Deborah Hopkinson

Eel, an orphan, and his best friend Florrie must help Dr. John Snow prove that cholera is spread through water, and not poisonous air, when an epidemic sweeps across their London neighborhood in 1854.

In 1931, a boy and his father watch as the world's tallest building, the Empire State Building, is constructed, step-by-step, near their Manhattan home.

When his father leaves to fight in World War I, Mikey joins the Central Park Knitting Bee to help knit clothing for soldiers overseas.

For years Dickens kept the story of his own childhood a secret. Yet it is a story worth telling. For it helps us remember how much we all might lose when a child's dreams don't come true . . . As a child, Dickens was forced to live on his own and work long hours in a rat-infested blacking factory. Readers will be drawn into the winding streets of London, where they will learn how Dickens got the inspiration for many of his characters. The 200th...

A letter from someone who was once an exasperating second-grader reveals her experiences with a teacher who brought out the best in her.

An immigrant girl explains how she learned English by reading about Monarch butterflies, and how, troubled by their decline, she got her classmates and neighbors together to build a butterfly garden.

"The story of Girl Power! Learn about the remarkable women who changed US history. From Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Gloria Steinem and Hillary Clinton, women throughout US history have fought for equality. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women were demanding the right to vote. During the 1960s, equal rights and opportunities for women--both at home and in the workplace--were pushed even further. And in the more...

Thirteen-year-olds Bertie Bradshaw of London and American Eleanor Shea team up to decipher a coded notebook and stop a double agent from revealing secrets about the upcoming D-Day invasion.

"Ruth David was growing up in a small village in Germany when Adolf Hitler rose to power in the 1930s. Under the Nazi Party, Jewish families like Ruth's experienced rising anti-Semitic restrictions and attacks. Just going to school became dangerous. By November 1938, anti-Semitism erupted into Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, and unleashed a wave of violence and forced arrests. Days later, desperate volunteers sprang into action to organize...

"The WWII invasion of Allied troops into German-occupied Europe, known as D-Day, was the largest military endeavor in history. By the time it occurred on June 6, 1944, Hitler and the Axis powers had a chokehold grip on the European continent, which the Allies called "Fortress Europe." Behind enemy lines, Nazi Germany was engaged in the mass extermination of the Jewish people and the oppression of civilians across Europe. The goal of D-Day was no less...