Andrew Morton tells the story of the feckless Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor; his American wife, Wallis Simpson; and the bizarre wartime Nazi plot to make him a puppet king after the invasion of Britain and the attempted cover-up by Churchill, General Eisenhower and King George VI of the duke's relations with Hitler. From the alleged affair between Simpson and the German foreign minister to the discovery of top secret correspondence about the man dubbed "the traitor king" and the Nazi high command, 17 CARNATIONS is a saga of intrigue, betrayal and deception.

Beginning with her great-great grandfather, Moses Calhoun, a house slave who used the rare advantage of his education to become a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, Gail Lumet Buckley follows her family’s two branches: one that stayed in the South, and the other that settled in Brooklyn. Through the lens of her relatives’ momentous lives, Buckley examines major events throughout American history --- from Atlanta during Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, and then from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement.

Constance Fenimore Woolson, who contributed to Henry James’ conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the 19th century. Yet today the best-known (and most misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This first full-length biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature. Uncovering new sources, Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson’s dramatic life.

In 1938, 28-year-old Pauli Murray wrote a letter to the President and First Lady, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, protesting racial segregation in the South. Eleanor wrote back. So began a friendship that would last for a quarter of a century, as Pauli became a lawyer, principal strategist in the fight to protect Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and a co-founder of the National Organization of Women, and Eleanor became a diplomat and first chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

The First Congress was the most important in US history, says prize-winning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function. Had it failed, it’s possible that the United States as we know it would not exist today. The Constitution was a broad set of principles. It was left to the members of the First Congress and President George Washington to create the machinery that would make the government work. Fortunately, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others less well known today rose to the occasion.

More than a century has passed since Theodore Roosevelt was in the White House, but he still continues to fascinate. He became a war hero, reformed the NYPD, busted the largest railroad and oil trusts, passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, created national parks and forests, won the Nobel Peace Prize and built the Panama Canal --- to name just a few. Yet it was the cause he championed the hardest --- America's entry into World War I --- that would ultimately divide and destroy him, when his youngest son, Quentin, died in an air fight.

From the life of John James Audubon to the invention of the atomic bomb, readers have long relied on Richard Rhodes to explain, distill and dramatize crucial moments in history. Now, he takes us into battlefields and bomb shelters, into the studios of artists, into the crowded wards of war hospitals, and into the hearts and minds of a rich cast of characters to show how the ideological, aesthetic and technological developments that emerged in Spain changed the world forever.

Robert Kaplan first visited Romania in the 1970s, when he was a young journalist and the country was a bleak Communist backwater. It was one of the darkest corners of Europe, but few Westerners were paying attention. What ensued was a lifelong obsession with a critical, often overlooked country --- a country that, today, is key to understanding the current threat that Russia poses to Europe. Through the lens of one country, Kaplan examines larger questions of geography, imperialism, the role of fate in international relations, the Cold War, the Holocaust and more.

On August 18, 1648, the royalist garrison holding Colchester Castle surrendered and Oliver Cromwell’s army firmly ended the rule of Charles I of England. The rebels executed four of the senior officers captured at the castle. Yet still, the king refused to accept he had lost the war. As France and other allies mobilized in support of Charles, a tribunal was hastily gathered and a death sentence was passed. On January 30, 1649, the King of England was executed. This is the account of the 59 regicides, the men who signed Charles I’s death warrant.

The very roughness of Lincoln's appearance made him seem all the more common, one of us ---- as did his sense of humor about his own awkward physical nature. Nineteenth-century African Americans felt deep affection for their "liberator" as a "homely" man who did not hold himself apart. During Reconstruction, Southerners felt a nostalgia for the humility of Lincoln, whom they envisioned as a "conciliator." Later, teachers glorified Lincoln as a symbol of nationhood that would appeal to poor immigrants.

In the early hours of May 6, 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton barreled into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge --- the first railroad bridge ever to span the Mississippi River. Soon after, the newly constructed vessel, crowded with passengers and livestock, erupted into flames and sank in the river below, taking much of the bridge with it. As lawyer and Lincoln scholar Brian McGinty dramatically reveals in LINCOLN'S GREATEST CASE, no one was killed, but the question of who was at fault cried out for an answer.

Historian David O. Stewart restores James Madison, sometimes overshadowed by his fellow Founders, to his proper place as the most significant framer of the new nation. Short, plain, balding, neither soldier nor orator, low on charisma and high on intelligence, Madison cared more about achieving results than taking the credit. To reach his lifelong goal of a self-governing constitutional republic, he blended his talents with those of key partners.

A patriot by birth, John Quincy Adams’ destiny was foreordained. He was not only “The Greatest Traveler of His Age,” but also his country’s most gifted linguist and most experienced diplomat. His world encompassed the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the early and late Napoleonic Age. In THE REMARKABLE EDUCATION OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, Phyllis Lee Levin provides the deeply researched and definitive biography of one of the most fascinating and towering early Americans.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book --- until now. In ROMANTIC OUTLAWS, Charlotte Gordon reunites the trailblazing author who wrote A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN and the Romantic visionary who gave the world FRANKENSTEIN --- two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy.

The American Revolution involved a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than 22 navies fighting on five oceans --- to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French and American history. In THE STRUGGLE FOR SEA POWER, Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American independence from a naval perspective.

In 1789, as George Washington became the first president of the United States, the world was all but certain that the American experiment in liberty and representative government would founder. More than a few Americans feared that the world was right. In WASHINGTON’S CIRCLE, we see how Washington and his trusted advisers, close friends and devoted family defied the doomsayers to lay the foundation for an enduring constitutional republic.

George Washington was famously unknowable, a man of deep passions hidden behind a facade of rigid self-control. Yet before he was a great general and president, Washington was a young man prone to peevishness and a volcanic temper. His greatness as a leader evolved over time, the product of experience and maturity but also a willed effort to restrain his wilder impulses. Focusing on Washington’s early years, Robert Middlekauff penetrates his mystique, revealing his all-too-human fears, values and passions.

In 1907, Irish immigrant William Mulholland conceived and built one of the greatest civil engineering feats in history: the aqueduct that carried water 223 miles from the Sierra Nevada mountains to Los Angeles --- allowing this small desert city to grow into a modern global metropolis. Les Standiford vividly captures the larger-then-life engineer and the breathtaking scope of his six-year, $23 million project that would transform a region, a state and a nation at the dawn of its greatest century.

Jean Stein transformed the art of oral history in her groundbreaking book EDIE: American Girl, an indelible portrait of Andy Warhol “superstar” Edie Sedgwick, which was edited with George Plimpton. Now, in WEST OF EDEN, she turns to Los Angeles, the city of her childhood. Stein vividly captures a mythic cast of characters: their ambitions and triumphs as well as their desolation and grief. These stories illuminate the bold aspirations of five larger-than-life individuals and their families.