American High

Told from three diverse points of view, this story of life and love after loss is one Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give, believes "will stay with you long after you put it down." We've lost everything...and found ourselves. Loss pulled Autumn, Shay, and Logan apart. Will music bring them...

Elinor Hanson, a 40-something former model, is struggling to reinvent herself as a freelance writer when she receives an unexpected assignment. Her mentor from grad school offers her a chance to write for a prestigious magazine about the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota. Elinor grew up near the Bakken, raised by an overbearing father and a distant Korean mother who met and married when he was stationed overseas. After decades away from home, Elinor returns to a landscape she hardly recognizes, overrun by tens of thousands of newcomers.

From the acclaimed author of Girlchild, this gritty, irreverent novel sees a young misfit grow into hope. Unsinkable and wrecked by grief, motherless and aimless and looking for connection, Helen Dedleder is a girl with a gift she doesn't want to use and a pack of friends who are all just...

An engrossing debut novel that cannily reimagines the extraordinary life and mysterious death of bohemian Georgetown socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer— secret lover of JFK, ex-wife of a CIA chief, sexual adventurer, LSD explorer and early feminist living by her own rules. She was a longtime lover...

Thomas B. Allen’s expertise in military history and strategy is combined with Roger MacBride Allen’s knowledge of technology to reveal a lesser-known yet fascinating side of the 16th president of the United States. Their authoritative narrative reveals Lincoln as our nation’s first hands-on commander in chief, whose appreciation for the power of technology plays a critical role in the North’s Civil War victory over the less-developed South.

For centuries, skeptical foreigners - and even millions of Americans - have believed there was no such thing as American cuisine. In recent decades, hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza have been thought to define the nation's palate. Not so, says food historian Paul Freedman, who demonstrates that there is an exuberant and diverse, if not always coherent, American cuisine that reflects the history of the nation itself.

Over the last decade, William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist. American Audacity gathers Giraldi's fierce and witty considerations of American writers and themes, including a never-before-published appreciation of James Baldwin and an introductory call to arms for 21st-century American literature.

When Dr. David Hosack tilled the country's first botanical garden in the Manhattan soil more than 200 years ago, he didn't just dramatically alter the New York landscape; he left a monumental legacy of advocacy for public health and wide-ranging support for the sciences. In melodic prose, historian Victoria Johnson eloquently chronicles Hosack's tireless career to reveal the breadth of his impact. The result is a lush portrait of the man who gave voice to a new, deeply American understanding of the powers and perils of nature.

Bruce Lancaster starts his story with an examination of colonial society and the origins of the quarrel with England. He details the ensuing battles and military campaigns from Lexington and Concord to the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, as well as the tense political and social situation of the new nation. The American Heritage History of the American Revolution details the birth of America with insight and depth.

Racial Justice and the Catholic Church examines the presence of racism in America from its early history through the Civil Rights Movement and the election of Barack Obama. It also explores how Catholic social teaching has been used - and not used - to promote reconciliation and justice.

Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant follows Franklin's remarkable career through the lens of the trends and innovations that the Protestant Reformation started (both directly and indirectly) almost two centuries earlier. His work as a printer, civic reformer, institution builder, scientist, inventor, writer, self-help dispenser, politician, and statesmen was deeply rooted in the culture and outlook that Protestantism nurtured.

The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago, yet our nation remains fiercely divided over its enduring legacies. In A Thousand May Fall, Pulitzer Prize finalist Brian Matthew Jordan returns us to the war itself. Creating an intimate, absorbing chronicle from the ordinary soldier's perspective, he allows us to see the Civil War anew - and through unexpected eyes.

This indelible quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applies especially well to California, where legend has so thoroughly become fact that it is visible in everyday landscapes. Our foremost historian of the West, Richard White, never content to "print the legend," collaborates here with his son, a talented photographer, in excavating the layers of legend built into California's landscapes. Together they expose the bedrock of the past, and the history they uncover is astonishing.

On a windy night in 1937, a 17-year-old German naval sub-cadet is wandering along the seawall when he stumbles upon a gang of ruffians beating up a tramp, whose life he saves. The man is none other than spymaster Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, German military intelligence. Canaris adopts the young man and dubs him "Cesare" after the character in the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for his ability to break through any barrier as he eliminates the Abwehr's enemies.

In a feat of remarkable research and timely reclamation, Eric K. Washington uncovers the nearly forgotten life of James H. Williams (1878-1948), the chief porter of Grand Central Terminal's Red Caps - a multitude of Harlem-based Black men whom he organized into the essential labor force of America's most august railroad station. Washington reveals that despite the highly racialized and often exploitative nature of the work, the Red Cap was a highly coveted job for college-bound Black men determined to join New York's bourgeoning middle class.

Empathy has become a gaping fault line in American culture. Pioneering programs aim to infuse our legal and educational systems with more empathic thinking, even as pundits argue over whether we should bother empathizing with our political opposites at all. Meanwhile, we are inundated with the buzzily termed "empathic marketing" - which may very well be a contradiction in terms. In I Feel You, Cris Beam carves through the noise with a revelatory exploration of how we perform empathy, how it is learned, what it can do - indeed, what empathy is in the first place.

America is at a crossroads. We are alienated from civic engagement, and our democracy is in doubt. Yet there is a new energy in the air. Young people are again taking up the role they've often held: as leaders of change, demanding a better future, wielding their votes to uphold democracy and lead the country forward. Enter Generation Citizen, an organization dedicated to empowering youth through revitalizing civics education across America.

What does it mean to be a Jewish woman in America? In a gripping historical narrative, Pamela S. Nadell weaves together the stories of a diverse group of extraordinary people - from the colonial-era matriarch Grace Nathan and her great-granddaughter, poet Emma Lazarus, to labor organizer Bessie Hillman and the great justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to scores of other activists, workers, wives, and mothers who helped carve out a Jewish American identity.

A devout Puritan minister in 17th-century New England, Roger Williams was also a social critic, diplomat, theologian, and politician who fervently believed in tolerance. Banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and laid the foundations for the colony of Rhode Island as a place where Indian and English cultures could flourish side by side, in peace. James A. Warren tells the remarkable and little-known story of the alliance between Roger Williams's Rhode Island and the Narragansett Indians, and how they joined forces to retain their autonomy and their distinctive ways of life against Puritan encroachment.

Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States - one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans.