American history

Abraham Lincoln always thought slavery was unjust — but struggled with what to do once slavery ended. Historian Eric Foner traces how Lincoln's thoughts about slavery — and freed slaves — mirrored America's own transformation in The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.

More than 6 million African-Americans moved from the South to cities in the Northeast and Midwest between 1915 and 1970. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson documents the resulting demographic and social changes in her history of the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns.

During the summer of 1896, a 10-day heat wave killed nearly 1,500 people across New York City — many of them tenement-dwellers. In Hot Time in the Old Town, historian Ed Kohn describes the disaster — and how a little-known police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt championed the efforts to help New Yorkers survive the heat.

Jonathan Eig's new book Get Capone reveals new insights about the famous Chicago gangster — including how freely he spoke to reporters, the time he shot himself in the groin, and how venereal disease eventually robbed him of his health and sanity.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Linda Greenhouse examines the public discourse that led to the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. She details the various legal briefs presented by both sides of the abortion debate to the court — and explains the newest challenges facing the legislation today.

Quanah Parker, considered the greatest Comanche chief, was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, a white pioneer woman kidnapped by a raiding party when she was a little girl. Their story — and the saga of the powerful American Indian tribe — is told by S.C. Gwynne in his new book, Empire of the Summer Moon.

Drinking didn't stop in the United States from 1920 to 1933 -- it just went underground. Author Daniel Okrent discusses the lasting cultural and political impact of Prohibition in his new book, Last Call.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. For the next two months, the man who shot him, James Earl Ray, was able to evade the FBI during a massive worldwide manhunt. Writer Hampton Sides traces the movements of both King and Ray in his new book, Hellhound on His Trail.

In 1937, frustrated by a conservative Supreme Court that struck down a series of his New Deal programs, President Franklin Roosevelt set about to reform the court — by expanding it and adding as many as six liberal justices. The controversial proposition is examined in writer Jeff Shesol's new book, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.

William Halsted is credited with creating the United States' first surgical residency program and transforming the way operating rooms are sterilized. He was also a morphine addict. Plastic surgeon Gerald Imber details Halsted's dual lives in the new biography Genius on the Edge.