california

Presents twenty trivia facts about the gold rush.

Seventeen-year-old Wendy Darling sets out to find her missing surfer brothers and finds herself on a secluded California beach, where she meets Pete, Belle, Jas, and others, learns to surf, helps some of them steal while avoiding the other's drug trade, and falls in love.

In 1849, twelve-year-old California Morning Whipple, who renames herself Lucy, is distraught when her mother moves the family from Massachusetts to a rough California mining town.

For fourteen-year-old budding artist Minoru Ito, her two brothers, her friends, and the other members of the Japanese-American community in southern California, the three months since Pearl Harbor was attacked have become a waking nightmare: attacked, spat on, and abused with no way to retaliate--and now things are about to get worse, their lives forever changed by the mass incarcerations in the relocation camps.

"Our camp, they tell us, is now to be called a 'relocation center' and not a 'concentration camp.' We are internees, not prisoners. Here's the truth: I am now a non-alien, stripped of my constitutional rights. I am a prisoner in a concentration camp in my own country. I sleep on a canvas cot under which is a suitcase with my life's belongings: a change of clothes, underwear, a notebook and pencil. Why?": Kiyo Sato In 1941 Kiyo Sato and her eight younger siblings lived with their parents on a small farm near Sacramento, California, where they grew strawberries, nuts, and other crops. Kiyo had started college the year before when she was eighteen, and her eldest brother, Seiji, would soon join the US Army. The younger children attended school and worked on the farm after class and on Saturday. On Sunday, they went to church. The Satos were an ordinary American family. Until they weren't. On December 7, 1941, Japan bombed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The next day, US president Franklin Roosevelt declared war on Japan and the United States officially entered World War II. Soon after, in February and March 1942, Roosevelt signed two executive orders which paved the way for the military to round up all Japanese Americans living on the West Coast and incarcerate them in isolated internment camps for the duration of the war. Kiyo and her family were among the nearly 120,000 internees. In this moving account, Sato and Goldsmith tell the story of the internment years, describing why the internment happened and how it impacted Kiyo and her family. They also discuss the ways in which Kiyo has used her experience to educate other Americans about their history, to promote inclusion, and to fight against similar injustices. Hers is a powerful, relevant, and inspiring story to tell on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.

In a predominately white California beach town, the only two black seventh-graders, Alberta and Edie, find hidden journals that uncover family secrets and speak to race relations in the past.

The Dunne family share a one-room dugout in the Oklahoma Panhandle and hang on to their precious land until the droughts of the thirties force them to join the exodus to California. There they find a labor system set up to abuse "Okies." The Dunnes join their fellow workers to resist and improve migrant working conditions.

An introduction to the "Golden State," the most populated state and the top farming and manufacturing state.

Eight-year-old EllRay Jakes's attempts to defend himself against the class bully always end up getting him in trouble, but he promises to do his best when his dad offers to take him to Disneyland if he can be good for an entire week--which may be a few days too long.

After Andromeda Klein's tarot card readings prove to be accurate, she discovers clues to secret truths connected to her family and friends, but things become stranger when Andromeda's dead friend Daisy starts to harass her.