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History Reference Center
Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
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It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war -- and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan.
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"In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet's now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin. Out of the ranks...
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"To control the past, they edited history. To control the future, they edited literature. The year is 1953. Edward VIII and Wallis are preparing for their coronation, and the country is tense with expectation. In honor of the event, Adolf Hitler will be making his first visit to the UK since its surrender to the Germans in 1940. One oppressive change conforming with Nazi ideology is the strict classification of women into hierarchical groups, ranging...
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"It is the present-day, and the world is as we know it: smartphones, social networking and Happy Meals. Save for one thing: the Civil War never occurred. A gifted young Black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service. He's got plenty of work. In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four." On the trail of a runaway known...
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"Like Golden Hill, Cahokia Jazz inhabits a different version of America, and like Golden Hill it has a propulsive and brilliantly twisty plot set within a fully imagined world. Only this world is full of fog, cigarette smoke, dubious motives, danger, and dark deeds. And in the main character of Joe Barrow, we have a hero of truly heroic proportions, and a troubled soul to fall in love with. One snowy night at the end of winter, Barrow and his partner...
8) The rising
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Alchemy wars volume Book 2
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"The second book in the Alchemy Wars trilogy by Ian Tregillis, an epic tale of liberation and war. Jax, a rogue Clakker, has wreaked havoc upon the Clockmakers' Guild by destroying the Grand Forge. Reborn in the flames, he must begin his life as a free Clakker, but liberation proves its own burden. Berenice, formerly the legendary spymaster of New France, mastermind behind her nation's attempts to undermine the Dutch Hegemony has been banished from...
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"We Install offers a showcase of styles, from humor--in "Father of the Groom," a scientist with a penchant for wild experimentation helps his love-struck son by synthesizing a wedding ring out of two carrots--to classic science fiction, as in the Hugo Award-winning "Down in the Bottomlands" and "Hoxbomb," in which a regular guy just trying to make a living selling scooters has to deal with some very odd competition. The alternate history tale "Drang...
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When dystopian futures don't feel so future at all…Four decades before George Orwell wrote 1984, The Napoleon of Notting Hill defined the dystopian genre. One of the first dystopian comedies, instead of a dark vision of jackboots and surveillance states, G.K. Chesterton explores the question of what a society would look like if no one could take a joke.In this future England, each new king is decided by lottery. When Auberon Quin, a man who cares...
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When her favorite customer, a lonely yet charming old man, dies right in front of her, Cassie holds on to the last book he was reading, which turns out to be a rare volume that has great power and she is tasked with protecting it from those who will do evil.
12) Lavinia
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In The Aeneid, Vergil's hero fights to claim the king's daughter, Lavinia, with whom he is destined to found an empire. Lavinia herself never speaks a word in the poem. Now, Ursula K. Le Guin gives Lavinia a voice in a novel that takes the reader to the half-wild world of ancient Italy, when Rome was a muddy village near seven hills.--From amazon.com.
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A man's life can change in an instant. For Ben-Hur, a young Jewish aristocrat, that time comes when he accidentally knocks a roof tile onto a Roman official's head. He is condemned to the galleys, but the most fateful moment of his life is yet to come: the day he meets Jesus.
14) The mechanical
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Alchemy wars volume 1
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"The Clakker: a mechanical man, endowed with great strength and boundless stamina--but beholden to the wishes of its human masters. Soon after the Dutch scientist and clockmaker Christiaan Huygens invented the very first Clakker in the 17th Century, the Netherlands built a whole mechanical army. It wasn't long before a legion of clockwork fusiliers marched on Westminster, and the Netherlands became the world's sole superpower. Three centuries later,...
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It takes readers on a journey over two millennia and six continents, telling three powerful tales a thousand years apart, all of them converging in the same cave in the Belizean jungle. Braided together are the stories of a pair of teenage twins who ascend the throne of a Maya kingdom; a young American woman on a trip of self-discovery in Belize; and two dangerous charismatics vying for the leadership of a new religion and racing toward a confrontation...
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A novel that imagines a future in which sweeping civil conflict has forced America's young people to flee its borders, into an unwelcoming world. One such American is Ron Patterson, who finds himself on distant shores, working as a repairman and sharing a room with other refugees. In an unnamed city wedged between ocean and lush mountainous forest, Ron can almost imagine a stable life for himself. Especially when he makes the first friend he has had...
17) River of teeth
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River of teeth volume 1
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English
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In the early 20th Century, the United States government concocted a plan to import hippopotamuses into the marshlands of Louisiana to be bred and slaughtered as an alternative meat source. This is true. Other true things about hippos: they are savage, they are fast, and their jaws can snap a man in two. This was a terrible plan. Contained within this volume is an 1890s America that might have been: a bayou overrun by feral hippos and mercenary hippo...
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Amina al-Sirafi novels volume 1
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English
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Best Fiction of 2023
HPL Best Books of 2023
NPR Books We Love 2023
OBD Best Books of 2023 (BookPage) - Adult
HPL Best Books of 2023
NPR Books We Love 2023
OBD Best Books of 2023 (BookPage) - Adult
Description
The first book of "a new trilogy of magic and mayhem on the high seas in this tale of pirates and sorcerers, forbidden artifacts and ancient mysteries, in one woman's determined quest to seize a final chance at glory--and write her own legend ... Amina al-Sirafi should be content. After a storied and scandalous career as one of the Indian Ocean's most notorious pirates, she's survived backstabbing rogues, vengeful merchant princes, several husbands,...
19) A Modern utopia
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A Modern Utopia is a novel by H. G. Wells. Because of the complexity and sophistication of its narrative structure A Modern Utopia has been called "not so much a modern as a postmodern utopia." The novel is best known for its notion that a voluntary order of nobility known as the Samurai could effectively rule a "kinetic and not static" world state so as to solve "the problem of combining progress with political stability." To this planet "out beyond...
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Dystopian lawyer novels volume 1
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Better Call Saul meets Nineteen Eighty-Four in this first volume in an explosive legal thriller series set in the world of Tropic of Kansas--a finalist for the 2018 Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of the year. Defeated in a devastating war with China, America is on the brink of a bloody civil war. Seizing power after a controversial election, the ruling regime has begun cracking down on dissidents fighting the nation's slide toward dictatorship....