Our study guides have suggested writing assignments. We believe that writing can provide space for students’ voices. It can also motivate students to read if the writing assignments require references from the readings.

Addams and Activists on Deck of Ship on the Way to Europe

Peace and Bread in Time of War by Jane Addams

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First published in 1922 during the “Red Scare,” by which time Jane Addams’s pacifist efforts had adversely affected her popularity as an author and social reformer, Peace and Bread in Time of War is Addams’s eighth book and the third to deal with her thoughts on pacifism.

Addams’s unyielding pacifism during the Great War drew criticism from politicians and patriots who deemed her the “most dangerous woman in America.” Even those who had embraced her ideals of social reform condemned her outspoken opposition to U.S. entry into World War I or were ambivalent about her peace platforms. Turning away from the details of the war itself, Addams relies on memory and introspection in this autobiographical portrayal of efforts to secure peace during the Great War. “I found myself so increasingly reluctant to interpret the motives of other people that at length I confined all analysis of motives to my own,” she writes. Using the narrative technique she described in The Long Road of Women’s Memory, an extended musing on the roles of memory and myth in women’s lives, Addams also recalls attacks by the press and defends her political ideals.
Source: Goodreads.

Launching Plane at Kitty Hawk

here

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To read this ebook on a computer, or tablet using Calibre, or Google Play Books, or iBooks on your iPad, download this epub format.

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To download a mobi file for your Amazon device, click below.

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Directions on how to email this file to your Kindle device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .

The Kindle Personal Document Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to up to 15 student Kindle email addresses at a time.

With Calibre, you and your students can read this ebook in epub format on computer screens. By changing the background color, and enlarging the font, the reading experience on a computer screen is reasonable. On Chromebooks, the operating system will offer an ereading app when you open the epub file.

 

In this fascinating, highly readable biography, Fred C. Kelly, a former newspaperman, author, and an old friend of the Wrights, tells the story of the two brilliant, dedicated, flight-obsessed bicycle mechanics from Ohio who first realized mankind’s age-old dream of conquering the skies.

Long considered the definitive Wright biography (the manuscript was read and approved by Orville Wright), this book recounts the Wrights’ small-town boyhood, their early interest in all things mechanical, the establishment of the Wright Cycle Shop, and the complete behind-the-scenes story of how they designed, built, tested, and flew (December 1903) the first “Flyer.”

Enhanced with sixteen rare photographs, Mr. Kelly’s engaging account avoids minute technical description, yet describes simply and clearly the technological innovations that enabled the two brothers to succeed where so many others had failed. Anyone interested in the mechanics of flight or early aviation will find this volume a splendid introduction to the Wright brothers and their epochal achievement.

Grade level from a sample of four chapters in the Flesch-Kincaid analysis is 10.3.

Man and a Horse on Book Cover

The Underdogs, a Story of the Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azuela

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“The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution” is Mariano Azuela’s fictional account of the Mexican Revolution. Originally published as a newspaper serial in 1915, then as a complete novel in 1920, it was first translated into English in 1929 and was a critical and financial success. Based closely on Azuela’s own experiences, it is the story of Demetrio Macias, a peasant who is mistreated by government soldiers and must flee his home. He runs to the mountains and forms a group of revolutionaries to help overthrow the corrupt dictator, Porfirio Diaz. Macias and his comrades are a motley group of outcasts who are often unsure of what precisely they are fighting for and are sometimes no better than the cruel government they are rebelling against. Rather than a simple struggle of honorable peasants against an unjust government, Azuela’s tale is sophisticated and nuanced and captures in stunning detail the lives of the poor, the passion of the revolutionaries, and the heartbreaking disillusionment they must often face. In Azuela’s depiction of Demetrio Macias, he captures the complicated spirit of the Mexican people and his masterful telling of this conflict between the rebels and the federales helped to establish him as one of Mexico’s preeminent novelists.

The novel seems to offer a number of opportunities for writing responses. Compare the Mexico of Demetrio Macias with the Mexico or the United States of today. How is power or wealth allocated in societies? etc.

Koch at at a microscope

Robert Koch: Father of Bacteriology by David C. Knight

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Robert Koch loved to solve problems. He wanted to end the anthrax infections that were killing so many of his neighbors’ sheep and cattle. And then he began working on an even smaller microbe that caused tuberculosis and was killing millions around the world.

