was gathering in southern Italy. Spearheaded by over 100,000 American troops, this vast, international army was faced with a grim task --- break The Gothic Line, a series of interconnected German fortifications that stretched across the mountains of northern Italy. These Allied soldiers fought uphill against entrenched enemies in some of the final and most brutal battles of the Second World War. Veteran war correspondent and historian Christian Jennings provides an unprecedented look inside this unsung but highly significant campaign.

A sweeping and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, THE BRAZEN AGE opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity, a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the 20th century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation and burgeoning bohemia.

Charlotte Brontë famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and with siblings whose astonishing creativity was a closely held secret. The genius of Claire Harman’s biography is that it transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to quiet rebellion and fierce ambition. Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte’s inner life with absorbing intensity. Brontë’s blazingly intelligent female characters brimming with hidden passions transformed English literature, even as a heartrending series of personal losses followed the author’s literary success.

Julia Ward was an heiress and aspiring poet when she married Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, an internationally acclaimed pioneer in the education of the blind. Authorship of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" made her celebrated and revered. But Howe was also continuing to fight a civil war at home; she became a pacifist, suffragist and world traveler. She came into her own as a tireless campaigner for women’s rights and social reform. Esteemed author Elaine Showalter tells the story of Howe’s determined self-creation and brings to life the society she inhabited and the obstacles she overcame.

The sinking of the Lusitania is a story that many of us think we know but don’t, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. DEAD WAKE brings to life a cast of evocative characters --- from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President Woodrow Wilson, a man lost to grief, dreading the widening war but also captivated by the prospect of new love.

Thanks to William Shakespeare, the death of Julius Caesar is the most famous assassination in history. But what actually happened on March 15, 44 BC is even more gripping than Shakespeare’s play. In THE DEATH OF CAESAR, Barry Strauss tells the real story. Shakespeare shows Caesar’s assassination to be an amateur and idealistic affair. The real killing, however, was a carefully planned paramilitary operation, put together by Caesar’s disaffected officers and designed with precision.

Adam Cohen tells the story of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court’s decision to champion eugenic sterilization for the greater good of the country. In 1927, when the nation was caught up in eugenic fervor, the justices allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal young woman, for being an “imbecile.” Exposing this tremendous injustice --- which led to the sterilization of 70,000 Americans --- IMBECILES overturns cherished myths and reappraises heroic figures in its relentless pursuit of the truth.

The Irish-American story, with all its twists and triumphs, is told through the improbable life of one man. A dashing young orator during the Great Famine of the 1840s, in which a million of his Irish countrymen died, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony. He escaped and six months later was heralded in the streets of New York. Meagher’s rebirth in America included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade from New York in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War.

Against the background of an age that saw the rebirth of ancient and classical learning, Paul Strathern explores the intensely dramatic rise and fall of the Medici family in Florence, as well as the Italian Renaissance, which they did so much to sponsor and encourage. Strathern also follows the lives of many of the great Renaissance artists and scientists with whom the Medici had dealings, along with the fortunes of those members of the Medici family who achieved success away from Florence.

The emergence of paper in the imperial court of Han China brought about a revolution in the transmission of knowledge and ideas. The first writing surface sufficiently cheap, portable and printable for books, pamphlets and journals to be mass-produced and distributed widely, paper opened the way for an unprecedented, ongoing dialogue between individuals and between communities across continents, oceans and time. THE PAPER TRAIL explores how the new substance was used to solidify social and political systems that influenced China even into our own time.

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.

America’s First Families are unknowable in many ways. No one has insight into their true character like the people who serve their meals and make their beds every day. Full of stories and details by turns dramatic, humorous and heartwarming, THE RESIDENCE reveals daily life in the White House as it is really lived through the voices of the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers and others who tend to the needs of the President and First Family.

RIGHTFUL HERITAGE chronicles Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legacy as the founder of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and premier protector of America’s public lands. FDR built from scratch dozens of State Park systems and scenic roadways. As America’s president, he established hundreds of federal migratory bird refuges and spearheaded the modern endangered species movement. During its nine-year existence, the CCC put nearly three million young men to work on conservation projects, combating severe unemployment during the Great Depression.

The sale of Babe Ruth by the Boston Red Sox to the New York Yankees in 1919 is one of the pivotal moments in baseball history, changing the fortunes of two of baseball's most storied franchises. More than a simple transaction, the sale resulted in a deal that created the Yankee dynasty, turned Boston into an also-ran, sold the American people on the modern home run era after the Black Sox scandal, and led the public to fall in love with Ruth. Award-winning baseball historian Glenn Stout reveals brand-new information about Babe and the unique political situation surrounding his sale.

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.

The 1911 New York Giants stole an astonishing 347 bases, a record that still stands more than a century later. That alone makes them special in baseball history, but as Maury Klein relates in STEALING GAMES, they also embodied a rapidly changing America on the cusp of a faster, more frenetic pace of life dominated by machines, technology and urban culture. Baseball, too, was evolving from the dead-ball to the live-ball era --- the cork-centered ball was introduced in 1910 and structurally changed not only the outcome of individual games but the way the game itself was played, requiring upgraded equipment, new rules and new ways of adjudicating.