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Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
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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...
2) 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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Part comedy, part adventure, part social commentary, this astonishing tale of tomorrow explores the essence of human nature Published in 1904, G. K. Chesterton's debut novel is set eighty years in the future. Technology and social mores remain the same, but the England of 1984 boasts a government in which ineffectual kings are selected at random from an otherwise apathetic populace that has "lost faith in revolutions." The political system hits a...
5) 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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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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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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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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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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Inspired by two of the most beloved works by literary masters, All Men of Genius takes place in an alternate Steampunk Victorian London, where science makes the impossible possible.
Violet Adams wants to attend Illyria College, a widely renowned school for the most brilliant up-and-coming scientific minds, founded by the late Duke Illyria, the greatest scientist of the Victorian Age. The school is run by his son, Ernest, who has held to his father's...
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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...
12) 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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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....
15) 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.
16) The men: a novel
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"Deep in the California woods on an evening in late August, Jane Pearson is camping with her husband Leo and their five-year-old son Benjamin. As dusk sets in, she drifts softly to sleep in a hammock strung outside the tent where Leo and Benjamin are preparing for bed. At that moment, every single person with a Y chromosome vanishes around the world, disappearing from operating theaters mid-surgery, from behind the wheels of cars, from arguments and...
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A Richard Sharpe short story, featuring scenes of action and adventure at Christmas. 'You'll like Irati,' Colonel Hogan said. 'It's a nothing place, Richard. Hovels and misery, that's all it is and all it ever will be, but that's where you're going for Christmas.' Sharpe was sent to Irati because maybe the French were going there. The garrison planned to march at Christmas in the hope that their enemies would be too bloated with beef and wine to fight,...
18) Last orders
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The war that came early volume 6
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A conclusion to the landmark World War II series explores the lives of everyday soldiers and civilians as well as historic leaders to consider the fallout of Chamberlain's alternate-world decision not to appease Hitler.
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A Short History of the World illustrated H. G. Wells - A Short History of the World: with original illustrations
Although best known for his scientific romances that paved the way for the modern science fiction genre, H. G. Wells (1866-1946) produced significant works on politics, society, science and history. Fascinated as much with the real world as his imaginary one, and displeased with the quality of history textbooks at the end of World War...
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A multi-layered story told by two narrators: a 21st-century Emily Dickinson living in Mexico City who relates to the world vicariously through her children and a past that both overwhelms and liberates her, and a dying poet living in a run-down apartment in Philadelphia in the 1950s. While she tells the story of her past as a young editor in New York City desperately trying to convince a publisher to translate and publish the works of Gilberto Owen-an...