Ann Bausum

"Mississippi. 1966. On a hot June afternoon an African-American man named James Meredith set out to walk through his home state, intending to fight racism and fear with his feet. A seemingly simple plan, but one teeming with risk. Just one day later Meredith was shot and wounded in a roadside ambush. Within twenty-four hours, Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and other civil rights leaders had taken up Meredith's cause, determined to overcome...

"Revised and updated to include the winner of the 2020 presidential election, this photo-filled and fact-packed book is a timely reference. Key features include: Information about the 2021 president-elect and the 2020 election results, a brand-new thematic spread on the impeachment process and its history, revised terminology around the language of slavery and analysis of early presidents who benefitted from and relied on enslaved labor, comprehensive...

"The unlikely true story of why we know the name William Shakespeare today, and the four-hundred-year-old book that made it possible. Four hundred years ago, no one bothered to write down the exact words of stage plays. Characters' lines were scribbled on small rolls of paper (as in, an actor's role) and passed around, but no master script was saved for the future. The main reason we've heard of Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, and Shakespeare himself is that...

In early 1968 the grisly on-the-job deaths of two African-American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, prompted an extended strike by that city's segregated force of trash collectors. Workers sought union protection, higher wages, improved safety, and the integration of their work force. Their work stoppage became a part of the larger civil rights movement and drew an impressive array of national movement leaders to Memphis, including, on

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After the sinking of the Lusitania, anti-German sentiment in the United States led to the erosion of many cherished American freedoms. As U.S. troops fought to make the world safe for democracy, our own government eroded freedoms at home, especially for German-Americans. Free speech was no longer an operating principle of American democracy. Award-winning author Ann Bausum asks, just where do Americans draw the line of justice in times of war?

American soldier J. Robert Conroy befriended a stray dog with a stumpy tail while training to fight overseas in WWI. They bonded so closely that Conroy smuggled him to Europe, where Stubby accompanied Conroy's regiment on the Western Front, lending both his superior olfactory senses and amiable temperament to the war effort.

Bausum compares and contrasts the childhoods of John Lewis and James Zwerg in a way that helps young readers understand the segregated experience of our nation's past. The book shows how a common interest in justice created the convergent path that enabled these young men to meet as Freedom Riders on a bus journey south.

Explores how the media, politics, the civil rights movement, and labor protests all converged to set the scene for one of Dr. King's greatest speeches and for his tragic death on April 4, 1968, in Memphis.