ELA

It's 1793, and there's an invisible killer roaming the streets of Philadelphia. The city's residents are fleeing in fear. This killer has a name—yellow fever—but everything else about it is a mystery. Its cause is unknown, and there is no cure.

Thomas Jefferson is perhaps best known for writing the Declaration of Independence. But there's so much more to discover.

In 1964, Mississippi civil rights groups banded together to fight Jim Crow laws in a state where only 6.4 percent of eligible black voters were registered. Testing a bold new strategy, they recruited students from across the United States. That summer these young volunteers defied segregation by living with local black hosts, opening Freedom Schools to educate disenfranchised adults and their children, and canvassing door-to-door to register voters.

Cotton fields, dusty roads, and the hot Texas sun. One little girl's world looked the same as it always did when she went to sleep. But she wakes to find that everything is all different now.

Coretta Scott King Award winners Angela Johnson and E.B. Lewis tell the story of the first Juneteenth, the day freedom finally came to the last slaves in the South.

Early in the twentieth century, most Asian immigrants bound for America disembarked at a rocky island in San Francisco Bay. At the Angel Island Immigration Station, they were scrutinized, physically examined, interrogated, and confined behind barbed wire in crowded dormitories. Detainees often waited weeks or months to be processed. Those who passed inspection were allowed to enter the country known to many Chinese as Gold Mountain. Others, less fortunate, were sent back home or even died in detention.

"This woman's place is in the house—The House of Representatives!"

That was the slogan of Bella Abzug's successful 1970 election campaign. But from the first Congress, in 1789, until the 65th Congress, in 1917, women served in neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate. It wasn't until a suffragist from Montana named Jeannette Rankin won her state's congressional election that women first came to the House. "I may be the first woman member of Congress," she declared, "but I won't be the last." She wasn't, but it's been slow going.

When Michael's aunt passes away, she leaves behind a letter entitled "Who I am, what I've done, and who you are."

It reveals a story that will change everything. It starts with Michael's grandfather Leroy, a black officer in World War I who charged into a battle zone not once, but three times, to save wounded men. His fellow soldiers insisted he deserved special commendations for his bravery, but because of their racial barriers, he would go unacknowledged. Now it's up to Michael to change that.

As the First World War rages on, Alfie Summerfield has given up hope of seeing his father again. Though his mother maintains that father is away on a secret mission, Alfie knows he must be dead. But when Alfie learns by chance that his father is in a hospital close by—a hospital treating soldiers with shell shock, whatever that might be—he resolves to rescue his father from this strange unnerving place.