Washoe County Library System

"Eleven-year-old Brooklyn girl Delphine feels overwhelmed with worries and responsibilities. She's just started sixth grade and is self-conscious about being the tallest girl in the class, and nervous about her first school dance. She's supposed to be watching her sisters, but Fern and Vonetta are hard to control. Her uncle Darnell is home from Vietnam and seems different. And her Pa has a girlfriend. At least Delphine can write to her mother in Oakland,...

"Trapped in Tuscany as war rages along the Gothic Line, Vittoria Guidi doesn't understand where her allegiances should lie. With her Scots-Italian father or Fascist mother? With Mussolini, or her King? With the life she wants, or is told to live? As Germans occupy the mountains surrounding Barga and American Buffalo soldiers draw near, loyalties are tested and families torn apart. Frank Chapel, a young, black soldier fighting for a country that refuses...

"In the late 1950s, as the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. was at last gaining ground, 16 soldiers sat confined in basement cells on death row in the army's Fort Leavenworth maximum security prison in Kansas. Exactly eight were white and eight were black. All of the white soldiers were commuted. Not only were their lives spared, but they all were eventually released and returned to their families. They benefited from powerful Washington powerbrokers,...

"African Americans' Struggle for Freedom in the Civil War Era For a century and a half, Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation has been the dominant narrative of African American freedom in the Civil War era. However, David Williams suggests that this portrayal marginalizes the role that African American slaves played in freeing themselves. At the Civil War's outset, Lincoln made clear his intent was to save the Union rather than...

Focuses on the experiences of blacks as mountain men, soldiers, homesteaders, and scouts on the frontiers of the American West.

"When the United States entered World War II, it had to face its own contradictions at home. Opportunities opened up for Black people and women in support of the war effort. But ideas about race and gender didn't change as swiftly. Read the story of the first all-Black battalion in the Women's Army Corps-the Six Triple Eight-and its leader, Major Charity Adams. These women bravely confronted the racism and sexism they experienced. And they did it...