Raised among Scottish fishermen and storytellers, David Thomson was obsessed from childhood by the Celtic seal legend, the body of tales and songs about the "selchie," or gray Atlantic seal. In the early 1950's he took a journey to seek the
The Cure at Troy is Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles' Philoctetes. Written in the fifth century BC, this play concerns the predicament of the outcast hero, Philoctetes, whom the Greeks marooned on the island of Lemnos and forgot about until
Sweeney Astray is Seamus Heaney's version of the medieval Irish work Buile Suibne. Its here, Mad Sweeney, undergoes a series of purgatorial adventures after he is cursed by a saint and turned into a bird at the Battle of Moira. Heaney's translat
This baseball league that was made up of African American players and run by African American owners ushered in the biggest change in the history of baseball.
In America during the early twentieth century, no part was safe from segregation, not even th
Something wicked was brewing in the small town of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. It started when two girls, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, began having hysterical fits. Soon after, other local girls claimed they were being pricked with pins. With no sc
For more than 100 years, people have been captivated by the disastrous sinking of the Titanic that claimed over 1,500 lives. Now young readers can find out why the great ship went down and how it was discovered seventy-five years later.
When Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the "Corp of Discovery" left St. Louis, Missouri, on May 21, 1804, their mission was to explore the vast, unknown territory acquired a year earlier in the Louisiana Purchase. The travelers hoped to find
A mesmerizing overview of the world as it was when glaciers covered the earth and long-extinct creatures like the woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats battled to survive.
Go back 20,000 years ago to a time of much colder global temperatures when glac
A thoughtful and age-appropriate introduction to an unimaginable event--the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a genocide on a scale never before seen, with as many as twelve million people killed in Nazi death camps--six million of them Jews. Gail Herman tr
In 1848, gold was discovered in California, attracting over 300,000 people from all over the world, some who struck it rich and many more who didn't. Hear the stories about the gold-seeking "forty-niners!" With black-and white illustrations
The history of the feast! After their first harvest in 1621, the Pilgrims at Plymouth shared a three-day feast with their Native American neighbors. Of course, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag didn’t know it at the time, but they were making history, celeb
Travel back to the time when the mighty dinosaurs ruled the earth.
The Age of Dinosaurs began about 250 million years ago. In the beginning they were quite small but over time they evolved into the varied and fascinating creatures that captivate our im
A The morning of August 24, AD 79, seemed like any other in the Roman city of Pompeii. So no one was prepared when the nearby volcano Mount Vesuvius suddenly erupted, spouting ash that buried the city and its inhabitants. The disaster left thousands dead,
On December 7, 1941, Japanese war planes appeared out of nowhere to bomb the American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was a highly secretive and devastating attack: four battleships sunk, more than two thousand servicemen died,
On August 25th, 2005, one of the deadliest and most destructive hurricanes in history hit the Gulf of Mexico. High winds and rain pummeled coastal communities, including the City of New Orleans, which was left under 15 feet of water in some areas after th
From 1892 to 1954, Ellis Island was the gateway to a new life in the United States for millions of immigrants. In later years, the island was deserted, the buildings decaying. Ellis Island was not restored until the 1980s, when Americans from all over the
In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, an armada of 7,000 ships carrying 160,000 Allied troops stormed the beaches of Nazi-occupied France. Up until then the Allied forces had suffered serious defeats, yet D -Day, as the invasion was called, spelled
The story of Girl Power! Learn about the remarkable women who changed US history.
From Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton, women throughout US history have fought for equality. In the nineteenth and early
Before 1914, traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast meant going by land across the entire United States. To go by sea involved a long journey around South America and north along the Pacific Coast.
Back in 775 BC, athletes from all over Ancient Greece came together to compete in various games. The contests were held every four years and winning athletes brought honor and respect to their homelands.