Download in the epub format:
Download for Kindle Fire tablets and Amazon ereaders:
Teacher, social scientist, historian, poet, prophet—his was the voice that demanded equality, respect and dignity for the black man in a society that denied his humanity.
The memory of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois is as important to the past and future of this country as any revolutionary figure before or since. Yet for years he was unknown to white America and, as a victim of the McCarthy witch hunts of the fifties, rejected by his countrymen. In this dramatic, candid biography, Emma Gelders Sterne presents W. E. B. Du Bois to a new generation that is entitled to the truth about the black man who cried “Freedom Now!” and “Black Power” when no one was willing to listen.
Drawing from the private papers of Du Bois himself, his publications, and the confidences of those who knew and worked with him, Mrs. Sterne has written an unconventional story that reads like fiction but tells the little-known facts of a fascinating life. Thanks to the support of Dr. Herbert Aptheker, Du Bois’ close friend and literary executor, Mrs. Sterne was allowed to examine unpublished materials by and about Du Bois.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, three years after the emancipation of the slaves. His entire life was devoted to freeing those former slaves and their offspring from the burden of second-class citizenship. A brilliant scholar and orator who was graduated with honors from Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois was a pioneer social scientist, champion of the emerging African nations, and a founder and controversial member of the NAACP.
He wrote nineteen books, hundreds of articles and poems, and created and edited two literary magazines. But most remarkable of all was W. E. B. Du Bois the man: a uniquely American patriot and prophet who, denied the right to return to his homeland, died in exile in Ghana in 1963—still a revolutionary at the great age of ninety-five.
A testimonial from a librarian:
“To the youth of today (and those of age who engage in creative thinking) from a librarian who believes in the power of the ‘word . . .’ ”
“I urge you to read this book. It will make you think. William Du Bois searched all of his life for directions that black and other Americans should take. I do not agree with some of the directions he has suggested and you may or may not! But he has anticipated this reaction and left an answer: ‘What I have done well will live long and justify my life. What I have done ill or never finished can now be handed down to others.’
“He was a man who was jailed by his government and refused entrance to the land of his birth. He was ignored by the people he sought to help and yet he left another message especially for you: ‘One thing I charge you. As you live, believe in life. Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller lives….’ ”
Harriett B. Brown
Supervisor of Libraries
Board of Education, New York City
The Author:
EMMA GELDERS STERNE, a former teacher and editor, has written more than twenty books in the past forty years, including Mary McLeod Bethune; Benito Juarez, Builder of a Nation; I Have a Dream; and They Took Their Stand. The recipient of many awards over the years, she was honored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which established a children’s fund in her name.
Agent in Italy: A Memoir of a Spy in World War II with a Study Guide
/0 Comments/in For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, Military History, With a Study Guide, World War II /by Jim McCabeI couldn’t hear a sound, either from the corridor and offices beyond the door or from the sleeping city of Milan outside. All the rest of the world could have died.
It was stifling. Italian police stations are badly ventilated. My throat was very dry and I kept coughing. I smoked another cigarette but that made it worse. The smoke hung in the dead air.
I tried the door again. My wet palm slipped on the unclean handle. The door was still locked, of course.
I didn’t know exactly what time it was because they’d taken my watch away from me. I guessed about three in the morning. I was going to be shot at six.
Thus begins this amazing; book—both a thrilling story of personal danger in Italy’s underground movement, and a fully detailed, authentic report on the crumbling of Italian Fascist morale under the terror of German occupancy.
The gripping adventures experienced by S. K. during his undercover work in Italy give us a picture of methods which more than match all we have heard of German and Russian espionage work. Yet they are absolutely bona fide—the author’s credentials have been carefully checked. He remains anonymous for the protection of those colleagues still carrying on the Democratic revolution.
Working with groups of fearless Italian patriots, it was S. K. who first revealed to the outside world through confidential information on Germany’s flame-throwing tanks, the intention of Mussolini to move against Greece, the use of American dollars for the purchase of oil in French African ports by submarine captions, the shipping of Messerschimitts to Central America, the existence of camouflaged airports in Nicaragua and Bolivia, the sending of Stukas to Japan, and the building of new Condors in Holland.
In addition to these sensational disclosures, agent in Italy now reveals fully detailed story of the German occupation of Italy, giving facts and figures, including an estimate of 400,000 Germans now keeping the junior Axis partner under shaky control.
Filled with tense and breathless incident, this book, the first to disclose the bitter ordeal of Italy, bring the excitement of the mystery novel to one of the most important factual documents of our day.
To read this ebook as a pdf, see the link below.
Agent In Italy
To read this ebook using Readium on a computer, or for Google Play Books on your tablet, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.
To read on a device from Amazon, here is the ebook in mobi format.
Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see instructions at http://tinyurl.com/y8gsazq.
An Army of Amateurs
/0 Comments/in For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, Military History, World War II /by Jim McCabeDownload an epub file for your Android, or Apple tablet, or Chromebook.
Download a mobi file for your Amazon device.
AN ARMY OF AMATEURS is the incredible story of the resistance of the ordinary Frenchman in the street to the Nazis—secretly sapping the strength of the invading armies until the final Allied victory. Here is a picture of a group of dedicated but inexperienced citizens who risked their lives and displayed enormous courage—winning despite the many blunders that amateurs were bound to make.
Philippe De Vomécourt, who with his two brothers, and the aid of Great Britain, helped to organize the resistance, began his operations by obtaining a job with the Nazis as an inspector of railroad trucks-enabling him to see that these trucks failed to get to the proper destination, to plan “escape routes” and assist in smuggling Jews to safety.
It was not long, however, before the Nazis began to suspect Philippe of being a traitor and eventually the luck of the de Vomécourt brothers ran out. One of them—who saw to it that every single torpedo ship leaving Germany was blown up—paid for his work by death in a concentration camp. Philippe was sentenced to hard labor but soon showed his unfailing ingenuity and daring by managing to escape—taking with him fifty-three other prisoners. Departing for England with a small group, he returned to France before D-Day to supervise the cloak-and-dagger activities of his own group, Special Operations Executive, enlisting anyone who was willing to help them harass the Germans.
AN ARMY OF AMATEURS is an important book, packed with heroism, hair raising escapes, and some sharp criticism of France’s allies.
Philippe De Vomécourt was born in France in 1902 and educated in England. As a young man, he joined the Flying Corps (British) in World War I, later studying agriculture and managing a farm in Africa. After marrying, he lived in the New Herbrides and then Australia before settling in France.
Runaway Russia: An American Woman Reports on the Russian Revolution
/0 Comments/in For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, Primary Source, World History /by Jim McCabeA “Gripping Account” —The Wall Street Journal
Florence Harper was the first American female journalist in Petrograd. Sure that trouble was coming, she waited “as I would for a circus parade.” From the women’s bread protests of the heady first days when the mob seemed “good-natured” to the later horror of the “Marseillaise”-singing crowds being mowed down by machine guns, she remained undaunted, repeatedly returning to the streets despite the dangers she courted daily. She searched the morgues so that she could do a story on the victims. ‘‘I did not wait to count the coffins. It was too harrowing,” she reports. She did watch the hated police being thrown off roofs and also ran the gantlet of the mutinous Kronstadt sailors, who she recalls “all looked like cutthroats.” Allied officers at her hotel smashed the contents of its cellars till they were “literally knee deep in everything from champagne to vodka” to prevent the mob from getting at them. The stoicism and sympathy with which she endured it all shine forth from this gripping account.
Helen Rappaport, The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2017
Download a free copy for individual use or to distribute to your students.
To read this ebook using Readium on a computer, or for Google Play Books on your tablet, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.
To read on a device from Amazon, or with the Kindle app, here is the ebook in mobi format.
Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer using the Kindle app, see instructions at http://tinyurl.com/y8gsazq.
The Kindle Personal Document Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to up to 15 student Kindle email addresses at a time.
W.E.B. Du Bois: His Was the Voice by Emma Gelders Sterne (For Young Adults)
/in Biographies, For Young Adults, Free Ebooks /by Jim McCabeDownload in the epub format:
Download for Kindle Fire tablets and Amazon ereaders:
Teacher, social scientist, historian, poet, prophet—his was the voice that demanded equality, respect and dignity for the black man in a society that denied his humanity.
The memory of Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois is as important to the past and future of this country as any revolutionary figure before or since. Yet for years he was unknown to white America and, as a victim of the McCarthy witch hunts of the fifties, rejected by his countrymen. In this dramatic, candid biography, Emma Gelders Sterne presents W. E. B. Du Bois to a new generation that is entitled to the truth about the black man who cried “Freedom Now!” and “Black Power” when no one was willing to listen.
Drawing from the private papers of Du Bois himself, his publications, and the confidences of those who knew and worked with him, Mrs. Sterne has written an unconventional story that reads like fiction but tells the little-known facts of a fascinating life. Thanks to the support of Dr. Herbert Aptheker, Du Bois’ close friend and literary executor, Mrs. Sterne was allowed to examine unpublished materials by and about Du Bois.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Massachusetts in 1868, three years after the emancipation of the slaves. His entire life was devoted to freeing those former slaves and their offspring from the burden of second-class citizenship. A brilliant scholar and orator who was graduated with honors from Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois was a pioneer social scientist, champion of the emerging African nations, and a founder and controversial member of the NAACP.
