Christina receives her first store-bought doll and finds her old rag doll superior in a number of ways.

Thelma Parkss story, written in her own words, is one of compassion and courage and steadfast faith. Born on a sharecropping farm in Louisiana, raised by a single mom during the Great Depression along with seven brothers and sisters, Thelma learned that love begins at home. She was baptized at fifteen, and the God she chose that day began to walk with her day by day. She looked to Jesus as an everyday example of how to love and treat one another. In her adult years, she modeled a steadfast desire to follow Jesus and His ways. Experiencing the pain of racial prejudices, discriminations, and broken relationships, Thelma Parks, a quiet black lady, discovered the power of following His way of love. Thelma found her legacy through the pain and loss she experienced and overcame through a sincere love and forgiving heart. This Is My Story, This Is My Song: The Thelma Parks Story is filled with insights of the richness of Gods provisions and purposes. With simple yet profound words, this message of faith, love, and forgiveness can encourage and inspire. Discover God, the source of life who offers guidance and hope in your everyday life. Listen and learn the ways of God and live a life of lasting significance!

Can a ship carrying Friendship Dolls to Japan be Lexie’s ticket to see her fun-loving mother again? A heartwarming historical novel inspired by a little-known true event. It’s 1926, and the one thing eleven-year-old Lexie Lewis wants more than anything is to leave Portland, Oregon, where she has been staying with her strict grandparents, and rejoin her mother, a carefree singer in San Francisco’s speakeasies. But Mama’s new husband doesn’t think a little girl should live with parents who work all night and sleep all day. Meanwhile, Lexie’s class has been raising money to ship a doll to the children of Japan in a friendship exchange, and when Lexie learns that the girl who writes the best letter to accompany the doll will be sent to the farewell ceremony in San Francisco, she knows she just has to be the winner. But what if a jealous classmate and Lexie’s own small lies to her grandmother manage to derail her plans? Inspired by a project organized by teacher-missionary Sidney Gulick, in which U.S. children sent more than 12,000 Friendship Dolls to Japan in hopes of avoiding a future war, Shirley Parenteau’s engaging story has sure appeal for young readers who enjoy historical fiction, and for doll lovers of all ages.

As the United States transformed itself from an agricultural to an industrial nation, thousands of young people left farm homes for life in the big city. But even by 1920 the nation’s heartland remained predominantly rural and most children in the region were still raised on farms. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg retells their stories, offering glimpses—both nostalgic and realistic—of a bygone era. As Riney-Kehrberg shows, the experiences of most farm children continued to reflect the traditions of family life and labor, albeit in an age when middle-class urban Americans were beginning to redefine childhood as a time reserved for education and play. She draws upon a wealth of primary sources—not only memoirs and diaries but also census data—to create a vivid portrait of midwestern farm childhood from the early post–Civil War period through the Progressive Era growing pains of industrialization. Those personal accounts resurrect the essential experience of children’s work, play, education, family relations, and coming of age from their own perspectives. Steering a middle path between the myth of wholesome farm life and the reality of work that was often extremely dangerous, Riney-Kehrberg shows both the best and the worst that a rural upbringing had to offer midwestern youth a time before mechanization forever changed the rural scene and radio broke the spell of isolation. Down on the farm, truancy was not uncommon and chores were shared across genders. Yet farm children managed to indulge in inventive play—much of it homemade—to supplement store-bought toys and to get through the long spells between circuses. Filled with insightful personal stories and graced with dozens of highly evocative period photos, Childhood on the Farm is the only general history of midwestern farm children to use narratives written by the children themselves, giving a fresh voice to these forgotten years. Theirs was a way of life that was disappearing even as they lived it, and this book offers new insight into why, even if many rural youngsters became urban and suburban adults, they always maintained some affection for the farm.

The inspiration for the PBS documentary premiering March 2023 The story of the revolutionary Black women welfare organizers of Las Vegas who spearheaded an evergreen, radical revisioning of American economic justice This timely reissue tells the little-known story of a pioneering group of Black mothers who built one of this country's most successful antipoverty programs. In Storming Caesars Palace, Annelise Orleck brings into focus the hidden figures of a trailblazing movement who proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty, providing job training, libraries, medical access, daycare centers and housing to the poor in Las Vegas throughout the 1970s. Orleck introduces Ruby Duncan, a sharecropper turned White House advisor who led the charge on the long war on poverty waged against the poor Black mothers of Las Vegas. According to Ruby, “Poor women must dream their highest dreams and never stop,” and she, with the help of Mary Wesley and Alversa Beals, did exactly that. A vivid retelling of an overlooked American history, Orleck follows the Black women who went on to lead a revolutionary movement against welfare injustice. These women eventually founded Operation Life, one of the first women-led community organizations in the nation and one of the country’s most successful antipoverty programs. They went on to gain national traction and garnered the respect of key political figures such as Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. With a new prologue and epilogue that explore the race and labor movements paramount to the political climate of 2021, Orleck masterfully blends together history, social analysis, and personal storytelling in a story that is as enraging as it is empowering.

