In 1942 German merchant Philipp Manes and his wife were ordered by the Nazis to leave their middle class neighborhood and go live in Theresienstadt, the only so-called "showpiece" ghetto of the Third Reich. This model ghetto was set up by the Nazis as a front to show the world that the Jews were being treated humanely. The ghetto was run by a council of Jewish elders, and organized like an idyllic socialist utopia with theatre groups and debating societies. All the while, this was just a h...

Meet the overlooked women in history who loved, nurtured, and defended the famed American scientist and founding father.“ . . . highlights a side of Ben Franklin too often ignored by historians . . . and provides a necessary reminder that the women who came into his life are as deserving of our attention as Ben himself.” —Carol Berkin, author of Revolutionary MothersEveryone knows Benjamin Franklin—the thrifty inventor-statesman of...

" A compelling account of the lives of Japanese and Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II . . . instructive and moving."—Nippon.comFrom the editor of the award-winning Children of Manzanar, Heather C. Lindquist, and Edgar Award winner Naomi Hirahara comes a nuanced account of the "Resettlement": the relatively unexamined period when ordinary people of Japanese ancestry, having been unjustly imprisoned during World War II, were finally release...

Like Winchester's Krakatoa, The Year Without Summer reveals a year of dramatic global change long forgotten by historyIn the tradition of Krakatoa, The World Without Us, and Guns, Germs and Steel comes a sweeping history of the year that became known as 18-hundred-and-froze-to-death. 1816 was a remarkable year—mostly for the fact that there was no summer. As a result of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, weather patterns were disrupted wo...

In 1909, a bathtub drowning became one of the most famous and bizarre criminal cases in American history.On November 29, 1909, police were called to a ramshackle home in East Orange, New Jersey, where they found the emaciated body of twenty-four-year-old Oceana "Ocey" Snead facedown in the bathtub—dead of an apparent suicide by drowning. There was even a note left behind.But it would not take authorities long to discover that Ocey's death was no suicide. An...

A 1949 series of articles on life in post-World War II Germany, written by an undercover German reporter for an American paper—and the story behind them.Wolfe Frank was chief interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials where he was dubbed "The Voice of Doom." A playboy turned resistance worker branded an "enemy of the state—to be shot on sight," he had fled Germany for England in 1937. Initially interned as an "enemy alien," he was later allowed to join the British Army wh...

A blow-by-blow, ground-level account of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, the 2-month Polish Resistance effort to liberate Warsaw from Nazi occupation.Poland’s most famous post-war poet offers “the finest book about the insurrection of 1944”—an essential read for fans of WW2 history (John Carpenter).On August 1, 1944, Miron Białoszewski, later to gain renown as one of Poland’s most innovative poets, went out to run an errand for his mother and ran ...

A feminist reimagining of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale about a single mother and an enchanted friendship—from one of most bewitching British writers of the 20th century.“Comyns’s world is weird and wonderful . . . Tragic , comic and completely bonkers all in one, I’d go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius.” —The ObserverBella Winter has hit a low. Homeless and jobless, she is the mother of a toddler by a man whos...

For the first time, a bourgeois Catholic family tells their extraordinary story of working for the French Resistance in Nazi-occupied Paris during WW2.“ . . . a mix of history, biography and memoir which reads like a nerve-racking thriller.” —GuardianIn the autumn of 1943, André Boulloche became de Gaulle’s military delegate in Paris, coordinating all the Resistance movements in the 9 northern regions of France—only to be betrayed ...

Tour Versailles’ 2,100 acres as its gardener-in-chief of 40 years describes its fascinating history in this “eccentric and charming” love letter for gardeners and Francophiles (New York Times).In Alain Baraton’s Versailles, every grove tells a story. As the gardener-in-chief, Baraton lives on its grounds, and since 1982 he has devoted his life to the gardens, orchards, and fields that were loved by France’s kings and queens as much as the palace itself. Hi...

A thorough analysis of Allied actions after learning about the horrors of Nazi concentration camps—includes survivors' firsthand accounts.Why did they wait so long? Among the myriad questions of what the Allies could have done differently in World War II, understanding why it took them so long to respond to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps—specifically Auschwitz—remains vital today.In Auschwitz and the Allies, Martin Gilbert presents a c...

" Powerful . . . [Rosen] makes us see how the Holocaust's hidden children succeeded against the odds" in this #1 New York Times bestselling biography (W all Street Journal).Only one in ten Jewish children in Europe survived the Holocaust, many in hiding. In Such Good Girls, R. D. Rosen tells the story of these survivors through the true experiences of three girls.Sophie Turner-Zaretsky, who spent the war years believing she was an a...