He wrote nineteen books, hundreds of articles and poems, and created and edited two literary magazines. But most remarkable of all was W. E. B. Du Bois the man: a uniquely American patriot and prophet who, denied the right to return to his homeland, died in exile in Ghana in 1963—still a revolutionary at the great age of ninety-five.
A testimonial from a librarian:
“To the youth of today (and those of age who engage in creative thinking) from a librarian who believes in the power of the ‘word . . .’ ”
“I urge you to read this book. It will make you think. William Du Bois searched all of his life for directions that black and other Americans should take. I do not agree with some of the directions he has suggested and you may or may not! But he has anticipated this reaction and left an answer: ‘What I have done well will live long and justify my life. What I have done ill or never finished can now be handed down to others.’
“He was a man who was jailed by his government and refused entrance to the land of his birth. He was ignored by the people he sought to help and yet he left another message especially for you: ‘One thing I charge you. As you live, believe in life. Always human beings will progress to greater, broader, and fuller lives….’ ”
Harriett B. Brown
Supervisor of Libraries
Board of Education, New York City
The Author:
EMMA GELDERS STERNE, a former teacher and editor, has written more than twenty books in the past forty years, including Mary McLeod Bethune; Benito Juarez, Builder of a Nation; I Have a Dream; and They Took Their Stand. The recipient of many awards over the years, she was honored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which established a children’s fund in her name.
Download Your Copy of Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles in Epub or Kindle Format.
/0 Comments/in OER Commons /by Jim McCabeIn epub format:
Serenade to the Big Bird – Bert Stiles
For your Kindle:
Serenade to the Big Bird – Bert Stiles
See this link for information about how to share files with students with tablets.
See this suggestion for reading ebooks in epub format on computers. Students without tablets can use the Readium app with the Chrome browser on their Chromebooks or computers at home. Readium does not have all the note taking features of Google Play Books on tablets, but it is a decent workaround.
Grade Level:
This book is easy Reading. Grade level is 5.6 according to the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Formula.
From reviews:
“A book of terrific impact. Perhaps the best to come out of World War II.” From The Philadelphia Inquirer.
“THE serenade is a simple and moving story of the war in the air. The big bird was a Flying Fort. She had a crew of ten men and all but one of them were 20 to 24 years old. Bert Stiles was the co-pilot. He had been in college before he joined and had ability as a writer. The pilot was Sam Newton. Beach, who was 34, was the ball turret gunner. and the only man in the crew who was married. He had been a mechanic before the war. He was a sleepy sort of guy. They went out on missions together into Germany from England. They ran into flak and had the daylights scared out of them, and burned out their guns shooting down 109’s and Focke-Wulfs. They dropped bombs on Berlin and other cities, and hated war, and did not like to think what their bombs had done. …“There was none of the tense struggle of physical combat in young Stiles’ life. You just sat there and took it—faced death up in the cold sky and couldn’t do anything about it. Any time you might disintegrate in a blast of flame. It didn’t help the nerves.” From a review in The New York Times.
Bert Stiles flew 35 missions as co-pilot of a Flying Fortress—the “big bird” of the title. SERENADE TO THE BIG BIRD is a vivid, close-up view of life in the bomber squadrons of the U.S. Eighth Air Force in World War II. Bert Stiles was a combat co-pilot of a B-17, flying missions over France and Germany in the spring and summer of 1944. This is his book, written between missions— a beautiful and terrible and gripping story of one plane and its crew.
Your Review Copy of Serenade to the Big Bird by Bert Stiles in Epub and Kindle Formats
/0 Comments/in Review Copies /by Jim McCabeIn epub format:
Serenade to the Big Bird – Bert Stiles
For your Kindle:
Serenade to the Big Bird – Bert Stiles
They Called it “Purple Heart Valley”-A Combat Chronicle of the War in Italy by Margaret Bourke-White
/0 Comments/in For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, Military History, Primary Source, World War II /by Jim McCabeAn excerpt from The New York Times review by Foster Hailey, November 26, 1944:
“Reading Miss White’s remarkable book and looking at her even more remarkable photographs, many of them taken under fire, you know that all the American men and boys, in Italy, in France, in India, China, Burma and the many Pacific islands, have what it takes to defeat their country’s enemies. That’s why they’re winning the war.
“Margaret Bourke-White’s photographic-written record of the weeks she spent slogging through the mud, riding a Jeep up and down Highway 6, climbing mountain peaks in the dark with her heavy equipment to get just the right place and the right light to shoot her pictures, photographing the quick, the dead and the dying in gun emplacements. front-line foxhole, emergency dressing station and rear-base hospital, is one of the best and most remarkable books to come out of the war. The author prefers to be known perhaps as a photographer; but this book qualifies her as a first-rate reporter, in command of a lean, hard prose that is the only true medium of description for the ordered insanity of war…
“…Although the most exciting photographs and the best reading are of battle. Miss Bourke-White gives the whole picture. She tells of the misery of the Italian civilians behind the lines; the black market through which some Italians fleeced other Italians; the bungling of the American Military Government, which (by a confession to her, she said, of one of its high officials) was more interested in how the United States would react to what it was doing than of getting a disagreeable job done quietly and efficiently.”