It s the 1940 s and the WW11 is raging. There are six girls and three boys living with Mam in a log cabin with no electricity or running water. Pap comes home only when feels the notion life s not easy. The struggles become even more real when thirteen year old Retha Pogue sees her eighteen year old brother, Wilburn, drafter and going off to war. Surprising twists await in this gripping story of what life was really like for so many families.

Drawing from the magical world of her iconic Sundance award-winning film, Julie Dash’s stand-alone novel tells another rich, historical tale of the Gullah-Geechee people: a multigenerational story about a Brooklyn College anthropology student who finds an unexpected homecoming when she heads to the South Carolina Sea Islands to study her ancestors. Set in the 1920s in the Sea Islands off the Carolina coast where the Gullah-Geechee people have preserved much of their African heritage and language, Daughters of the Dust chronicles the lives of the Peazants, a large, proud family who trace their origins to the Ibo, who were enslaved and brought to the islands more than one hundred years earlier. Native New Yorker and anthropology student Amelia Peazant has always known about her grandmother and mother’s homeland of Dawtuh Island, though she’s never understood why her family remains there, cut off from modern society. But when an opportunity arises for Amelia to head to the island to study her ancestry for her thesis, she is surprised by what she discovers. From her multigenerational clan she gathers colorful stories, learning about "the first man and woman," the slaves who walked across the water back home to Africa, the ways men and women need each other, and the intermingling of African and Native American cultures. The more she learns, the more Amelia comes to treasure her family and their traditions, discovering an especially strong kinship with her fiercely independent cousin, Elizabeth. Eyes opened to an entirely new world, Amelia must decide what’s next for her and find her role in the powerful legacy of her people. Daughters of the Dust is a vivid novel that blends folktales, history, and anthropology to tell a powerful and emotional story of homecoming, the reclamation of cultural heritage, and the enduring bonds of family.

A spiritual awakening happens to ten-year-old Pansy Hunt when her parents launch out on a covered wagon adventure from Lincoln, New Mexico, to Galveston Island, Texas, in the year 1900. Along the trail, Papa shares campfire stories with Pansy about her unique family history. Stories like Pansys great-great grandmother, who is captured and raised by a warring Indian tribe, only to be rescued seven years later by a brave Indian scout. Stories that teach her about trusting God in the most impossible circumstances imaginable. These tales combine with real adventures along the trail to develop Pansys spiritual understanding that God promises He will never leave us nor forsake us. Letters and photos at the end of the book reveal that these adventures are drawn from the true life and family history of Pansy Virginia Hunt Rule. Pansy and the Promise is written for young minds to easily grasp the concept of Gods grace, mercy, and strength in a story of adventure, mystery, and intrigue.

Presents details of daily life of American children during the period from 1890 to 1914.

The “graceful, loving,” (The New York Times Book Review), never-before-told story of Hollywood icon Natalie Wood’s glamorous life, sudden death, and lasting legacy, written by her daughter, Natasha Gregson Wagner. Natasha Gregson Wagner’s mother, Natalie Wood, was a child actress who became a legendary movie star, the dark-haired beauty of Splendor in the Grass and West Side Story. She and Natasha’s stepfather, the actor Robert Wagner, were a Hollywood it-couple twice over, first in the 1950s, and then again when they remarried in the 70s. To Natasha, she was, above all, a doting, loving mom. But Natalie’s sudden death by drowning off Catalina Island at the age of forty-three devastated her family, turned Robert Wagner into a person of interest, and transformed a vibrant wife, mother, and actress into a figure of tragedy. The weekend has long been shrouded in rumors and scandalous tabloid speculation, but until now there has never been an account of how the events and their aftermath were experienced by Natalie’s beloved eldest daughter. Here, for the first time, is a“deeply intimate chronicle of life with her famous mother and how Wood’s death devastated the family” (Los Angeles Times). Cutting through the shadow hanging over her mother’s legacy, More Than Love is a “poignant” (The Washington Post) tale of a daughter coming to terms with her grief, as well as a “revealing new look at Natalie Wood” (Good Morning America).