History tells us that the Second World War broke Britain as a great power, diminishing its military strength, ruining its economy, and precipitating a striking wave of decolonization. Nationalists and new superpowers dominated the post-war landscape, and the country was on the slide. But no one knew this in 1945—the leading politicians, the top civil servants, and the most knowledgeable experts, all expected the British Empire to remain intact long into the future.

A major new history that transforms our understanding of World War II—tracing the conflict and its most infamous crime, the Holocaust, to Germany’s implacable hostility towards Soviet Russia.

By mid-1863, the Civil War, with Northern victories in the West and Southern triumphs in the East, seemed unwinnable for Abraham Lincoln. Robert E. Lee’s bold thrust into Pennsylvania, if successful, could mean Southern independence. In a desperate countermove, Lincoln ordered George Gordon Meade—a man hardly known and hardly known in his own army—to take command of the Army of the Potomac and defeat Lee’s seemingly invincible Army of Northern Virginia. Just three days later, the two great armies collided at a small town called Gettysburg.

Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these "diaries of the night" in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.

From award-winning and bestselling author David Nasaw, a revelatory reexamination of post-World War II America and the nation's unhealed traumas, exposing the fault lines that characterized the country then and now.

The American Revolution was at once a war for independence, a civil war, and a world war, fought by neighbors on American farms and between global powers an ocean or more away. Historian Geoffrey C. Ward ably steers us through the international forces at play, telling the story not from the top down but from the bottom up—and through the eyes of not only our “Founding Fathers” but also those of ordinary soldiers, as well as underrepresented populations, asking who exactly was entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Following the Battle of Agincourt, Henry V's second invasion of France in 1417 launched a campaign that would place the crown of France on an English head. By the time of Henry's premature death in 1422, nearly all of northern France lay in his hands and the Valois heir to the throne had been disinherited. Only Joan of Arc—a visionary peasant girl who claimed divine guidance—was able to halt the English advance, but not for long. Just six months after her death, Henry's young son was crowned in Paris as the first, and last, English king of France.

This book presents the remarkable personal journals of German soldier Hans Roth. Writing as events transpired, he recorded the mystery and tension as the Germans deployed on the Soviet frontier in June 1941. In these journals, battles are described in "you are there" detail, as Roth wrote privately, as if to keep himself sane, knowing that his honest accounts of the horrors in the East could never pass through Wehrmacht censors.

In 1930, as a young woman, Christa Schroeder became a stenographer for the Nazi party, before being noticed by Hitler who, in 1933, hired her as his private secretary. Schroeder remained by Hitler's side, fiercely loyal, for twelve years, living at the Wolfsschanze and even joining him and his staff in the Führerbunker in Berlin in January 1945. In 1945, interned in the Augsburg camp, Christa Schroeder was interrogated by French liaison officer Albert Zoller who asked her to recount her years spent with the Führer.

In popular memory, the Second World War was an unalloyed victory for freedom over totalitarianism, marking the demise of the age of empires and the triumph of an American-led democratic order. In Scorched Earth, historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin dispatches the myth of World War II as a good war. Instead, he depicts the conflict as it truly was: a massive battle beset by vicious racial atrocities, fought between rival empires across huge stretches of Asia and Europe.