“One July day four hundred years ago, Samuel de Champlain stepped out of a small boat at Quebec and began a great adventure.” So begins Christopher Moore’s riveting account of the life of the extraordinary, daring “father of New France.”Samuel de Champlain helped found the first permanent French settlement in the New World; he established the village that eventually became the great city of Quebec; he was a skilled cartographer who gave us many of our first accurate maps of North A...

During the American Revolution and the border conflicts that followed, Simon Girty's name struck terror into the hearts of U.S. settlers in the Ohio Valley and the territory of Kentucky. Girty (1741-1818) had lived with the Natives most of his life. Scorned by his fellow white frontiersmen as an "Indian lover," Girty became an Indian agent for the British. He accompanied Native raids against Americans, spied deep into enemy territory, and was influential in convincing the tribes to fight f...

The #1 bestselling chapter book series of all time celebrates 25 years with new covers and a new, easy-to-use numbering system! Getting the facts behind the fiction has never looked better. Track the facts with Jack and Annie!!When Jack and Annie got back from their adventure in Magic Tree House #4: Pirates Past Noon, they had lots of questions. Did pirates really make people walk the plank? What was life like on a pirate ship? Is there any buried treasure around today? Ar...

Adapted from the New York Times bestseller Mayflower!After a dangerous journey across the Atlantic, the Mayflower?s passengers were saved from certain destruction with the help of the Natives of the Plymouth region. For fifty years a fragile peace was maintained as Pilgrims and Native Americans learned to work together. But when that trust was broken by the next generation of leaders, a conflict erupted that nearly wiped out Pilgrims and Natives alike. Adapted fro...

Just 50,000 years ago, our hunter-gatherer ancestors ventured off the African savannah and into the wider world. Now, our technology reaches far out into the cosmos. How did we get to where we are today?With lively text and colorful illustrations, From Then to Now explains how individual societies struggled to find their own paths, despite war, disease, slavery, natural disasters, and the relentless growth of human knowledge. From Hammurabi to Henry Ford, from Inca...

Marco Polo was seventeen when he set out for China . . . and forty-one when he came back! More than seven hundred years ago, Marco Polo traveled from the medieval city of Venice to the fabled kingdom of the great Kublai Khan, seeing new sights and riches that no Westerner had ever before witnessed. But did Marco Polo experience the things he wrote about . . . or was it all made-up? Young readers are presented with the facts in this entertaining, highly readable Who Was . . . ? bio...

As a young boy, Charles Darwin hated school and was often scolded forconducting “useless” experiments. Yet his passion for the natural world was so strong that he suffered through terrible seasickness during his five-year voyage aboard The Beagle. Darwin collected new creatures from the coasts of Africa, South America, and the Galapagos Islands, and expanded his groundbreaking ideas that would change people's understanding of the natural world. About 100 illustrations and a clear, exciting...

History is dramatic—and the renowned, award-winning authors Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier demonstrate this in a compelling series aimed at young readers.Covering American history from the founding of Jamestown through present day, these volumes explore far beyond the dates and events of a historical chronicle to present a moving illumination of the ideas, opinions, attitudes, and tribulations that led to the birth of this great nation.

When Portuguese sailor Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Spain in 1519, he believed he could get to the Spice Islands by sailing west through or around the New World. He was right, but what he didn't know was that the treacherous voyage would take him three years and cost him his life. Black-and-white line drawings illustrate Magellan's life and voyage, with sidebars and a time line that enhance readers' understanding of the period.

Fascinated by what lies beyond the boundaries of human experience, men and women have throughout history been irresisibly drawn to venture into the unknown. Explorers charts the astonishing feats of history's most intrepid pathfinders. From the early voyages of the Ancient Greek mariner Colaeus, who first discovered that beyond the Mediterranean lay a far greater ocean, to the compelling tale of the race for the poles. this book encompasses the discovery and exploration of the gre...

When Shizuye Takashima, “Shichan” as she was called, was eleven years old, her entire world changed forever. As a Japanese-Canadian in 1941, she was among thousands of people forced from their homes and sent to live in internment camps in the Canadian Rockies. Although none had been convicted of any crime, they were considered the enemy because the country was at war with Japan. In this true story of sadness and joy, Shichan recalls her life in the days leading up to her family’s forced mo...

David Thompsons story is one of the great tales of North American adventure. His life was a mixture of truth and legend, but he was without a doubt one of the greatest surveyors and mapmakers of the North American continent. Raised in a charity school in London, England, and apprenticed to the Hudsons Bay Company as a teenager, he then travelled extensively, recording valuable navigational information. His life was one of adventure and hardship but also of incredible accomplishment.