This is a story of his investigations told in a readable prose for young adults and with enough details to satisfy adult readers. The author tells the Koch story well. Koch’s energy and dedication are still inspiring.

Those closest to Koch admired him for the ideal scientific worker that he was. They admired the severe way he himself criticized his own work; the high intelligence he brought to every problem; the inventiveness he used in overcoming great obstacles. Perhaps most of all they admired his great courage and constant hard work in sticking to something where other scientists had failed.

The grade level is 8.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale in Microsoft Word. A study guide is included at the end of the ebook for secondary school students.

 

Serenade to the Big Bird with Maps and a Study Guide

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Agent in Italy: A Memoir of a Spy in World War II with a Study Guide

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I couldn’t hear a sound, either from the corridor and offices beyond the door or from the sleeping city of Milan outside. All the rest of the world could have died.

It was stifling. Italian police stations are badly ventilated. My throat was very dry and I kept coughing. I smoked another cigarette but that made it worse. The smoke hung in the dead air.

I tried the door again. My wet palm slipped on the unclean handle. The door was still locked, of course.

I didn’t know exactly what time it was because they’d taken my watch away from me. I guessed about three in the morning. I was going to be shot at six.

Thus begins this amazing; book—both a thrilling story of personal danger in Italy’s underground movement, and a fully detailed, authentic report on the crumbling of Italian Fascist morale under the terror of German occupancy.

The gripping adventures experienced by S. K. during his undercover work in Italy give us a picture of methods which more than match all we have heard of German and Russian espionage work. Yet they are absolutely bona fide—the author’s credentials have been carefully checked. He remains anonymous for the protection of those colleagues still carrying on the Democratic revolution.

Working with groups of fearless Italian patriots, it was S. K. who first revealed to the outside world through confidential information on Germany’s flame-throwing tanks, the intention of Mussolini to move against Greece, the use of American dollars for the purchase of oil in French African ports by submarine captions, the shipping of Messerschimitts to Central America, the existence of camouflaged airports in Nicaragua and Bolivia, the sending of Stukas to Japan, and the building of new Condors in Holland.

In addition to these sensational disclosures, agent in Italy now reveals fully detailed story of the German occupation of Italy, giving facts and figures, including an estimate of 400,000 Germans now keeping the junior Axis partner under shaky control.

Filled with tense and breathless incident, this book, the first to disclose the bitter ordeal of Italy, bring the excitement of the mystery novel to one of the most important factual documents of our day.

To read this ebook as a pdf, see the link below.
Agent In Italy

To read this ebook using Readium on a computer, or for Google Play Books on your tablet, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.

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To read on a device from Amazon, here is the ebook in mobi format.

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Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see instructions at http://tinyurl.com/y8gsazq.

 

Image of GIs Wading Ashore

From a Pulitzer-Prize Winning War Correspondent with Maps and a Study Guide

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Read about the first year of the Korean War in “War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent.”  The author, Marguerite Higgins, was the first woman to win a Pulitzer for international reporting. The book is about the battles at the start of the war as the armies moved up and down the Korean Peninsula. But Higgins is not concerned with military strategy. She writes about the lives of U.S. GIs, the Korean civilians, and how she navigated through a male dominated military who wanted to send her home.

The military historian, S.L.A. Marshall appreciated Higgins’s work: “This Maggie’s eye view of the Korean police action is downright irresistible in its candor, in its simple expression of the things which most of us feel strongly but can’t say very well, in its change of pace between the tragedy of the battlefield and the high comedy of much of human behavior in close relationship to it….Many of her word pictures are remarkable in their ability to convey much in little; where she philosophizes at all about men in battle her style is almost epigrammatic, and many of her observations have such a true ring that they deserve to be remembered and widely quoted.”

According to the Saturday Review of Literature it is “….a whale of a war story.”

Here is the ebook in pdf format:
War In Korea The Report Of A Wo – Marguerite Higgins

To read this ebook using Readium on a computer, or for Google Play Books on your tablet, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.

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To read on a device from Amazon, or on the Kindle app on your computer, here is the ebook in mobi format.

Click here to download

Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .

The Kindle WhisperCast Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to a group of student Kindle email addresses even if the document or ebook was not purchased on Amazon. In the WhisperCast Service, the mobi files you upload such as this one, will then be found in the Documents folder. Only items purchased on Amazon, will appear in the Books folder.