In 1859, families discover the lure of the Old West as they settle in territories from Wyoming to Kansas. Meanwhile, a gruff cowboy soon finds himself on the run with a prostitute and a young boy after killing a fellow gunman.
With the help of a German bounty hunter, a freed slave sets out to rescue his wife from a brutal Mississippi plantation owner.
The story of Edgardo Mortara, a young Jewish boy living in Bologna, Italy, who in 1858, after being secretly baptized, was forcibly taken from his family to be raised as a Christian. His parents’ struggle to free their son became part of a larger political battle that pitted the papacy against forces of democracy and Italian unification.
In the Bendigo Goldfields in 1855, the charismatic headman of the Chinese mining camp suddenly finds himself struggling to maintain the fragile harmony between Chinese and European diggers and authorities when a murdered European woman is discovered to have links with the Chinese community.