From Foreign Affairs: Reviewed By Robert Gale Woolbert July 1945
In this intimate, first-hand description of the Cassino campaign in Italy the author has accompanied her usual superb photography with exciting text.
Download in epub format for your Apple or Android device:
Download in mobi format for your Amazon ereader or Fire tablet:
From a Pulitzer-Prize Winning War Correspondent with Maps and a Study Guide
/0 Comments/in For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, Korea, Military History, Primary Source, With a Study Guide /by Jim McCabeRead about the first year of the Korean War in “War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent.” The author, Marguerite Higgins, was the first woman to win a Pulitzer for international reporting. The book is about the battles at the start of the war as the armies moved up and down the Korean Peninsula. But Higgins is not concerned with military strategy. She writes about the lives of U.S. GIs, the Korean civilians, and how she navigated through a male dominated military who wanted to send her home.
The military historian, S.L.A. Marshall appreciated Higgins’s work: “This Maggie’s eye view of the Korean police action is downright irresistible in its candor, in its simple expression of the things which most of us feel strongly but can’t say very well, in its change of pace between the tragedy of the battlefield and the high comedy of much of human behavior in close relationship to it….Many of her word pictures are remarkable in their ability to convey much in little; where she philosophizes at all about men in battle her style is almost epigrammatic, and many of her observations have such a true ring that they deserve to be remembered and widely quoted.”
According to the Saturday Review of Literature it is “….a whale of a war story.”
Here is the ebook in pdf format:
War In Korea The Report Of A Wo – Marguerite Higgins
To read this ebook using Readium on a computer, or for Google Play Books on your tablet, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.
To read on a device from Amazon, or on the Kindle app on your computer, here is the ebook in mobi format.
Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .
The Kindle WhisperCast Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to a group of student Kindle email addresses even if the document or ebook was not purchased on Amazon. In the WhisperCast Service, the mobi files you upload such as this one, will then be found in the Documents folder. Only items purchased on Amazon, will appear in the Books folder.
Why Does the Volume of Reading Matter?
/0 Comments/in Literacy Practices /by Jim McCabeSee how the volume of reading influences reading comprehension. Could the volume of reading matter more than intelligence in reading comprehension?
What did Anne S. Cunningham and Keith Stanovich discover in their research?
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/cunningham.pdf
What are the barriers to more reading which Cunningham and Stanovich advocate?
How do literacy practices influence the achievement gap in high schools?
Why do school districts rely so heavily on textbooks in high school history classrooms? What are the consequences of this decision?
The excerpt below is from The Wasted Years: American Youth, Race, and the Literacy Gap by James McCabe. Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. It describes the decision of the Montgomery County school system to depend on textbooks alone in most of the history courses being offered in high schools, and what the consequences of this decision are. While the spending numbers in this chapter are out-of-date, the recommendations at the end of the chapter may still useful to you as you work improve the reading skills of the students in your high school.
And for a very recent look at the barriers teachers face ordering books in Montgomery County, Maryland, see this abbreviated description of the instructional materials review process. The total process is here. It looks like nineteen steps are involved. Each must be fulfilled before a simple biography can arrive in a classroom. Obviously, the process makes it extremely difficult for teachers to obtain exciting books for their classes.
Here is the chapter with the recommendations about changing literacy practices.
Chapter 7: Books in Montgomery County High Schools
Quality
/0 Comments/in How To Share Ebooks with Your Students /by Jim McCabeSamples of all of our titles are available on Amazon so that you and your faculty, and students can see if the narratives are engaging.
The ebooks are a combination of young adult and regular trade biographies. These books were not published in the last couple of years. Typically, they are trade biographies or young adult titles published in the 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s. They are out of print in paper. We contacted the writers or the heirs of the writers and contracted with them for re-publication in ebook form. A few are public domain titles not available on Project Gutenberg or Internet Archive.
They are good reads and quality books; many were written by journalists whose mission was to inform without overwhelming readers with technical details. Other were written by authors who specialized in books for young adults such as the prize-winning Emma Gelders Sterne. Several were reviewed in the New York Times and other newspapers at publication. One of our writers was the first woman to win a Pulitzer prize as a foreign correspondent. Her ebook, War in Korea: The Report of a Woman War Correspondent is an easy to read account of the chaos in the first year of the Korean War.
And the FAQ section of our website contains advice on how to share the ebooks which you have downloaded from our site with your students.