Seventeen-year-old Rachel Morelli has been living for the day her next door neighbor returns from Vietnam. Evan will know how to talk her dad into letting her go to Pratt University to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. But when Evan comes home injured, losing all of his dreams to become a musician, Rachel is on her own to find a way out of her small town and her dad's plan to make her go to Kent State University. Throughout the harsh winter of 1970, Rachel's world spins ever further off its axis, as she and Kent are on a collision course with history. Determined to find a way out of town for herself--and some peace for Evan--Rachel challenges the establishment in her own, unique way. Caught up in the May 4, 1970, shootings at KSU where National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed students, Rachel is forced to forge her own destiny in ways she'd never imagined."LEAVING KENT STATE does what excellent historical fiction is supposed to do--it breathes life into an era. Through the eyes of its young protagonist, this well-researched novel recreates the tensions in Kent, Ohio during the Vietnam War years and the tragedy that resulted. Readers will love Sabrina Fedel's masterfully drawn characters, her compelling plot, and her rich prose. This is the debut novel of a sensitive and accomplished writer." ~ Patricia Harrison Easton, author of seven books, five of them for young people, including the Beverly Cleary Children's Choice Award winning DAVEY'S BLUE-EYED FROG.

From two-time National Book Award finalist Deborah Wiles, a masterpiece exploration of one of the darkest moments in our history, when American troops killed four American students protesting the Vietnam War. May 4, 1970. Kent State University. As protestors roil the campus, National Guardsmen are called in. In the chaos of what happens next, shots are fired and four students are killed. To this day, there is still argument of what happened and why. Told in multiple voices from a number of vantage points -- protestor, Guardsman, townie, student -- Deborah Wiles's Kent State gives a moving, terrifying, galvanizing picture of what happened that weekend in Ohio . . . an event that, even 50 years later, still resonates deeply.

All of James A. Michener's storytelling and reportorial skills are brought to the fore in this stunning and heartbreaking examination of the events that led to the 1970 shootings at Kent State, which shook the country to the roots and had a profound impact on the anti-war movement.

From Derf Backderf, the bestselling author of My Friend Dahmer, comes the tragic and unforgettable story of the Kent State shootings†‹ On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard gunned down unarmed college students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University. In a deadly barrage of 67 shots, 4 students were killed and 9 shot and wounded. It was the day America turned guns on its own children—a shocking event burned into our national memory. A few days prior, 10-year-old Derf Backderf saw those same Guardsmen patrolling his nearby hometown, sent in by the governor to crush a trucker strike. Using the journalism skills he employed on My Friend Dahmer and Trashed, Backderf has conducted extensive interviews and research to explore the lives of these four young people and the events of those four days in May, when the country seemed on the brink of tearing apart. Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, which will be published in time for the 50th anniversary of the tragedy, is a moving and troubling story about the bitter price of dissent—as relevant today as it was in 1970.

Kent State: the day the war came home is a documentary which originally aired on The Learning Channel in 2001. The documentary brings together archival footage and interviews with surviving guardsmen and protestors.

Epilogue: A Battlefield of Memory -- Appendix: After the War-The Fates of Kent's Activist Generation -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index -- Illustrations -- Back Cover

At midday on May 4, 1970, after three days of protests, several thousand students and the Ohio National Guard faced off at opposite ends of the grassy campus Commons at Kent State University. At noon, the Guard moved out. Twenty-four minutes later, Guardsmen launched a 13-second, 67-shot barrage that left four students dead and nine wounded, one paralyzed for life. The story doesn't end there, though. A horror of far greater proportions was narrowly averted minutes later when the Guard and students reassembled on the Commons. The Kent State shootings were both unavoidable and preventable: unavoidable in that all the discordant forces of a turbulent decade flowed together on May 4, 1970, on one Ohio campus; preventable in that every party to the tragedy made the wrong choices at the wrong time in the wrong place. Using the university's recently available oral-history collection supplemented by extensive new interviewing, Means tells the story of this iconic American moment through the eyes and memories of those who were there, and skillfully situates it in the context of a tumultuous era.