The fascinating story of how free African Americans and runaway slaves crossed international borders to fight for freedom and racial justice.

FLASH... FLASH... FLASH...A lighthouse signals from the rocky shore, guiding ships away from danger. Once sailors watched for giant bonfires that were set high on hills. Now, most lighthouses are fully automated. In Beacons of Light: Lighthouses, Gail Gibbons tells all about these beautiful and useful structures, using careful explanations, colorful facts, and helpful illustrations to show how lighthouse technology has developed and changed over the years. FLASH... FLASH... FLASH... In this informative, delightfully evocative book, lighthouses are beacons of light thatremind us of our past.

How does history end? -- The Red Queen -- Will to power -- Economics outside the corridor -- Allegory of good government -- The European scissors -- Mandate of Heaven -- Broken Red Queen -- Devil in the details -- What's the matter with Ferguson? -- The paper leviathan -- Wahhab's children -- Red Queen out of control -- Into the corridor -- Living with the leviathan.

New Hampshire was once a hotbed of abolitionist activity. But the state had its struggles with slavery, with Portsmouth serving as a slave-trade hub for New England. Abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers and Stephen Symonds Foster helped create a statewide antislavery movement. Abolitionists and freed slaves assisted in transporting escapees to freedom via the Underground Railroad. Author Michelle Arnosky Sherburne uncovers the truth about slavery, the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement in New Hampshire.

A “deeply researched and bracing retelling” (Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian) of the American Revolution, showing how the Founders were influenced by overlooked Americans—women, Native Americans, African Americans, and religious dissenters. Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes. Holton describes the origins and crucial battles of the Revolution from Lexington and Concord to the British surrender at Yorktown, always focusing on marginalized Americans—enslaved Africans and African Americans, Native Americans, women, and dissenters—and on overlooked factors such as weather, North America’s unique geography, chance, misperception, attempts to manipulate public opinion, and (most of all) disease. Thousands of enslaved Americans exploited the chaos of war to obtain their own freedom, while others were given away as enlistment bounties to whites. Women provided material support for the troops, sewing clothes for soldiers and in some cases taking part in the fighting. Both sides courted native people and mimicked their tactics. Liberty Is Sweet is a “must-read book for understanding the founding of our nation” (Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin), from its origins on the frontiers and in the Atlantic ports to the creation of the Constitution. Offering surprises at every turn—for example, Holton makes a convincing case that Britain never had a chance of winning the war—this majestic history revivifies a story we thought we already knew.

Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie's Freedom's Seekers offers a bold and innovative intervention into the study of emancipation as a transnational phe-nomenon and serves as an important contribution to our understanding of the remaking of the nineteenth-century Atlantic Americas. Drawing on decades of research into slave and emancipation societies, Kerr-Ritchie is attentive to those who sought but were not granted freedom, and those who resisted enslavement individually as well as collectively on behalf of their communities. He explores the many roles that fugitive slaves, slave soldiers, and slave rebels played in their own societies. He likewise explicates the lives of individual freedmen, freedwomen, and freed children to show how the first free-born generation helped to shape the terms and conditions of the post-slavery world. Freedom's Seekers is a signal contribution to African Diaspora studies, especially in its rigorous respect for the agency of those who sought and then fought for their freedom, and its consistent attention to the transnational dimensions of emancipation.

The Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution are the greatest statements of human liberty ever written. They are the highest achievement of our political tradition, powerful beacons to all who strive for liberty. Taken together, these documents represent the liberating principles that America seeks to conserve for itself and proclaim to the world.If we are to restore and preserve America's principles, the truths to which we are dedicated and the common ideas that constitute us as a people, we must first rediscover them, writes Matthew Spalding, director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation.And that demands that we rediscover the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.