In early 1939, few Americans were thinking about the darkening storm clouds over Europe. Nor did they have much sympathy for the growing number of Jewish families who were increasingly threatened and brutalized by Adolf Hitler's policies in Germany and Austria. But one ordinary American couple decided that something had to be done. Despite overwhelming obstacles, Gilbert and Eleanor Kraus made a bold and unprecedented decision to travel into Nazi Germany in an effort to save a group of Jewish children.

The Roaring Twenties is the only decade in American history with a widely applied nickname, and our collective fascination with this era continues. But how did this surge of innovation and cultural milestones emerge out of the ashes of The Great War? Acclaimed author Eric Burns investigates the year of 1920, which was not only a crucial 12-month period of its own, but one that foretold the future, foreshadowing the rest of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States was wakened from its slumber of isolationism. To help him steer the nation through the coming war, President Franklin Roosevelt turned to the greatest “team of rivals” since the days of Lincoln: Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Admiral Ernest J. King and General George C. Marshall. Together, these four men led the nation through history’s most devastating conflict and ushered in a new era of unprecedented American influence, all while forced to overcome the profound personal and political differences that divided them.

In 1941, as Hitler’s threat loomed ever larger, President Roosevelt realized he needed weaponry to fight the Nazis --- most important, airplanes --- and he needed them fast. So he turned to Detroit and the auto industry for help. THE ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY tells the incredible story of how Detroit answered the call, centering on Henry Ford and his tortured son Edsel, who, when asked if they could deliver 50,000 airplanes, made an outrageous claim: Ford Motor Company would erect a plant that could yield a “bomber an hour.”

Revered today for articulating America’s founding principles, the first 10 amendments was in fact a political stratagem executed by James Madison to preserve the Constitution, the Federal government, and the latter’s authority over the states. In the hands of award-winning historian Carol Berkin, the story of the Founders’ fight over the Bill of Rights comes alive in a gripping drama of partisan politics, acrimonious debate and manipulated procedure.

Eastern Europe, 1944: Three women believe they are pregnant, but are torn from their husbands before they can be certain. Rachel is sent to Auschwitz, unaware that her husband has been shot. Priska and her husband travel there together, but are immediately separated. Also at Auschwitz, Anka hopes in vain to be reunited with her husband. With the rest of their families gassed, these young wives are determined to hold on to all they have left --- their lives, and those of their unborn babies.

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.

ENDURING COURAGE is the electrifying story of the beginning of America’s love affair with speed --- and how one man above all the rest showed a nation the way forward. Eddie Rickenbacker was an innovator on the racetrack, a skilled aerial dualist and squadron commander, and founder of Eastern Air Lines. He showed a war-weary nation what it took to survive against nearly insurmountable odds when he and seven others endured a harrowing three-week ordeal adrift without food or water in the Pacific during World War II.

This is the story of American baseball during World War II --- of both the players who left to join the war and the ones who struggled to keep the game alive on the home front. Taking the place of the big shots turned soldiers, sailors and combat pilots were misfit replacement players. While Detroit Tigers MVP Hank Greenberg represented the player who served, Pete Gray symbolized the player who stayed. He was a one-armed outfielder who overcame insurmountable odds to become a professional.

After suffering a stinging defeat in the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial election, Richard Nixon's political career was proclaimed dead by everyone. Yet on January 20, 1969, he would stand taking the oath of office as the 37th President of the United States. Patrick J. Buchanan --- who served as one of two staff members to Nixon --- gives a first-hand account of those pivotal years, in which Nixon worked to reverse his political fortunes in a decade marked by revolution, the Vietnam War, assassinations, and the rise of the New Left.

Multi-million-copy bestselling historian Kenneth C. Davis sets his sights on war stories in THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR. He brings to life six emblematic battles, revealing untold tales that span our nation's history, from the Revolutionary War to Iraq. Along the way, he illuminates why we go to war, who fights, the grunt's-eye view of combat, and how these conflicts reshaped our military and national identity.

Lynne Cheney's biography of James Madison explores the astonishing story of a man of vaunted modesty who audaciously changed the world. Outwardly reserved, Madison was the intellectual driving force behind the Constitution and crucial to its ratification. His visionary political philosophy and rationale for the union of states --- so eloquently presented in The Federalist papers --- helped shape the country Americans live in today.

Helen Castor tells afresh the gripping story of the peasant girl from Domremy who hears voices from God, leads the French army to victory, is burned at the stake for heresy, and eventually becomes a saint. But unlike the traditional narrative, a story already shaped by the knowledge of what Joan would become and told in hindsight, Castor’s book takes us back to 15th-century France and tells the story forwards. Instead of an icon, she gives us a living, breathing woman confronting the challenges of faith and doubt.

This is the story of how a small SOE unit led by Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general on the Nazi-occupied island of Crete in 1944. For 32 days, they were chased across the mountains as they headed for the coast and a rendezvous with a Royal Navy launch waiting to spirit the general to Cairo. From the adrenalin rush of the kidnapping, to the help provided by the Cretan partisans and people, Rick Stroud explains the overall context of Crete's role in World War II and reveals the devastating consequences of this mission for them all.

