In January 1785, a young African American woman named Elizabeth (Liss) was put on board the Lucretia in New York Harbor, bound for Charleston, where she would be sold to her fifth enslaver in just twenty-two years. Leaving behind a small child she had little hope of ever seeing again, Elizabeth was faced with the stark reality of being sold south to a life quite different from any she had known before. She had no idea that Robert Townsend, a son of the first family she was enslaved by, would locate her, safeguard her child, and return her to New York—nor that Robert, one of George Washington's most trusted spies, had joined an anti-slavery movement. As Robert and Elizabeth’s story unfolds, prominent Revolutionary figures cross their path, including Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Jupiter Hammon, John André, and John Adams, as well as participants in the Boston Massacre, the Sons of Liberty, the Battle of Long Island, Franklin’s Paris negotiations, and the Benedict Arnold treason plot. Elizabeth's journey brings a new perspective to America's founding—that of an enslaved Black woman seeking personal liberty in a country fighting for its own. The 2023 paperback edition includes a new chapter highlighting recent discoveries about Elizabeth's freedom and later life.

IT IS 1764 IN CHARLES TOWN, SOUTH CAROLINA, and Harry's school for enslaved children has been in full swing for twenty years, despite the Negro Act of 1740. An enslaved person himself, Harry finds an unlikely ally in Hannah, a young Jewish girl from town who tutors Bintü, a recent acquisition of the prominent Reverend and Mistress Harte. But his school begins to feel the pressure as political winds shift and the Stamp Act causes revolt, uproar, and armed protests. Caught in the crossfire of impending revolution and increased animosity towards an educated enslaved population, Harry-and ultimately the two girls-will find their faith and integrity sorely tested. With relentless attention to historical accuracy, Blue-Eyed Slave levels an unflinching gaze at the cruelties of enslavement and shows that although human cruelty may be universal, the same is true for kindness and bravery.

“We have a right to encounter God where we are. We have a sacred responsibility to experience God authentically." What happens when the God we’ve been taught to believe in seems powerless to help us in the struggles of life? What do we do when the God we personally encounter no longer resembles the God we’ve been shown in narrow interpretations of the Bible? Many of those raised in the world of fundamentalist Christianity have been manipulated into accepting a false reality that runs counter to lived experience. The result is confusion, isolation, fear, shame, and trauma, often carried throughout one’s entire life. This book is for the victims of this spiritual abuse—anyone looking to reclaim their faith from legalism, nationalism, sexism, anxiety, intolerance, and other mechanisms of control utilized by God’s self-appointed gatekeepers. It’s for anyone who has learned that the real God is infinitely complex, that authentic faith is perfectly compatible with doubt, and that our suffering is not something we’ve earned. Gaslighted by God is not a book of easy answers—it’s a companion for those mourning the loss of a belief system who need their pain recognized and legitimized. Tiffany Yecke Brooks shows—through stories from her own life, conversations with Christians from a variety of backgrounds, historical anecdotes, and messy episodes from Scripture—that there can be faith after disillusionment. But it will be a different faith—bruised, battered, nuanced, and real, rather than one wrapped in tissue-thin platitudes and three-point sermons. It will be a faith empowered to see beyond who God “should” be to who God is.

In the mid-1930s, just as the United States was embarking on a policy of neutrality, Nazi Germany launched a program of espionage against the unwary nation. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s fascinating history provides the first full account of Nazi spies in 1930s America and how they were exposed in a high-profile FBI case that became a national sensation.

“An informative and often enthralling book…in the appealing style of Tom Clancy” (Kirkus Reviews) about the 1983 war game that triggered a tense, brittle period of nuclear brinkmanship between the United States and the former Soviet Union. What happened in 1983 to make the Soviet Union so afraid of a potential nuclear strike from the United States that they sent mobile ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) into the field, placing them on a three-minute alert Marc Ambinder explains the anxious period between the United States and the Soviet Union from 1982 to 1984, with the “Able Archer ’83” war game at the center of the tension. With astonishing and clarifying new details, he recounts the scary series of the close encounters that tested the limits of ordinary humans and powerful leaders alike. Ambinder provides a comprehensive and chilling account of the nuclear command and control process, from intelligence warnings to the composition of the nuclear codes themselves. And he affords glimpses into the secret world of a preemptive electronic attack that scared the Soviet Union into action. Ambinder’s account reads like a thriller, recounting the spy-versus-spy games that kept both countries—and the world—in check. From geopolitics in Moscow and Washington, to sweat-caked soldiers fighting in the trenches of the Cold War, to high-stakes war games across NATO and the Warsaw Pact, “Ambinder’s account of a serious threat of global annihilation…is spellbinding…a masterpiece of recent history” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). The Brink serves as the definitive intelligence, nuclear, and national security history of one of the most precarious times in recent memory and “shows the consequences of nuclear buildups, sometimes-careless language, and nervous leaders. Now, more than ever, those consequences matter” (USA TODAY).

WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.