For thousands of years, West African griots (men) and griottes (women) have recited the stories of their people. Without this oral tradition, Bettye Kearse would never have known she is a descendant of President James Madison and his slave, and half-sister, Coreen. 

This is the story of the United States outside the United Sates. It is the expansive tale of America’s global conquests, the actual territories this country has inhabited and governed to build an empire.

Winston Churchill knew the outcome of the war rested on the battle for the Atlantic.  What he didn’t know was his solution would evolve from a game.

The 1960 Rome Olympics: 18 days of theater, suspense, victory and defeat. Some of the most honored athletes in Olympic history competed there: decathlete Rafer Johnson, sprinter Wilma Rudolph, Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila, and Louisville boxer Cassius Clay, who at eighteen seized the world stage for the first time, four years before he became Muhammad Ali.

In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 landed behind barbed wire fences on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain.

Three edgy superpowers. One tension-filled week. The Yalta Conference in February 1945 threatened to tear the wartime alliance among Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin apart—just when victory was close at hand. But there’s more to this story:  three intelligent (and very glamorous) young women were also there: Anna Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill and Kathleen Harriman.

What happens when a bestselling novelist hooks up with a hard-hitting Boston-based true crime writing team? An explosive new book about the last days of a music legend: John Lennon. “We were the best bloody band there was,” the former Beatle said.  “There was nobody to touch us.” Nobody except the nowhere man. 

It took a global war and a pandemic to blaze this trail. A month after war broke out in 1914, doctors Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson set out for Paris. They opened a hospital in a luxury hotel and treated hundreds of casualties plucked from France's battlefields.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. The established script for a family like this was: work hard, set goals, move up, be happy. But there was another story behind the scenes: psychological breakdown, shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

The second most powerful man in the world was Admiral William D. Leahy.  Aside from FDR, no American did more to shape World War II.  Not Douglas MacArthur. Not Dwight Eisenhower.  Not even the legendary George Marshall.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the national bestseller "Cleopatra" unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials.