History & Culture

In this stirring audiobook, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence....

Discovered in the attic in which she spent the last years of her life, Anne Frank’s remarkable diary has since become a world classic - a powerful reminder of the horrors of war and an eloquent testament to the human spirit....

At 16, Lady Jane Grey is about to be married off to a stranger and caught up in a conspiracy to rob her cousin, King Edward, of his throne....

Ten concentration camps. Ten different places where you are starved, tortured, and worked mercilessly. It's something no one could imagine. But it is what Yanek Gruener has to face....

Cordelia Carstairs is a Shadowhunter, a warrior trained since childhood to battle demons. When her father is accused of a terrible crime, she and her brother travel to London in hopes of preventing the family’s ruin....

A powerful and haunting debut novel about a little-known slice of history....

In this captivating young adult edition of her award-winning number one New York Times best seller, Laura Hillenbrand tells the story of a former Olympian's courage, cunning, and fortitude following his plane crash in enemy territory....

A critically acclaimed, multilayered romance set in the perilous days of World Wars I and II, where gods hold the fates - and the hearts - of four mortals in their hands....

The compelling account of how two heritages united in their struggle to gain freedom and equality in America. The first paths to freedom taken by runaway slaves led to Native American villages. There, black men and women found acceptance and friendship....

This compelling classic of a boy's coming of age during the Civil War is based on stories the author's grandfather told her about his own life....

Irene Gut was just 17 in 1939, when the Germans and Russians devoured her native Poland. Just a girl, really. But a girl who saw evil and chose to defy it....

When the Navy sends their elite, they send the SEALs. When the SEALs send their elite, they send SEAL Team Six—a secret unit made up of the finest soldiers in the country, if not the world. This is Howard Wasdin's story of beating the odds to become an elite American warrior....

At the outset of World War II, Denmark did not resist German occupation. Deeply ashamed of his nation's leaders, 15-year-old Knud Pedersen resolved with his brother....

Here are the real events that inspired Gary Paulsen to write Brian Robeson’s story in Hatchet, The River, Brian’s Winter, Brian’s Return, and Brian's Hunt....

The number one New York Times best-selling series that started with Stalking Jack the Ripper and Hunting Prince Dracula continues in this third bloody installment! A luxurious ocean liner becomes a floating prison of madness and horror when passengers are murdered one by one....

The construct of race has always been used to gain and keep power, to create dynamics that separate and silence. This remarkable reimagining of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning reveals the history of racist ideas in America....

Mara is a proud and beautiful slave girl who yearns for freedom in ancient Egypt, under the rule of Queen Hatshepsut....

Drawing from her experiences as an Indigenous scientist, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer demonstrated how all living things—from strawberries and witch hazel to water lilies and lichen—provide us with gifts and lessons every day in her bestselling book Braiding Sweetgrass....

It’s 1950, and as the French Quarter of New Orleans simmers with secrets, 17-year-old Josie Moraine is silently stirring a pot of her own....

When America won the Revolutionary War, its people offered General George Washington a crown. Two and a half centuries later, the House of Washington still sits on the throne. Like most royal families, the Washingtons have an heir and a spare....

A Different Mirror for Young People brings ethnic history alive through the words of people, including teenagers, who recorded their experiences in letters, diaries, and poems....

Germany, 1945. The soldiers who liberated the Gross-Rosen concentration camp said the war was over, but nothing feels over to 18-year-old Zofia Lederman. Her body has barely begun to heal; her mind feels broken. And her life is completely shattered....

Without bitterness or sentimentality, Francisco Jiménez finishes telling the story of his youth....

This spellbinding tale takes listeners to a sinister, magical, and war-torn world filled with richly drawn characters like trickster fauns, murderous soldiers, child-eating monsters, courageous rebels, and a long-lost princess hoping to be reunited with her family....

Join multi-award-winning author Philippa Gregory as she tells the story of English women over 900 years. There are plenty of books profiling exceptional women – this book is DIFFERENT. It’s about ordinary, everyday women – erased from history for centuries.

The moving story of an orphan, determined to know her own history, who discovers the true meaning of family. Twelve-year-old Crow has lived her entire life on a tiny, isolated piece of the starkly beautiful Elizabeth Islands in Massachusetts. Abandoned and set adrift in a small boat when she was just hours old, Crow’s only companions are Osh, the man who rescued and raised her, and Miss Maggie, their fierce and affectionate neighbor across the sandbar.

Melding the entirely true and the wildly fictional, Dead End in Norvelt is a novel about an incredible two months for a kid named Jack Gantos, whose plans for vacation excitement are shot down when he is "grounded for life" by his feuding parents, and whose nose spews bad blood at every little shock he gets. But plenty of excitement (and shocks) are coming Jack's way once his mom loans him out to help a fiesty old neighbor with a most unusual chore—typewriting obituaries filled with stories about the people who founded his utopian town.

