Arcadia Public Library

Eighteen-year-old Salama Kassab, a pharmacy student volunteering at the hospital in Homs, is desperate to find passage on a refugee boat for herself and her pregnant best friend, but first she must learn to see the events around her for what they are--not a war, but a revolution.

"Gracetown, Florida. June 1950. Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie's journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory. Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort...

Travel back on a delicious decade-by-decade jaunt as Hollis shows you how to bake vintage forgotten greats. From Chocolate potato cake to Avocado pie, he has collected these recipes from antique cookbooks from the 1900s to the 1980s. Some are spectacular failures-- and others are disastrously strange. Others are delightful blasts from the past that you just may end up adding to your permanent collection. -- adapted from inside front cover, and perusal...

"California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives-- the first slaves transported into California-- and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California's carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in...

"A groundbreaking, sweeping overview of the great kingdoms in African history and their legacies, written by world-leading experts. This is the first book for non-specialists to explore the great precolonial kingdoms of Africa that have been marginalized throughout history. Great Kingdoms of Africa aims to decenter European colonialism and slavery as the major themes of African history and instead explore the kingdoms, dynasties, and city-states that...

"From the critically acclaimed historian Victor Sebestyen, the enthralling account of historical and cultural events that define Budapest, a unique city on the fault line between East and West in the heart of Europe. Including an eight-page insert of photographs, this book is a glorious homage to an extraordinary city"--

"A sweeping look at how the major transformations in history--from the rise of Homo sapiens to the birth of capitalism--have been shaped not by humans but by germs. According to the accepted narrative of progress, humans have thrived thanks to their brains and brawn, collectively bending the arc of history. But in this revelatory book, professor Jonathan Kennedy argues that the myth of human exceptionalism overstates the role that we play in social...

"In Assyria, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of one of the ancient world's most accomplished civilizations, the Assyrian Empire. Tracing its origins to a minor city state in present-day Iraq, Assyria at its height, around 660 BCE, stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf, the first empire the world had seen. Breath-taking, belligerent conquest -- epitomized in the motto of the seventh-century king Esarhaddon, "Before me,...

"As a columnist for the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri has watched in real time as those who didn't learn from history have been forced to repeat it. And repeat it. And repeat it. If we repeat history one more time, we're going to fail! Maybe it's time for a new textbook. Alexandra Petri's US History contains a lost (invented!) history of America. (A history for people disappointed that the only president whose weird sex letters we have is Warren...

"June 1946. As the residents of Winthrop Island prepare for the first summer season after the sacrifice of war, a glamorous new figure moves into the guest cottage at Summerly, the idyllic seaside estate of the wealthy Peabody family. To Emilia Winthrop, daughter of Summerly's year-round caretaker and a descendant of the island's settlers, Olive Rainsford opens a window into a world of shining possibility. While Emilia spent the war years caring for...