A brief biography of civil rights activist Rosa Parks, who in 1955, refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, leading to a year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.
Profiles approximately sixty individuals who played significant roles in the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Medgar Evers, and Diane Nash, and includes a glossary and a further reading list.
In 1956 Sweden, eleven-year-old Joel and his father, a logger who was once a sailor, live alone with their secrets, including Joel's secret society that meets at night and his father's new romantic interest.
Nick endures servitude, beatings, and more after his British father's plantation in Burma is invaded by the Japanese in 1941, and when his father and others are taken prisoner and Nick is stranded with his friend Mya, they plan a daring escape on elephants, risking their lives to save Nick's father and Mya's brother from a Japanese prisoner of war camp.
Offers an introduction to the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, chronicling the events that surrounded the killings and the reasons behind the Khmer Rouge's bloody attacks.
In 1989, when fifteen-year-old Jude's mother wins a Fulbright fellowship to study art in Czechoslovakia, the family postpones a planned move to Utah to join her, but the political situation and the move itself are too much for Jude, who is overwhelmed by a previously undiagnosed psychological disorder.
Presents a biography on Sir Winston Churchill, who was Britain's Prime Minister during the most difficult days of World War Two and chronicles his childhood, military, and political career.
The author, who was a chief correspondent for the New York Times in Germany, recalls the events associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Communist governments throughout Eastern Europe.
When eleven-year-old Violet runs away from home in 1918 and takes the train to New York City to find her older sister who is a suffragist, she falls in with people her parents would call "the wrong sort, " and ends up in Nashville, Tennessee, where "Suffs" and "Antis" are gathered, awaiting the crucial vote on the nineteenth amendment.
Twelve-year-old Clyde Thomason's older brother is a guard on the Freedom Train, which is carrying the Bill of Rights and other documents throughout the country in 1948, but Clyde is also learning about rights and freedom as he is saved from a beating by an African American boy, and later returns the favor when men in their Atlanta suburb decide to show the "Nigras" their place.
