Amazing Grace tells the story of the remarkable life of the British abolitionist William Wilberforce (1759-1833). This accessible biography chronicles Wilberforce's extraordinary role as a human rights activist, cultural reformer, and member of Parliament. At the center of this heroic life was a passionate twenty-year fight to abolish the British slave trade, a battle Wilberforce won in 1807, as well as efforts to abolish slavery itself in the British colonies, a victory achieved just three days before his death in 1833.

Caesar Augustus created the Roman Empire and forever associated the name Caesar with power. Heir to Julius Caesar, he thrust himself into the middle of Roman politics at its most violent period, facing off against Brutus, and eventually Antony and Cleopatra. He was a military dictator who schemed and killed his way to power and then brought the Romans peace and prosperity after all the chaos, laying the foundations of the famous Pax Romana.

In 1919, in Newfoundland, four teams of aviators came from Britain to compete in "the Big Hop": an audacious race to be the first to fly, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean. One pair of competitors was forced to abandon the journey halfway, and two pairs never made it into the air. Only one team, after a death-defying sixteen-hour flight, made it to Ireland.

Here are some of the most courageous missions executed by six-man teams on their own deep behind enemy lines. Ranging from the Central Highlands to the Mekong Delta to excursions—authorized and unauthorized—into Cambodia, these gripping accounts begin when the call first went out for covert US long-range reconnaissance patrols in late 1965, continue through the battles of Tet, and go all the way up to the final, tortured pullout.

In the early 1900s, many Americans actually believed we had discovered intelligent life on Mars, as bestselling science writer David Baron chronicles in The Martians, his truly bizarre tale of a nation swept up in Mars mania. At the center of Baron's historical drama is Percival Lowell, the Boston Brahmin and Harvard scion, who observed "canals" etched into the surface of Mars. Lowell devised a grand theory that the red planet was home to a utopian society that had built gargantuan ditches to funnel precious meltwater from the polar icecaps to desert farms and oasis cities.

In this comprehensive work, David Eltis offers a two-thousand-year perspective on the trafficking of people, and boldly intervenes in the expansive discussions about slavery in the last half-century. Using new and underexplored data made available by slavevoyages.org, Eltis offers compelling explanations of why the slave trades began and why they ended, and in the process debunks long-held assumptions, including how bilateral rather than triangular voyages were the norm, and how the Portuguese rather than the British were the leading slave traders.

Roger Dooley wasn’t looking for the San Jose. But an accidental discovery in the dusty stacks of a Spanish archive in the 1980s led him to the story of a lifetime—the journey of a ship that had gathered a mountain of riches from the New World for a long-awaited delivery to the King of Spain nearly three centuries earlier. But that ship, the galleon San Jose, never reached its destination. Instead, the Spanish treasure fleet was drawn into a pitched battle with British ships of war off the coast of Cartagena. When the smoke cleared, the San Jose had disappeared into the ocean.

In June 1944, an Allied army of British, American, and Canadian troops sought to open up a Second Front in Normandy. But they were not only fighting to bring the Second World War to an end. After decades of Anglo-American struggle for dominance, they were also contending with one another—to determine who would ascend to global hegemony once Hitler's armies fell. Marc Milner traces this bitter rivalry as it emerged after the First World War and evolved during the fragile peace which led to the Second.

In January 1945, the Red Army launched a powerful offensive across the Vistula River to drive the Wehrmacht out of Poland, with the intention of securing a start line for an operation that would ultimately result in the capture of Berlin and the end of the war. But, as Prit Buttar expertly reveals, there were other issues at play. Stalin was determined to push the boundaries of the Soviet Union further west, restoring land lost by the tsars and securing vast industrial and mineral wealth.

Winston Churchill once remarked that the only threat to truly frighten him was the peril of Nazi U-boats. Over the course of World War II, Germany’s submariners sank over three thousand Allied ships, nearly three-quarters of Allied shipping losses in all theaters of the war. In the process the submariners endured horrific conditions and suffered a 75 percent death rate, the highest of any arm of service in the conflict. In Wolfpack, historian Roger Moorhouse tells the story of the Battle of the Atlantic from the point of view of the German submariners.