National Network for Equitable Library Service

Tells the stories of women pioneers who endured unimaginable hardships to settle the West. All of them overcame obstacles, broke barriers, and changed the world--inspiring examples for the modern woman.

At midday on May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard launched a sixty-seven-shot barrage that left four Kent State students dead and nine wounded. Means tells the story of this iconic American moment through the eyes and memories of those who were there.

The Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow and focused the electoral power of black America. Drawing on extensive research, Ethan Michaeli constructs a narrative of race in America and brings to life the reporters who braved lynch mobs and policemen's clubs.

This book takes us back to 1952, when no one could foresee an end to Joseph Stalin's murderous regime. Rubenstein vividly describes Stalin's mysterious, sudden death and the unfolding of Soviet and international events in the months after.

The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin radically altered the future of both Israel and the Palestinians. In a riveting narrative, Ephron tells the parallel stories of Rabin and his stalker, Yigal Amir, for two years leading up to the assassination, as one negotiated for peace and the other plotted murder.

Following Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–58, Chinese intellectuals were subjected to “re-education” by the state. In Banished to the Great Northern Wilderness, Ning Wang draws on labour farm archives and other newly uncovered Chinese-language sources, including an interview with a camp guard, to provide a remarkable look at the suffering and complex psychological world of intellectuals banished to China’s remote north.

With her linen head scarf and white apron emblazoned with a red cross, the Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse, or VAD, has become a romantic emblem of the Great War. This book tells the story of the nearly 2,000 women from Canada and Newfoundland who volunteered to “do their bit” overseas and at home. Well-educated and middle-class but largely untrained, VADs were excluded from Canadian military hospitals overseas (the realm of the professional nurse) but helped solve Britain’s nursing deficit.

Since 1970 in Quebec, there has been immense change for the Cree, who now live with the consequences of Quebec's massive development of the North. Home Is the Hunter presents the historical, environmental, and cultural context from which this recent story grows. Hans Carlson shows how the Cree view their lands as their home, their garden, and their memory of themselves as a people. By investigating the Cree's three hundred years of contact with outsiders, he illuminates the process of cultural negotiation at the foundation of ongoing political and environmental debates.

Between 1916 and 1918, Lance-Corporal George Timmins, a British-born soldier who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote faithfully to his wife and children. Sixty-three letters and four fragments survived. These letters tell the compelling story of a man who, while helping his fellow Canadians make history, used letters home to remain a presence in the lives of his wife and children, and who drew strength from his family to appreciate life's simple pleasures.

In Sister Soldiers of the Great War, award-winning author Cynthia Toman recovers the long-lost history of Canada’s first women soldiers – nursing sisters who enlisted as officers with the Canadian Army Medical Corps. The nursing sisters had a mandate to salvage as many sick and wounded men as possible for return to the front lines. Nothing prepared them, however, for the poor living conditions, the scale of the casualties, or the type of wounds they encountered.