Historical Life Nonfiction

Twelve-year-old Ji-li Jiang has brains, friends, and a bright future. Then Mao Zedong launches China’s infamous Cultural Revolution. Soon school is suspended and students are getting caught up in the fervor of Mao’s extreme politics. When Ji-li’s family is accused of capitalist crimes, all of her beautiful dreams burst like soap bubbles. Because Ji-li’s grandfather was a landlord, her family is harassed and humiliated. Their home is searched, and they live in constant fear. Nonetheless, Ji-li remains loyal to her beloved Chairman Mao....

From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry, World War I soldiers coping with PTSD, and the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, to the AIDS quilt, Hmong story clothes, and pink pussyhats, women and men have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances. Threads of Life is a chronicle of identity, protest, memory, power, and politics told through the stories of needlework.

Poland, 1940. The Russian army invades the beautiful city streets of Vilna. Soldiers storm 10-year-old Esther Rudomin's house and arrest her entire family. The Rudomins, the soldiers say, are "capitalists - enemies of the people". Forced from their home and friends, the Rudomins are herded onto crowded cattle cars. Their destination: the endless steppe of Siberia.

Spend twenty-four hours with the ancient Chinese. Travel back to AD 17, during the fourth year of the reign of Wang Mang of the Han dynasty, a vibrant and innovative era full of conflicts and contradictions. But as different as the Han culture might have been to other great ancient civilizations, the inhabitants of ancient China faced the same problems as people have for time immemorial: earning enough money, coping with workplace dramas, and keeping your home in order.

Blind since the age of three, young Louis Braille wanted to be able to read. He spent every spare moment punching holes in paper with a stylus until, by the age of 15, he had invented his own alphabet. This vivid biography, written by an award-winning author, allows young listeners the opportunity to identify with and to appreciate a real life hero.

Pre-war debutantes were members of the most protected, not to say isolated, stratum of 20th-century society: the young (17-20) unmarried daughters of the British upper classes. For most of them, the war changed all that for ever. It meant independence and the shock of the new, and daily exposure to customs and attitudes that must have seemed completely alien to them. For many, the almost military regime of an upper-class childhood meant they were well suited for the no-nonsense approach needed in wartime.

Inge Auerbacher is a happy German girl when the nightmare begins. Six-year-old Inge is made to wear a yellow star to identify her as a Jew. As the Nazis gain power, her family is subjected to greater and greater horrors. Their home and citizenship are taken away. Inge’s relatives are sent away, and she and her parents are forced into the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was only 25 when he helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott and was soon organizing black people across the country in support of the right to vote, desegregation, and other basic civil rights. Maintaining nonviolent and peaceful tactics even when his life was threatened, King was also an advocate for the poor and spoke out against racial and economic injustice until his death - from an assassin's bullet - in 1968.

Convinced that unnamed babies are not truly alive, King Tuthmosis I’s wife Ahmose immediately names her newborn daughter Hatshepsut. This tiny girl will one day rise above her name and become not just "the foremost of women" but ruler of all Egypt. Growing up in pharaoh’s palace, the young princess prepares for her future by learning the essentials of Egyptian religious, political, and social life. After 12-year-old Hatshepsut’s father dies, she - following the royal custom - becomes queen by marrying King Tuthmosis II, the son of one of her father’s lesser wives.

Sir Nicholas Winton rescued 669 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia at the brink of World War II. Most never saw their parents again. This is his story.

For 700 years, Japan was ruled by military commanders who waged war against one another incessantly. Shogun tells the fascinating story of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the man who finally unified and brought lasting peace to the nation. He established a new central government which enabled his descendants to rule Japan for the next 260 years—a period in which Japanese culture as we know it today flourished.

From the creative minds of the scholarly group behind the groundbreaking Jesus Seminar comes this provocative and eye-opening look at the roots of Christianity that offers a thoughtful reconsideration of the first two centuries of the Jesus movement, transforming our understanding of the religion and its early dissemination.

From award-winning scholar John Bergsma comes an intriguing audiobook that reveals new insights on the Essenes, a radical Jewish community predating Christianity, whose existence, beliefs, and practices are often overlooked in the annuls of history. Bergsma reveals how this Jewish sect directly influenced the beliefs, sacraments, and practices of early Christianity and offers new information on how Christians lived their lives, worshiped, and eventually went on to influence the Roman Empire and Western civilization.

Large numbers of atheists, humanists, and conspiracy theorists are raising one of the most pressing questions in the history of religion: "Did Jesus exist at all?" Was he invented out of whole cloth for nefarious purposes by those seeking to control the masses? Or was Jesus such a shadowy figure - far removed from any credible historical evidence - that he bears no meaningful resemblance to the person described in the Bible?

On March 2, 1955, a slim, bespectacled teenager refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Mont-gomery, Alabama. Shouting "It's my constitutional right!" as police dragged her off to jail, Claudette Colvin decided she'd had enough of the Jim Crow segregation laws that had angered and puzzled her since she was a young child.

At age two, Helen Keller became deaf and blind. She lived in a world of silence and darkness and she spent the rest of her life struggling to break through it. But with the help of teacher Annie Sullivan, Helen learned to read, write, and do many amazing things. This inspiring biography is perfect for young middle-grade listeners.

The New York Times best-selling author of Jumanji and The Polar Express, Chris Van Allsburg has garnered the National Book Award, multiple Caldecott Medals, and the Regina Medal for lifetime achievement in children’s literature. Queen of the Falls highlights the death-defying attempt of 62-year-old former charm school teacher Annie Edson Taylor to be the first woman to survive the perilous plunge over Niagara Falls.

The season of 1939 brought all those "in Society" to London. The young debutante daughters of the upper classes were presented to the king and queen to mark their acceptance into the new adult world of their parents. They sparkled their way through a succession of balls and parties and sporting events. The season brought together influential people not only from society but also from government at the various events of the social calendar.

London, 1857: Two teenage girls holding a sign that says "Fugitive Slaves" ask for money on the corner of Blackman Street. After a constable accosts them and charges them with begging, they end up in court, where newspapers pick up their story. Are the girls truly escaped slaves from Kentucky? Or will the city's dystopian Mendicity Society catch them in a lie, exposing them as born-and-raised Londoners and endangering their safety? With its many accounts of people like these who lived and made their living on the streets, Vagabonds forms a moving picture of London's most compelling period.

Between 1854 and 1930, more than 200,000 orphaned or abandoned children were sent west on orphan trains to find new homes. Some were adopted by loving families; others were not as fortunate. In recent years, some of the riders have begun to share their stories. Andrea Warren alternates chapters about the history of the orphan trains with the story of Lee Nailling, who in 1926 rode an orphan train to Texas.