BooK Cover with Photo of Edison Sitting

Thomas Edison: American Inventor by Ray Eldon Hiebert and Roselyn Hiebert

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A self-made man with little formal education, Thomas Edison had a remarkable mind and possessed the imagination, creative ability, self-confidence, and perseverance to succeed brilliantly in his field. It was he who perfected the incandescent electric bulb, improved on the telephone, made the first phonograph, and pioneered motion pictures. The list of his other inventions is long.
His traits were so common to the traditional American character of his day that he can right¬fully be called “an American inventor.” Most important was his ability to work hard. From the time he was twelve years old until-he reached his middle eighties he worked, often day and night. By trial and error he patiently attacked problems until he found their solutions. With his men he perfected the teamwork approach to systematic research. His laboratories at Menlo Park and West Orange, New Jersey, were the early models for the huge industrial research and development institutions of today.
In a biography rich with anecdote, Roselyn and Ray Eldon Hiebert present an unforgettable picture of this lively and colorful man—a true rugged individualist.

Image of Abraham Lincoln on Book Cover

Abraham Lincoln by James Daugherty

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James Henry Daugherty (1889-1974), winner of a Newbery Medal for Children’s Literature, was born in Asheville, North Carolina, but grew up in Indiana and Ohio. When he was 9, the family moved to Washington D.C., where he studied at the Corcoran School of Art, and the Philadelphia Art Academy. He then spent two years in London studying under Frank Brangwyn.

According to the New York Times, Mr. Daugherty “won distinction as a writer and illustrator of children’s books on American historical themes.”

Mr. Daugherty’s books of biography and frontier tales include “Abraham Lincoln,” “The Landing of the Pilgrims,” “West of Boston” and “Their Weight in Wildcats.”

Daugherty’s first publication was an illustration for John Flemming Wilson’s series, Tad Sheldon, Boy Scout (1913). He then worked camouflaging ships and creating four murals in Loew’s State Theatre, Cleveland, while illustrating fiction, and signed and unsigned magazine work. In 1925 he was asked to illustrate R.H. Horne’s King Penguin which he describes as the first book he ever illustrated. In 1926 S.E. White’s Daniel Boone, Wilderness Scout appeared, with Daugherty illustrations. He won the Newbery in 1940 for his self-illustrated Daniel Boone and was runner-up for two Caldecott Medals with Andy and the Lion, 1939, and Gillespie and the Guards, 1957.

With Title Mississippi Notebook

Mississippi Notebook: Freedom Summer June-August 1964 by Nicholas Von Hoffman

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One of those who watched and was watched in the turbulent summer of 1964 was Chicago Daily News reporter Nicholas von Hoffman. Through ten tense weeks and over 6000 miles of dusty roads and highways, from the Delta to the piney hills to the Gulf, von Hoffman studied the state of mind of the State of Mississippi.

Mississippi Notebook is his vivid and entirely honest record of that summer, a summer that was marked by murder, violence, and intimidation on a scale that is difficult to grasp for any but those who witnessed it, or—and worse—for those who were made to suffer it.
Sometimes it is the way people talk, how they look, the small but illuminating incident overlooked in the broad sweep of the news that really tells the story and makes a complex social crisis understandable.

Such is the case with Mississippi Notebook. It is a finely detailed and deeply disturbing report on a state and its people, white and black, who are playing a major role in the greatest domestic crisis now facing the nation.

Thaddeus Stevens: Militant democrat and fighter for Negro rights

Thaddeus Stevens: Militant democrat and fighter for Negro rights

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The writer makes the political energy and moral intensity of Thaddeus Stevens clear to readers in this short, 40 page pamphlet. What was the fate of the Freedmen after the Civil War? What economic opportunities were available to them? What were Stevens’s plans for Reconstruction? Were they enacted? 

Thaddeus Stevens
 (April 4, 1792 – August 11, 1868) was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. He was one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s. A fierce opponent of slavery and discrimination against African Americans, Stevens sought to secure their rights during Reconstruction, leading the opposition to U.S. President Andrew Johnson. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee during the American Civil War, he played a leading role, focusing his attention on defeating the Confederacy, financing the war with new taxes and borrowing, crushing the power of slave owners, ending slavery, and securing equal rights for the Freedmen.

As the most powerful leader in Congress of the Radical Republicans, he asked the nation what would political rights mean after the Civil War “without jobs, land, bread and shelter.”

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