After the death of his beloved older brother Hector in World War I, sixteen-year-old Edward leaves the family farm in Canada to enlist in Hector's batallion, where he attempts to come to terms with what has happened.

In 1916 on an island in Lake Superior, Carl builds himself a boat by bartering with the other islanders for parts and labor.

Presents a collection of five short stories featuring "American Girl" Molly McIntire, who is growing up during World War II.

In 1903, ten-year-old Sofia and her family begin their life in America in Boston, where her father works in a grocery, her mother sells pasta, and she goes to school while trying to stay in touch with her old friend Maureen. Includes historical notes.

Illustrations and simple rhyming text follow a family as they make the difficult journey by wagon to a new home across the Rocky Mountains.

Relates how Benjamin Banneker's grandmother journeyed from England to Maryland in the late seventeenth century, worked as an indentured servant, began a farm of her own, and married a freed slave.

Relates the surprising gifts bestowed on twelve-year-old Bob Barnhart and his family, who have recently moved to a small Illinois town in 1958, by their larger-than-life neighbor, Mrs. Dowdel.

While her father works on the Manhattan Project, eleven-year-old gadget lover and outcast Dewey Kerrigan lives in Los Alamos Camp, and becomes friends with Suze, another young girl who is shunned by her peers.

When sixteen-year-old Miranda's father dies, she is sent to live with her father's cousin, Count John Hardwood, who sells her to Court for profit; and as part of Queen Elizabeth's court, Miranda attempts to leverage her seamstress skills to gain her independence and reunite with Henry Raleigh, whom she has always loved.