history

Presents the biography of Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon.com. Also describes how Bezos and Amazon changed the way people use the Internet.

"[Presents] inspirational stories of ten Black women and women's collectives from Canadian and American history. Included are leaders and groundbreakers who were anti-slavery activists, business women, health-care activists, civic organizers and educators"--Provided by publisher.

Looks at the life of Charles B. Darrow, the creator of the Monopoly board game.

In 1940, Bill Ash sacrificed his American citizenship to join in the fight against Hitler. He flew Spitfires for Britain as a fighter pilot. Shot down over France in March 1942, he evaded capture for months before being betrayed. Tortured and sentenced to death he was saved from the firing squad by the Luftwaffe and by Stalag Luft III, the "Greaf Escape" prison camp. He attempted over a dozen break-outs and is one of the war's greatest escapees.

Gail Lumet Buckley is the daughter of Lena Horne. Starting with her great-great-grandfather Moses Calhoun, a house slave who became a successful businessman in post-war Atlanta, she follows two branches of the family: one that stayed in the South and the other that settled in Brooklyn. From Atlanta during the Reconstruction, the rise of Jim Crow, New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, to world wars and the civil rights movement, her family participated in the most crucial turning points in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

For more than twenty-five years the March of the Living in Poland has brought together survivors and students from all over the world to ensure that firsthand accounts of the Holocaust are not lost. As they walk through concentration camps, ghettos, and towns depleted of Jewish communities, a special bond forms as the original witnesses to the Holocaust pass their mantle to a new generation whose task it is to remember what they hear and see. Although Jews were the largest group slated for extermination, the Nazis also killed those who differed with Nazi beliefs: trade unionists, Communists, homosexuals, Roma (gypsies), Russian POW's, and the disabled. But the Jewish people alone were ultimately subjected to the goal of total annihilation.

Forty-two-year old Alonzo Delano joined the California Gold Rush to California hoping to cure a lung ailment and strike it rich. He was a highly observant and intelligent man and frequently wrote to his family in Illinois about his western life. Eventually these letters became a book, Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings. His satirical style of writing influenced such writers as Mark Twain. He lived in Grass Valley California, until his death in 1874.

World War I was war and death on an unprecended scale. At first it was viewed by the British as a glorious adventure and the conflict that began in August 1914 was said to be over by Christmas. Even when that was no longer true, thousands of British boys lied about their ages so they could join up. This book contains stories about young men who were not yet twenty when they won the highest awards their country could bestow. Some did not survive the war, some did, some went on to serve in World War II. Their reckless indifference to death inspired the title of this book.

First published in 1977, this is the diary of a Jewish prisoner who was in a German concentration camp during World War II. It weaves poetry and powerful insights into the emotional life of a camp prisoner. David Koker was twenty-one when he was transported to the Vught Concentration Camp in 1943 and he recorded his thoughts, feelings, and observations almost daily. He was able to smuggle 73,000 words our of the camp, almost a year's worth of entries. In June 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz, then to Langenbielan in August 1944, and on to Dachau in February 1945. He did not survive the journey to Dachau.

On April 29, 1945, the forward battalions of Rainbow Division, 42nd Infantry, were moving swiftly toward Munich. They had survived four months of costly and bitter combat. They were optimistic and confident as the war was coming to an end. Amost half of the soldiers were eighteen to twenty years old. And then their road led to the liberation of Dachau Concentration Camp. To the horrors of war they added the horrors of Dachau. This book honors the memories of the American liberators whose lives were forever changed by what they saw on April 29, 1945. The editor of the book was a Rainbow soldier.