Orphan History

Eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin “B .F.” Windes decides to abandon home and trail his father’s path. Thus begins a trip of constant struggle with disease, severe weather, hardship, Indian attack, and death on his lone journey across much of what is now the United States. B. F. spends the next 11 years in gold rush towns in California - first as a barber, then as a physician’s assistant - before departing for the Caribbean at age 19, where he becomes a blockade runner during the American Civil War.

A gripping tale of betrayal and counterbetrayal that tells the story of the most enigmatic member of the Cambridge spy ring - Donald Maclean. Donald Maclean was a star diplomat, an establishment insider and a keeper of some of the West's greatest secrets. He was also a Russian spy, driven by passionately held beliefs, whose betrayal and defection to Moscow reverberated for decades.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing bigger in Texas high school football than the Masonic Home Mighty Mites - a group of orphans bound together by hardship and death. These youngsters, in spite of being outweighed by at least 30 pounds per man, were the toughest football team around. They began with nothing - not even a football - yet in a few years were playing for the state championship on the highest level of Texas football. This is a winning tribute to a courageous band of underdogs from a time when America desperately needed fresh hope and big dreams.

With feudal wars raging through the Japanese countryside, it is no place for children, particularly homeless orphans like six-year-old Saru, who grow up fast and hard in the cold city. When begging does not fill his stomach, stealing and cunning do the trick. The only warmth Saru knows is from a kindly priest who allows him to sleep under his little Shinto shrine in the winter, and Neko, his adopted kitten. Living day-by-day, Saru gives little thought to the future or the course his life might take.

Opium's Orphans is the first full history of drug prohibition and the "war on drugs." A no-holds-barred but balanced account, it shows that drug suppression was born of historical accident, not rational design. The war on drugs did not originate in Europe or the United States, and even less with President Nixon, but in China. Two Opium Wars followed by Western attempts to atone for them gave birth to an anti-narcotics order that has come to span the globe. But has the war on drugs succeeded?

Orphan, clock keeper, and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy Paris train station, where his survival depends on secrets and anonymity. But when his world suddenly interlocks with an eccentric, bookish girl and a bitter old man who runs a toy booth in the station, Hugo's undercover life and his most precious secret are put in jeopardy.

Rilla, almost 15, can't think any further ahead than going to her very first dance at the Four Winds lighthouse and getting her first kiss from handsome Kenneth Ford. But undreamed-of challenges await the irrepressible Rilla when the world of Ingleside becomes endangered by a far-off war. Her brothers go off to fight, and Rilla brings home an orphaned newborn in a soup tureen. She is swept into a drama that tests her courage and leaves her changed forever.

It's 1941, and tensions are rising in the United States as the Second World War rages in Europe. Eleven-year-old Gusta's life, like the world around her, is about to change. Her father, a foreign-born labor organizer, has had to flee the country, and Gusta has been sent to live in an orphanage run by her grandmother. Nearsighted, snaggletoothed Gusta arrives in Springdale, Maine, lugging her one precious possession: a beloved old French horn, her sole memento of her father. But in a family that's long on troubles and short on money, how can a girl hang on to something so valuable and yet so useless?

The free-spirited Anne Shirley has a beautiful way of looking at the world and touching our hearts. In this, the third volume of the Anne of Green Gables series, the irrepressible Anne dreams of the woman she hopes to be when she decides to leave Green Gables and her beloved Prince Edward Island for college. She is eager for new adventure.

In this colonial adventure tale, set on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border in 1768, Everett Shinn is enlisted in a search for two runaway indentured servants. Eager for adventure and to become a hero by capturing the runaways himself, 12-year-old Peter York, Shinn’s adopted son, volunteers to join the search. Peter assumes that the runaways are swarthy ruffians. When he discovers, however, that they are mistreated children seeking freedom in Pennsylvania, Peter’s purpose turns from capturing them to helping them escape. Will Shinn, a devout Quaker of few words, foil Peter’s plans, or will the young man receive help from an unexpected source?