When 11-year-old Langston's mother dies in 1946, he and his father leave rural Alabama for Chicago's brown belt as a part of what came to be known as the Great Migration. It's lonely in the small apartment with just the two of them, and Langston is bullied at school. But his new home has one fantastic thing. Unlike the whites-only library in Alabama, the local public library welcomes everyone. There, hiding out after school, Langston discovers another Langston, a poet whom he learns inspired his mother enough to name her only son after him.

Eleven-year-old Delphine and her younger sisters Vonetta and Fern travel to Oakland to meet their mother, Cecil, who abandoned their family years earlier. But even when Cecil gets them to her house, she shows no interest and seems to view them as nothing but a nuisance.

This first novel from Nebula Award-winning short story writer Ellen Klages was picked as a Junior Library Guild selection and named a Book Sense Number-One Children's Pick. It follows a young girl named Dewey, whose father is part of a super-secret project in 1943 Los Alamos. Dewey, a gifted scientist herself, slowly realizes the implications of "the gadget" her father is working on. She and Suze, another Los Alamos child, find comfort in each other's friendship.

Through the alternating voices of 12-year-old Morning Girl and her younger brother Star Boy, we step into the extraordinarily rich lives of an indigenous family on a Bahamian Island in 1492, just as their paradise is about to be discovered and a new world order begins to take shape.

New from Newbery Honor author Kirby Larson, the moving story of a Japanese American girl who is separated from her dog upon being sent to an incarceration camp during WWII. Although Mitsi Kashino and her family are swept up in the wave of anti-Japanese sentiment following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mitsi never expects to lose her home - or her beloved dog, Dash. But, as World War II rages and people of Japanese descent are forced into incarceration camps, Mitsi is separated from Dash, her classmates, and life as she knows it.

Grown-ups lie. That's one truth Beans knows for sure. He and his gang know how to spot a whopper a mile away, because they are the savviest bunch of barefoot conchs (that means "locals") in all of Key West. Not that Beans really minds. It's 1934, the middle of the Great Depression. With no jobs on the island and no money anywhere, who can really blame the grown-ups for telling a few tales? Besides, Beans isn't anyone's fool. In fact he has plans. Big plans. And the consequences might surprise even Beans himself.

Her name is Omakayas, or Little Frog, because her first step was a hop, and she lives on an island in Lake Superior. It is 1850 and the lives of the Ojibwe have returned to a familiar rhythm: they build their birchbark houses in the summer, go to the ricing camps in the fall to harvest and feast, and move to their cozy cedar log cabins near the town of LaPointe before the first snows.

They tell Jip he tumbled off the back of a wagon when he was small, and no one ever came back for him. He never had a reason to question this tale - but then a stranger shows up and begins asking about him around town. Who is this man, and could he possibly know something about Jip's past?

Tomi was born in Hawaii. His grandfather and parents were born in Japan and came to America to escape poverty. World War II seems far away from Tomi and his friends, who are too busy playing ball on their eighth-grade team, the Rats. But then Pearl Harbor is attacked by the Japanese, and the United States declares war on Japan. Japanese men are rounded up, and Tomi’s father and grandfather are arrested. It’s a terrifying time to be Japanese in America. But one thing doesn’t change: the loyalty of Tomi’s buddies, the Rats.

As Robert watches the townspeople's hostility toward the German Artist Hoffman build, he worries about his sensitive cousin Elliot's friendship with the artist. And he wonders more and more about the family secret everyone seems to be keeping from him - a secret involving Robert's father, a bomber pilot in Europe. Will Elliot's ability to detach himself from the turmoil around him be enough to sustain him when prejudice and suspicions erupt into violence? And can Robert find a way to deal with the truth about his family's past?

The winner of the Scott O’Dell Award, The Bomb is a powerful history lesson and a gripping tale of suspense that no listener will ever forget. In 1946, 16-year-old Sorry Rinamu watches as U.S. Navy warships appear off the coast of Bikini Island. The U.S. Government wants to test the deadly power of the atomic bomb—and Sorry’s island has been chosen as the test site. The young man knows he must stop the Americans from dropping the bomb—even if it means defying orders from the U.S. Government and risking his own life.

Jonathan’s older brother is away fighting with General Washington in Pennsylvania. But at 13, Jonathan is too young to fight. Still too young. Then one morning, April 3, 1778, the tavern bell sounds, calling men to arms. Eager to prove his mettle, with blood pounding in his ears, Jonathan joins the gathering men at the tavern to hear the news. With a 12-pound, six-foot-long flintlock musket loaned to him by the tavern keeper, Jonathan finds a place in with the other men, marching to battle.

Twelve-year-old Pascal can hardly believe his ears. His older, run-away brother has returned to the plantation with an amazing story: President Lincoln has freed the slaves. Not only that, each newly-freed family can have 40 acres of land and maybe a mule, just for the asking. Now all Pascal and his brother have to do is sneak away from their angry master - and find out where the government is giving away farmland.