Inspired by the University of Illinois's celebration of the Brown v. Board of Education decision's fiftieth anniversary, this collection addresses the significance of Brown in the contributors' lives or work in education and civil rights. Several authors describe their personal roles in the Brown case or similar cases, while others examine and illustrate events, performances, and exhibitions that were part of the anniversary commemoration. The book not only explo...

The true story of a family's fight for their educational future in "a sure-to-be-classic account of 1960s desegregation" ( Los Angeles Times ).With an Introduction by New York Times –bestselling author Marian Wright Edelman"The most important thing we can give our children is an education." —Mae Bertha CarterIn 1965, the Carters, an Afric...

"Stripped-down . . . sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams's best songs," in an Oprah's book club pick about married life in Appalachia ( The New York Times Book Review ).Young Julie Harmon works "hard as a man," they say, so hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her to slaughter the hogs and nurse the dying. People are weak, and there is so much to do. At just seventeen s...

The face of modern-day Cuba is in many respects still frozen in the 1950s, with its classic American cars, horse-drawn carriages and colonial Spanish architecture. In a country where taxi drivers earn more than doctors, understanding Cuba is a compelling but never-ending task.In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Cuba was plunged into crisis. Having been subsidized by the Soviet Union to the tune of $3 million a day, the country's economy entered freefall. The ban ...

This is the brutal history of Auckland Island, a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean that faces year-round freezing rain and howling winds, making it one of the most forbidding places in the world—where to be shipwrecked means almost certain death.In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relent...

The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents wit...

In the segregated South, a young girl’s life is changed forever: “A beautifully written literary novel [and] a real page-turner.” —Lee Smith, New York Times-bestselling author of Blue MarlinOn a scorching day in August 1954, thirteen-year-old Jubie Watts leaves Charlotte, North Carolina, with her family for a Florida vacation. Crammed into the Packard along with Jubie are her three siblings, her mother, and the family’s black maid, Mary Luther. Fo...

In this true story, Armande Martel, a young nun from Quebec, is arrested by the Germans in 1940 during a stay at her religious order’s mother house in Brittany. She spends the war years in a German concentration camp. After her return to Canada, she leaves the Church, finds the love of her life in Montreal, and adopts Lise Dion.Growing up, Lise is familiar with only a few facts of her mother’s past. It’s when she clears her mother’s small apartment after her death that Lise Dion di...

#1 New York Times BestsellerAvailable in a special hardcover edition, Christina Baker Kline’s smash bestseller, a captivating historical novel that is “a lovely novel about the search for family that also happens to illuminate a fascinating and forgotten chapter of American history” (Ann Packer).Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of aband...

From #1 international bestselling author Ami McKay comes The Virgin Cure, the story of a young girl abandoned and forced to fend for herself in the poverty and treachery of post-Civil War New York City.McKay, whose debut novel The Birth House made headlines around the world, returns with a resonant tale inspired by her own great-great-grandmother's experiences as a pioneer of women's medicine in nineteenth-century New York.One summer night...

A sweeping historical novel about a shipwreck off North Carolina’s Outer Banks and the generations of survivors whose lives are shaped by the mystery, violence, and isolation that follow.Michael Parker’s vast and involving novel about pirates and slaves, treason and treasures, madness and devotion, takes place on a tiny island battered by storms and cut off from the world. Inspired by two little-known moments in history, it begins in 1813, when Theodosia Burr, en r...

Leo Litwak was a university student when he joined the Army to fight in World War II, "a na've, callow eighteen-year-old son prepared to join other soldier boys being hauled off to war." In 1944 he found himself in Belgium, in the middle of the waning European war, a medic trained to save lives but often powerless to do much more than watch life slip away. It was hard fighting that took Litwak and his rifle company into the heart of Germany at the close of the war. But Litwak learned there...