Cranston Public Library

"At the height of the Great Depression, Sam Babb, the charismatic basketball coach of tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College, began dreaming. Like so many others, he wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm, he recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education if they would come play for his basketball team, the Cardinals. Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices...

Uses the American Girls to discuss major moments in United States history and what it would have been like to grow up in another era.

"In 1970s San Francisco, Julie and her best friend Ivy learn about Chinese immigration in the early twentieth century when they investigate a mysterious doll theft." --

Step into the perfumed parlors of the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in American history-and the catalyst for a culture war that rocked the nation. Operating in Chicago's notorious Levee district at the dawn of the twentieth century, the club's proprietors, two aristocratic sisters named Minna and Ada Everleigh, welcomed moguls and actors, senators and athletes, foreign dignitaries and literary icons, into their stately double mansion, where...

A young African American girl is sold away from her mother as a slave, and then later is sold to a Cherokee Indian, but eventually she is bought by a white man who not only sets her free, but adopts her into his family of fifteen children. Based on a true story; includes instructions for making a hollyhock doll.

One kokeshi, two kokeshi, three kokeshi, four... Anna is a Japanese-American girl whose grandparents live in Japan. They have been sending her adorable Kokeshi dolls made of painted wood each year for her birthday since she was very small. The dolls, like people, are all different -- and beautiful! In this charming children's book by Tracy Gallup, we watch Anna grow up as her Kokeshi collection grows bigger, and we see how these dolls bring Anna and...

One of the leading American poets offers a new collection of poems that plumbs the ordinary American experience for spiritual insights, wit, and historical relevance.

"Limiting his scope to those works already overlooked or in danger of slipping from view, Perrin leads us through a wide spectrum of fiction, ranging from stories for the very youngest listeners to nuanced novels for the adolescent reader. There is something here for every child: dolls and their houses; animals of varied talents and personalities; travels through time and space; romances promised, sometimes failed, sometimes realized; castles and...

"Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer has the heartbeat of one American woman's life in the twentieth century. It tells an intimate story of how Alice Adams-white, privileged, talented-endured a lonely childhood as a child in the racially distressed South and came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. Always a rebel in good-girl's clothing, Adams used her education, sexual and emotional curiosity, and uncompromising artistic ambition to...

A compilation of the nineteenth-century English writer's poems features previously uncollected works including epigraphs, Domicilium, and songs from The Dynasts.