A little girl has a wonderful idea. With the help of her canine assistant, she is going to make the most magnificent thing! She knows just how it will look. She knows just how it will work. But making the most magnificent thing turns out to be harder than she thinks.

The facts about accepted myths of American history.

"The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Inaccurate interpretations and outright misrepresentations of the past-cultivated within and promoted by the conservative movement and right-wing media over the last several decades-hold sway among large numbers of Americans, damaging our public discourse. In Myth America, historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of historians to provide textured analysis...

Europe experienced one of the most remarkable periods in history roughly between 1550 and 1700, when three of history's most important events were occurring simultaneously: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. The three closely connected movements had a profound impact on Western society, and the Scientific Revolution led eventually to the Industrial Revolution. Worldwide exploration, which preceded the Scientific Revolution...

A twelve-year-old boy, worried that his parents may divorce, discovers that an island in the middle of the lake where he's spending the summer is the testing ground of the mysterious Dr. Libris, who may have invented a way to make the characters in books come alive.

"Some of humanity's mightiest engineering achievements are small in scale--and, without them, the complex machinery on which our modern world runs would not exist. In Nuts and Bolts, structural engineer Roma Agrawal examines seven of these extraordinary elements: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the string, and the pump. Tracing the evolution from Egyptian nails to modern skyscrapers, and Neanderthal string to musical instruments,...

Simon Winchester delivers his first book about America: a fascinating popular history that illuminates the men who toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizenry and geography of the U.S.A. from its beginnings. How did America become “one nation, indivisible”? What unified a growing number of disparate states into the modern country we recognize today? To answer these questions, Winchester follows in the footsteps of America’s...

Tells the story of how women throughout the ages have responded to situations confronting them in daily life by inventing such items as correction fluid, space helmets, and disposable diapers.

"[The author] explores how to experiment and how to think about science for young readers"--

For the beginnings of the enslavement of steam, that mighty giant whose work has changed the world we live in, we must return to the times of Benjamin Franklin. James Watt, the accredited father of the modern steam engine, was a contemporary of Franklin, and his engine was twenty-one years old when Franklin died. The discovery that steam could be harnessed and made to work is not, of course, credited to James Watt. The precise origin of that discovery...