Build literacy skills and social studies content-area knowledge with this nonfiction title! This 6-Pack offers an integrated English language arts approach that specifically addresses California content standards for history-social science, as well as reading, writing, and English language development standards. Students will explore the history of westward expansion with this engaging nonfiction reader. This informational text also focuses on the westward routes pioneer travelers took, including the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, the Mormon Trail, and the California Trail. Authentic artifacts, including maps, government documents, and other primary sources provide an intimate glimpse of life during this era. This 6-Pack includes six copies of this title and a lesson plan that aligns to California's History-Social Science Content Standards.

Writing with a signature command of his subject and with compelling resonance, Marc Reisner leads us through California’s improbable rise from a largely desert land to the most populated state in the nation, fueled by an economic engine more productive than all of Africa. Reisner believes that the success of this last great desert civilization hinges on California’s denial of its own inescapable fate: Both the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay areas sit astride two of the most violently seismic zones on the planet. The earthquakes that have already rocked California were, according to Reisner, a mere prologue to a future cataclysm that will result in immense destruction. Concluding with a hypothetical but chillingly realistic description of what such a disaster would look like, A Dangerous Place mixes science, history, and cultural commentary in a haunting work of profound importance.

College student Megs Devonshire sets out to fulfill her younger brother George’s last wish by uncovering the truth behind his favorite story. What transpires is a fascinating look into the bond between siblings and the life-changing magic of stories. 1950: Margaret Devonshire (Megs) is a seventeen-year-old student of mathematics and physics at Oxford University. When her beloved eight-year-old brother asks Megs if Narnia is real, logical Megs tells him it’s just a book for children, and certainly not true. Homebound due to his illness, and remaining fixated on his favorite books, George presses her to ask the author of the recently released novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a question: “Where did Narnia come from?” Despite her fear about approaching the famous author, who is a professor at her school, Megs soon finds herself taking tea with C. S. Lewis and his own brother Warnie, begging them for answers. Rather than directly telling her where Narnia came from, Lewis encourages Megs to form her own conclusion as he shares the little-known stories from his own life that led to his inspiration. As she takes these stories home to George, the little boy travels farther in his imagination than he ever could in real life. After holding so tightly to logic and reason, her brother’s request leads Megs to absorb a more profound truth: “The way stories change us can’t be explained. It can only be felt. Like love.” From the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Book of Flora Lea A captivating, standalone historical novel combining fact and fiction An emotional journey into the books and stories that make us who we are Includes discussion questions for book clubs

“Much more than a coming-of-age story, Badluck Way is an important meditation on what it means to share space and breathe the same air as truly wild animals, and the necessary damage that can occur when boundaries are crossed” (Tom Groneberg, author of The Secret Life of Cowboys). In this gripping memoir of a young man, a wolf, their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Bryce Andrews describes life on the remote, windswept Sun Ranch in southwest Montana. The Sun’s twenty thousand acres of rangeland occupy a still-wild corner of southwest Montana—a high valley surrounded by mountain ranges and steep creeks with portentous names like Grizzly and Bad Luck. Just over the border from Yellowstone National Park, the Sun holds giant herds of cattle and elk amid many predators—bears, mountain lions, and wolves. In lyrical, haunting language, Andrews recounts marathon days and nights of building fences, riding, roping, and otherwise learning the hard business of caring for cattle, an initiation that changes him from an idealistic city kid into a skilled ranch hand. But when wolves suddenly begin killing the ranch’s cattle, Andrews has to shoulder a rifle, chase the pack, and do what he’d hoped he would never have to do. Called “an elegant memoir” by the Great Falls Tribune, Badluck Way is about transformation and complications, about living with dirty hands every day. It is about the hard choices that wake us at night and take a lifetime to reconcile. Above all, Badluck Way celebrates the breathtaking beauty of wilderness and the satisfaction of hard work on some of the harshest, most beautiful land in the world.

This book chronicles the fascinating story of the enthusiastic, stalwart, and talented naturalists who were drawn to California’s spectacular natural bounty over the decades from 1786, when the La Pérouse Expedition arrived at Monterey, to the Death Valley expedition in 1890–91, the proclaimed "end" of the American frontier. Richard G. Beidleman’s engaging and marvelously detailed narrative describes these botanists, zoologists, geologists, paleontologists, astronomers, and ethnologists as they camped under stars and faced blizzards, made discoveries and amassed collections, kept journals and lost valuables, sketched flowers and landscapes, recorded comets and native languages. He weaves together the stories of their lives, their demanding fieldwork, their contributions to science, and their exciting adventures against the backdrop of California and world history. California's Frontier Naturalists covers all the major expeditions to California as well as individual and institutional explorations, introducing naturalists who accompanied boundary surveys, joined federal railroad parties, traveled with river topographical expeditions, accompanied troops involved with the Mexican War, and made up California’s own geological survey. Among these early naturalists are famous names—David Douglas, Thomas Nuttall, John Charles Fremont, William Brewer—as well as those who are less well-known, including Paolo Botta, Richard Hinds, and Sara Lemmon.