Adult

It was the final speech of a long day when hundreds of thousands gathered on the Mall for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Martin Luther King Jr. lifted the crowd when he told of his dream that all Americans would join together to realize the founding ideal of equality. His speech still inspires us 50 years later, but its very power has also narrowed our understanding of the march. In this insightful history, William P. Jones restores the march to its full significance.

The president and Mrs. Lincoln personally comforted the wounded troops who flooded wartime Washington. In 1862, Lincoln spent July 4th riding in a train of ambulances carrying casualties from the Peninsula Campaign to Washington hospitals. He saluted the “One-Legged Brigade” assembled outside the White House as “orators,” their wounds eloquent expressions of sacrifice and dedication. These are among the unforgettable scenes in LINCOLN'S CITADEL, a fresh, absorbing narrative history of Lincoln’s leadership in Civil War Washington.

Inside Spain as well as outside, many believe --- wrongly --- that under Francisco Franco’s fascist dictatorship, nothing truthful or imaginatively worthwhile could be said or written or shown. In FRANCO'S CRYPT, Jeremy Treglown argues that oversimplifications like these of a complicated, ambiguous actuality have contributed to a separate falsehood: that there was and continues to be a national pact to forget the evils for which Franco’s side (and, according to this version, his side alone) was responsible.

For America, the mid-19th century was an era of vast expectation and expansion: the country dreamed big, craved new lands, developed new technologies, and after too long a delay, finally confronted its greatest moral failure: slavery. Brenda Wineapple explores these feverish, ecstatic, conflicted years when Americans began to live within new and ever-widening borders; fought a devastating war over parallel ideals of freedom and justice; and transformed their country, at tragic cost, from a confederation into one nation, indivisible.

Following the end of World War II, more than 10,000 German civilians trapped in the Red Army’s way pack aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff. Soon after the ship leaves port, three Soviet torpedoes strike it, inflicting catastrophic damage and throwing passengers into the frozen waters of the Baltic. Drawing on interviews with survivors, as well as the letters and diaries of those who perished, award-wining author Cathryn Prince reconstructs this forgotten moment in history.

In September 1967, after three years of landmark civil rights laws and three months of devastating urban riots, the football season began at Louisiana’s Grambling College and Florida A&M. The teams were led by two extraordinary coaches, and they featured the best quarterbacks ever at each school. BREAKING THE LINE brings to life the historic saga of the battle for the 1967 black college championship, culminating in a riveting, excruciatingly close contest.

In 1820, a group of about 80 African Americans reversed the course of history and sailed back to Africa. They went under the banner of the American Colonization Society, a white philanthropic organization with a dual agenda: to rid America of its blacks, and to convert Africans to Christianity. The settlers staked out a beachhead; their numbers grew as more boats arrived; and after breaking free from their white overseers, they founded Liberia --- Africa’s first black republic --- in 1847. James Ciment’s ANOTHER AMERICA is the first full account of this dramatic experiment.

Few people today realize that the United States’s sovereignty was not assured until 1814, when England acknowledged it with the Treaty of Ghent. In fact, earlier that same year, the prospects for America couldn’t have looked bleaker. By year's end, however, the young nation was at peace, poised for expansion to the west, never to go to war against Britain again. How did this remarkable transformation happen? Drawing from rarely used source material, Willard Sterne Randall re-creates the dramatic chain of events that prevented the nation from falling into British hands. 

Vivid and entertaining, this sweeping tale of adventure and intrigue describes the essential role that pepper played in bringing both Americans and Europeans to Asia. From the abundance of wildlife on the islands of the Indian Ocean to colorful accounts of sultans entertaining their European visitors, this fascinating book reveals the often surprising story behind one of mankind's most common spices.

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.