Same-sex marriage is now the law in Lerner Publishing Group’s home state of Minnesota, making us the twelfth state to legalize same-sex marriage. Governor Dayton signed the act into law in May of this year, and same-sex marriages began taking place last week, just after midnight on August 1, 2013. In addition, with a recent US Supreme Court ruling, DOMA is officially dead, so it’s a great time to look again at a couple of TFCB titles that offer perfect background reading. Same-Sex Marriage by Tricia Andryszewski covers the U.S. struggle for marriage equality from a pro/con perspective, while Gay Power: The Stonewall Riots and the Gay Rights Movement by Betsy Kuhn takes a broader look at the modern gay rights movement in the United States, starting with the Stonewall event in New York City in 1969.

In the meantime, here’s a teaser on a soon-to-be-released TFCB title that tackles another type of recentering, this one scientific. In the 1500s and 1600s, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton began to ask questions about the universe that eventually upended the long-held belief that Earth lay at its center. Quoting from original sources, Recentering the Universe, by Ron Miller, tells the story of the epic struggle between faith and science. It’s a fascinating look at the scientific method, at human personality, and at history in the making.

I’ll have more in the next weeks and months about other great new titles in TFCB’s Fall 2013 list, so stay tuned!