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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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The bestselling book that asks the question: what would present-day America look like if the Civil War never happened? A New York Times bestseller; a Goodreads Choice finalist; named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, Slate, Publishers Weekly, Hudson Bookseller, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kirkus Reviews, AudioFile Magazine, and Amazon A young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty...
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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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"Ruth Hall - A Domestic Tale of the Present Time" is an 1854 novel by American writer Fanny Fern. The story revolves around Ruth Hall-a fictionalized version of the author-and follows her happy marriage, destitute widowhood, and eventual success as a newspaper columnist. Sara Payson Willis (1811–1872), also known as Fanny Fern, was an American novelist, humorist, newspaper columnist, and children's writer during the 1850s and 1870s. Fern's novels...
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Originally published serially in 1912, "The Lost World" is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic tale of discovery and adventure. The story begins with the narrator, the curious and intrepid reporter Edward Malone, meeting Professor Challenger, a strange and brilliant paleontologist who insists that he has found dinosaurs still alive deep in the Amazon. Malone agrees to accompany Challenger, as well as Challenger's unconvinced colleague Professor Summerlee,...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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Amina al-Sirafi novels volume 1
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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
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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,...
15) 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....
17) Smoke: a novel
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Smoke volume 1
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An England where people who are wicked in thought or deed are marked by the Smoke that pours forth from their bodies, a sign of their fallen state. The aristocracy do not smoke, proof of their virtue and right to rule, while the lower classes are drenched in sin and soot. An England utterly strange and utterly real. An elite boarding school where the sons of the wealthy are groomed to take power as their birthright. Teachers with mysterious ties to...
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"Building on the recent discovery that "the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and indivisible and final and - lifeless - lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy," Wells conjures a 1950s England in which clean, efficient atomic engines have transformed life for the better. Alas, a world war breaks out, in which atomic bombs wipe out the world's great cities. Worldwide civilization is on the brink of collapse, when a conference...
19) Beheld
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Kendra chronicles volume 4
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Kendra, a witch, meets James, another witch, in Salem, Massachusetts during the Salem Witch Trials, and he rescues her. This is the story of the three hundred years Kendra spends looking for James, while helping those around her find love.
20) Flower fables
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Six stories and three poems relate the adventures of the fairy folk and their friends, the flowers.