For years, 16-year-old Hattie's been shuttled between relatives. Tired of being Hattie Here-and-There, she courageously leaves Iowa to prove up on her late uncle's homestead claim near Vida, Montana. With a stubborn stick-to-itiveness, Hattie faces frost, drought, and blizzards. Despite many hardships, Hattie forges ahead, sharing her adventures with her friends, especially Charlie, fighting in France, through letters and articles for her hometown paper.

When Princess Mary ascends the throne in sixteenth-century England, Rose is forced to leave Princess Elizabeth and serve Mary. But the religiously devout queen’s next plan is to begin her attack on Protestants - burning them at the stake! Rose’s dad urges Rose to escape to her home century, present day Indiana, where Rose befriends a young immigrant named Marisol. Relishing her newfound family, Rose is determined to rescue her father and best friend Franny from the dangers of Queen Mary's reign. Is she willing to risk everything to save the people closest to her?

Between 1854 and 1930, more than 200,000 orphaned or abandoned children were sent west on orphan trains to find new homes. Some were adopted by loving families; others were not as fortunate. In recent years, some of the riders have begun to share their stories. Andrea Warren alternates chapters about the history of the orphan trains with the story of Lee Nailling, who in 1926 rode an orphan train to Texas.

A fascinating tale from the 1800s of young boys who were unfortunately wrecked in the ship Charles Eaton, of London, and lived for several years with the natives of the South Sea Islands. The remainder of the passengers and crew of this ill-fated ship were most inhumanly murdered by the savages soon after they landed from the wreck.

Based on a true story originally written by one of the survivors, Neta Lohnes Frazier's account of seven children traveling westward still has the power to astonish. In the 1840s, the Sager family set off on the Oregon Trail, a dangerous and adventure-filled journey. Tragedy struck when both the mother and father succumbed to fever, orphaning the youngsters - one just a newborn. The entire wagon train adopted them, until they arrived at the Whitman Mission in Oregon.

Janusz Korczak was more than a good doctor. He was a hero. The Dr. Spock of his day, he established orphanages run on his principle of honoring children and shared his ideas with the public in books and on the radio. He famously said that "children are not the people of tomorrow, but people today". Korczak was a man ahead of his time, whose work ultimately became the basis for the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

"The Orphan Trains were needed at the time they happened. They were not the best answer, but they were the first attempts at finding a practical system. Many children that would have died, lived to have children and grandchildren. It has been calculated that over two million descendants have come from these children. The trains gave the children a fighting chance to grow up." - D. Bruce Ayler

في هذا الكتاب سِيرٌ لجمع من المفكرين والفقهاء والمخترعين والأدباء ورجال الأعمال والعلماء ممن اشتركوا في خصلة واحدة وارتبطوا فيما بينهم برابطة مشتركة... ألا وهي اليتم، فكلهم فقدوا آباءهم فأصبحوا بلا عائلة، وتُركوا أمام الدنيا كجندي بلا سلاح وربّانٍ بلا سفينة، تأخذهم المصاعب وتتلاعب بهم المتاعب، فتحدوا الحياة وخاضوا غمارها، فلم توقفهم العقبات ولم تحل دون ما أرادوه المصاعب والأزمات، ولم يتخبئوا خلف يتمهم ولم ينتظروا رأفة الآخرين وإحسانهم، وعلموا أن الحياة مغامرة مثيرة، وأن الوصول إلى القمة يتطلب السير في القاع...

Orphans of Empire tells the story of what happened to the thousands of children who were raised at the London Foundling Hospital, Coram's brainchild, which opened in 1741 and grew to become the most famous charity in Georgian England. It provides vivid insights into the lives and fortunes of London's poorest children, from the earliest days of the Foundling Hospital to the mid-Victorian era, when Charles Dickens was moved by his observations of the charity's work to campaign on behalf of orphans.

“Doomed from birth” was how psychologist Harold Skeels described two girls at the Orphans’ Home in Davenport, Iowa, in 1934. Following prevailing eugenic beliefs, Skeels and his colleague Marie Skodak assumed that the girls had inherited their parents’ low intelligence and sent them to an institution. To their astonishment, under the women’s care, the children’s IQ scores became normal. Recasting Skeels and his team as intrepid heroes, Marilyn Brookwood weaves years of prodigious archival research to show how after decades of backlash, the Iowans finally prevailed.