THE LIFE OF SAUL BELLOW marks the centenary of Saul Bellow’s birth, as well as the 10th anniversary of his death. It draws on unprecedented access to Bellow’s papers, including much previously restricted material, as well as interviews with more than 150 of the novelist’s relatives, close friends, colleagues and lovers. Zachary Leader chronicles a singular life in letters, offering original and nuanced accounts not only of the novelist’s development and rise to eminence, but of his many identities --- as writer, polemicist, husband, father, Chicagoan, Jew, American.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews with veterans of the war --- fighter and helicopter pilots, tank commanders and Recon soldiers, paratroopers, as well as women soldiers, wives and others --- Steven Pressfield tells the story of the Six Day War as you’ve never experienced it before: in the voices of the young men and women who battled not only for their lives but for the survival of a Jewish state, and for the dreams of their ancestors.

On August 12, 1944, Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. hoisted himself up into a highly modified B-24 Liberator bomber. The munitions he was carrying that day were 50 percent more powerful than TNT. Kennedy's mission was part of Operation Aphrodite/Project Anvil, a desperate American effort to rescue London from a rain of German V-1 and V-2 missiles. LOST DESTINY is a rare exploration of the origin of today's controversial military drones as well as a searing and unforgettable story of heroism, WWII and the Kennedy dynasty that might have been.

Based on years of archival research and interviews with the last surviving aides and Roosevelt family members, Nigel Hamilton offers a definitive account of FDR’s masterful --- and underappreciated --- command of the Allied war effort. Hamilton takes readers inside FDR’s White House Oval Study --- his personal command center --- and into the meetings where he battled with Churchill about strategy and tactics and overrode the near mutinies of his own generals and secretary of war.

NO BETTER FRIEND tells the remarkable story of Royal Air Force technician Frank Williams and Judy, a purebred pointer, who met in a World War II internment camp. Judy was fiercely loyal, with a keen sense for who was friend and who was foe, and the pair's relationship deepened throughout their captivity. When the prisoners suffered beatings, Judy would interrupt by barking. She survived bombings and other near-death experiences and became a beacon for the men, who saw in her survival a flicker of hope for their own.

In 1776, 13 American colonies declared themselves independent states that only temporarily joined forces in order to defeat the British. Once victorious, they planned to go their separate ways. The triumph of the American Revolution was neither an ideological nor a political guarantee that the colonies would relinquish their independence and accept the creation of a federal government with power over their autonomy as states. THE QUARTET is the story of this second American founding and of the men most responsible: Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Jay and James Madison.

H. W. Brands establishes Ronald Reagan as one of the two great presidents of the 20th century, a true peer to Franklin Roosevelt. REAGAN conveys how the confident force of Reagan’s personality and the unwavering nature of his beliefs enabled him to engineer a conservative revolution in American politics and play a crucial role in ending communism in the Soviet Union. He shut down the age of liberalism, Brands shows, and ushered in the age of Reagan, whose defining principles are still powerfully felt today.

Kim Philby’s story is not a tale of one spy, but of three: Philby, his fellow Englishman Nicholas Elliott, and the American James Jesus Angleton. These men supposedly served the same cause, but Philby was channeling all of their confidences to his Soviet handlers. As the web of suspicion closed around him, Elliott and Angleton never abandoned him. When the truth was revealed, it would have profound consequences on those who thought they knew him best.

SUPREME CITY is the story of Manhattan's growth and transformation in the 1920s and the brilliant people behind it. In less than 10 years, Manhattan became the social, cultural and commercial hub of the country, transformed by its night clubs, radio, skyscrapers, movies and ferocious energy. The 1920s was the Age of Jazz and the Age of Ambition.

Acclaimed Texas historian Stephen L. Moore’s new narrative history --- the official nonfiction companion to the History Channel's dramatic series "Texas Rising" (created by the same team that made the ratings record-breaker "Hatfields & McCoys") --- tells the full, thrilling story of the Texas Revolution from its humble beginnings to its dramatic conclusion, and reveals the contributions of the fabled Texas Rangers --- both during the revolution and in the frontier Indian wars that followed.

Ty Cobb is baseball royalty. His lifetime batting average is still the highest of all time, and when he retired in 1928, he held more than 90 records. But the numbers don’t tell half of Cobb’s tale. Setting the record straight, Charles Leerhsen pushed aside the myths and re-traced Cobb’s journey, from the shy son of a professor and state senator who was progressive on race for his time, to America’s first true sports celebrity. In the process, he tells of a life overflowing with incident and a man who cut his own path through his times.

On June 18, 1815, the armies of France, Britain and Prussia descended upon a quiet valley south of Brussels. In the previous three days, the French army had beaten the Prussians at Ligny and fought the British to a standstill at Quatre-Bras. The Allies were in retreat. The little village north of where they turned to fight the French army was called Waterloo. The blood-soaked battle to which it gave its name would become a landmark in European history. In his first work of nonfiction, Bernard Cornwell offers a riveting chronicle of every dramatic moment.

A master historian and superb teller of history, John Ferling illuminates the years 1763 to 1783 --- from the end of the French and Indian War that left England triumphant in North America to the signing of the Treaty of Paris in September 1783 and the final departure of British troops from New York City in November of that year. With original insight, he chronicles the myriad and complex events and contentious viewpoints that drove Americans in their insurgency against Great Britain and sustained them in the seemingly quixotic belief that they could win their independence.

On a winter day in 1903, in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, two unknown brothers from Ohio changed history. But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot. Who were these men, and how was it that they achieved what they did? David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly American story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.