Peter S. Canellos provides us with a fascinating biography of a Supreme Court judge who was the sole dissenter in both the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in which the court held that the Constitution established the separate-but-equal doctrine.

For more than three decades, Mike Davis has offered clear and often stinging counterpoints to the prevailing vision of the “California Dream.”

In “The Agitators,” Dorothy Wickenden explores 19th-century intersections of class, racism and patriarchy through the lives of the escaped slave Harriet Tubman and the activists Martha Wright and Frances Seward.

One of the most fascinating stories of the 20th century belongs to Walter Ciszek, S.J., an American Jesuit priest who spent two decades laboring in the Soviet Union after he was accused of being a Vatican spy.

No list of brilliant Catholic novelists would be complete without Dame Muriel Spark.

John L'Heureux was rightly praised for his novels, short stories, poetry and memoir. But how many other writers do you know also once wrote an experimental eucharistic prayer?