SILENT NIGHT brings to life one of the most unlikely and touching events in the annals of war. In the early months of WWI, on Christmas Eve, men on both sides left their trenches, laid down their arms, and joined in a spontaneous celebration with their new friends, the enemy. For a brief, blissful time, remembered since in song and story, a world war stopped. Even the participants found what they were doing incredible. Germans placed candle-lit Christmas trees on trench parapets and warring soldiers sang carols. In the spirit of the season they ventured out beyond their barbed wire to meet in No Man's Land, where they buried the dead in moving ceremonies, exchanged gifts, ate and drank together, and joyously played football, often with improvised balls. The truce spread as men defied orders and fired harmlessly into the air. But, reluctantly, they were forced to re-start history's most bloody war. SILENT NIGHT vividly recovers a dreamlike event, one of the most extraordinary of Christmas stories.

The untold history of the multiracial making of the border between Canada and the United States. Often described as the longest undefended border in the world, the Canada-United States border was born in blood, conflict, and uncertainty. At the end of the American Revolution, Britain and the United States imagined a future for each of their nations that stretched across a continent. They signed treaties with one another dividing lands neither country could map, much less control. A century and a half later, they had largely fulfilled those earlier ambitions. Both countries had built nations that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had created an expansive international border that restricted movement. The vision that seemed so clear in the minds of diplomats and politicians was never so well-defined on the ground. As A Line of Blood and Dirt argues, both countries built their border across Indigenous lands using hunger, violence, and coercion to displace existing communities and to disrupt their ideas of territory and belonging. Drawing on oral histories, map visualizations, and archival sources, Benjamin Hoy reveals the role Indigenous people played in the development of the international boundary, as well as the impact the border had on Indigenous people, European settlers, Chinese migrants, and African Americans. Unable to prevent movement at the border's physical location for over a century, Canada and the United States instead found ways to project fear across international lines. Bringing together the histories of tribes, immigration, economics, and the relationship of neighboring nations, A Line of Blood and Dirt offers a new history of Indigenous peoples and the borderland.