biography

Meet civil rights leaders who were inspiring individuals as well as leaders in their fields: inventor, activist, orator, scientist. Learn about their childhoods, achievements, and contributions that made the world a better place. Biographies feature fascinating facts and archival photography that vividly illustrate the amazing lives of each hero.

Harriet Tubman was born a slave and dreamed of being free. She was willing to risk everything including her own life to see that dream come true. After her daring escape, Harriet became a conductor on the secret Underground Railroad, helping more than three hundred other slaves make the dangerous journey to freedom.

"What if all of the presidents were online? From how they grew up to how they led, learn what historians know about these incredible leaders and find out what they're saying to each other! Just flip the page to follow the leaders! Was Teddy Roosevelt a cute kid in his Throwback Thursday photos? Whose no-shave November facial hair is better, Lincoln's or Taft's? Just how many selfies did JFK take in the oval office?"--Page [4] cover.

"For nearly a decade, award-winning New York Times journalist Amy Chozick chronicled Hillary Clinton's pursuit of the presidency. Chozick's assignments, covering Clinton's imploding 2008 campaign and then her front-row seat to the 2016 election on "The Hillary Beat," set off a years-long journey in which the formative years of Chozick's twenties and thirties became, both personally and professionally, intrinsically intertwined with Clinton's presidential ambitions. As Clinton tried, and twice failed, to shatter "that highest, hardest glass ceiling," Chozick was trying, with various fits and starts, to scale the highest echelons of American journalism. In this rollicking, hilarious narrative, Chozick takes us through the high- (and low-) lights of the most noxious and dramatic presidential election in American history. Chozick's candor and clear-eyed perspective--from her seat on the Hillary bus and reporting from inside the campaign's Brooklyn headquarters to her run-ins with Donald J. Trump--provide fresh intrigue and insights into the story we thought we all knew. This is the real story of what happened, with the kind of dishy, inside details that repeatedly surprise and enlighten. But Chasing Hillary is also the unusually personal and moving memoir of how Chozick came to understand Clinton not as an unknowable enigma and political animal, but as a complete, complex person, full of contradictions and forged in the crucible of political battles that had long predated Chozick's years covering her. And as Chozick gets engaged, married, buys an apartment, climbs the professional ladder, and inquires about freezing her eggs so she can have children after the 2016 campaign, she dives deeper into decisions Clinton had made at similar points in her early career. In the process, Chozick develops an intimate understanding of what drives Clinton, how she accomplished what no woman had before, and why she ultimately failed. Chozick also reveals how the social fissures in the electorate that drove angry voters to Trump and blindsided Clinton would unexpectedly bring out the tensions in Chozick's own life--between the red state she came from and the blue state she ended up in, and her desire to climb in her career as a woman but be treated no differently than a man. Clinton's shocking defeat would mark the end of the almost imperial hold she'd had on Chozick for most of her professional life. But the results also make Chozick question everything she'd worked so hard for in the first place. Political journalism had failed. The elite world Chozick had tried for years to fit in with had been rebuffed. The less qualified, bombastic man had triumphed (as they always seem to do), and Clinton had retreated to the woods in Chappaqua, finally comfortable enough to just walk, no makeup, no pants suit, showing the real person Chozick had spent years hoping to see. Illuminating, poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, Chasing Hillary is a campaign book unlike any other that reads like a fast-moving political novel"--Dust jacket.

This sweeping work covers world cultures from prehistory through the year 700 C.E. With in-depth analysis of civilizations, key figures, cities, cultures and daily life. Its three volumes stretch beyond the boundaries of the ancient world of Greece, Rome and Egypt, to include Egypt, China, the Near East, Europe, Africa, the Americas and more, to provide true world coverage. The set begins with 26 overview essays, from Agriculture to Writing Systems, followed by 1,100 alphabetically arranged essays on persons, cultures, wars, battles, documents or works, traditions or cultural phenomena, structures or artifacts, places or sites, terms, and groups or civilizations. Next, over 200 entries provide in-depth overviews of historic civilizations, times and places. Lastly, the set provides detailed descriptions of "life as" an individual living in a given time and place. Coverage is broad in scope, yet easy to use, with guides for pronunciation, geography, word usage, and timelines included. Additional appendices include a Categorized List of Contents, Timeline, Geographical Guide to Ancient World, Glossary, Websites, and Bibliography, as well as a Name Index and a comprehensive Subject Index. Not only does the set provide encyclopedic coverage of the Ancient World and its civilizations, but it goes on to offer students and researchers new insight into what it meant to live in a specific time and place. No other reference tool provides this unique combination of material. -- Amazon.com.

"In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau, the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life. During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved man ate peaches and watermelon that grew in the backyard and talked about Cudjo's past--memories from his childhood in Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War. Based on those interviews, featuring Cudjo's unique vernacular, and written from Hurston's perspective with the compassion and singular style that have made her one of the preeminent American authors of the twentieth-century, Barracoon masterfully illustrates the tragedy of slavery and of one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture."--Publisher's website.

"The true story for middle grade readers of First Lt. Jack Montgomery, a Native American who received the Medal of Honor for his valor in World War II."--Provided by publisher.

Profiles four women who have been integral to NASA's space program, helping to develop the Hubble Space Telescope, create computer code to send spacecraft to the moon, and work onboard the space shuttle.