Deborah Hopkinson

On April 15, 1912, the magnificent ocean liner the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank beneath the icy North Atlantic seas. Hopkinson weaves together archival photographs and the voices of real Titanic survivors and witnesses to the disaster to bring the horrors of that terrible night to life. There's nine-year-old Frankie Goldsmith; Violet Jessop, a young stewardess; Archibald Gracie, a well-to-do gentleman; Charlotte Collyer, a young mother on...

"As World War II raged, millions of young Jewish people were caught up in the horrors of the Nazis' Final Solution. Many readers know of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi state's genocidal campaign against European Jews and others of so-called "inferior" races. Yet so many of the individual stories remain buried in time. Of those who endured the Holocaust, some were caught by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps, some hid right under Hitler's nose, some...

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 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...

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.

" A thrilling account of the most daring American POW rescue mission of World War II.Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, America entered World War II, and a new theater of battle opened up in the Pacific. But US troops, along with thousands of Filipino soldiers who fought alongside them, were overtaken in the Philippines by a fiercely determined Japanese navy, and many Americans and Filipino fighters were killed or captured.These American and Filipino...

"The deadly outbreak of plague known as the Great Mortality, which struck Europe in the mid 1300s and raged for four centuries, wiped out more than 25 million people in the course of just two years. With its vicious onslaught, life changed for millions of people almost instantaneously. Deadly pandemics have always been a part of life, from the Great Mortality of the Middle Ages, to the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918, to the eruption of COVID-19...

On a hot summer night a little girl wakes up, and wonders what has woken her, and the rest of the nighttime world.

The story of America's little known war-within-a war -- that of the "silent service" -- U.S. submarine warfare during World War II.