On the night before Halloween, 1938, that's what people all over the country heard coming over their radios -- an announcement that a glowing yellow spacecraft had crashed in New Jersey. When the announcer went on to describe an alien covered in tentacles that came wiggling out of it, the entire country panicked! What most Americans didn't know was that this emergency broadcast wasn't real -- it was a radio play, performed by actors, based on the H. G. Wells science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds. Aliens hadn't landed in New Jersey that night. There was no spacecraft.

This is the inside story of what really happened when Americans heard "War of the Worlds" and reacted to what they thought was a Martian menace.

An American Library Association Notable Book: In rural Ohio in 1938, twelve-year-old Willie Bea prepares for Halloween—and an alien invasion! Halloween is Willie Bea’s favorite holiday. Her relatives always visit, and everyone cooks, bakes, and tells stories. Best of all, the kids get to dress in costume and go trick-or-treating. But this Halloween is different. When Willie’s glamorous aunt Leah, who reads palms and wears sweet-smelling perfume, hears on the radio that aliens are coming to Earth, the entire family is petrified. Will the aliens come to their small Ohio town? What will they do when they arrive? Inspired by Orson Welles’s historic War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which terrified people across the country, Newbery and Coretta Scott King Award winner Virginia Hamilton tells a gripping, imaginative, and humorous story about a Depression-era family on their day of reckoning.

The tranquility of Mars is disrupted by humans who want to conquer space, colonize the planet, and escape a doomed Earth.

This practical, accessible resource will help future and practicing teachers integrate literature into their middle school or high school classrooms, while also addressing content area standards and improving the literacy skills of their students. Two introductory chapters are followed by five chapters that each cover a different genre: Chapter 3, Informational Books; Chapter 4, Fiction; Chapter 5, Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir; Chapter 6, Poetry; and Chapter 7, How-to and Hands-on Books. Each genre chapter consists of four parts: Part 1: Discusses the genre and how content area teachers can use books within that genre to further content learning and enhance literacy skills. Part 2: Offers hands-on instructional strategies and activities using literature, with activities for use in a variety of disciplines. Part 3: Presents individual author studies (three or four per chapter) with bibliographies and guidelines for using the authors' books in content area courses. Part 4: Features an annotated bibliography of specially selected children and young adult literature for that genre, organized by content area. The annotations provide information about the book, which can be used to prepare booktalks, and teaching ideas for using in a specific content area. Altogether these sections contain more than 600 annotated entries tabbed by subject area, including art, English/language arts, languages and culture, math and technology, music, PE/health, science, and social studies/history.

Research indicates boys are interested in reading nonfiction materials, yet most children's librarians prefer to booktalk fiction. Offering citations for more than 1,100 books, Gotcha for Guys! deals specifically with books to pique the interest of middle grade boys. A series of booktalks are grouped within chapters with like titles such as: Creepy-Crawly Creatures, Disasters and Unsolved Mysteries, Action and Innovation, and All Things Gross. Complete booktalks are presented in a beginning section of chapters 1-9. A second section in each of these chapters contains short annotations and talks for other books of interest, and a third section offers lists of well-reviewed titles to consider for boys. The book is enhanced with book cover art and reproducible lists for teachers and librarians.

On the evening of October 30, 1938, radio listeners across the United States heard a startling report of a meteor strike in the New Jersey countryside. With sirens blaring in the background, announcers in the field described mysterious creatures, terrifying war machines, and thick clouds of poison gas moving toward New York City. As the invading force approached Manhattan, some listeners sat transfixed, while others ran to alert neighbors or to call the police. Some even fled their homes. But the hair-raising broadcast was not a real news bulletin-it was Orson Welles's adaptation of the H. G. Wells classic The War of the Worlds. In Broadcast Hysteria, A. Brad Schwartz boldly retells the story of Welles's famed radio play and its impact. Did it really spawn a "wave of mass hysteria," as The New York Times reported? Schwartz is the first to examine the hundreds of letters sent to Orson Welles himself in the days after the broadcast, and his findings challenge the conventional wisdom. Few listeners believed an actual attack was under way. But even so, Schwartz shows that Welles's broadcast became a major scandal, prompting a different kind of mass panic as Americans debated the bewitching power of the radio and the country's vulnerability in a time of crisis. When the debate was over, American broadcasting had changed for good, but not for the better. As Schwartz tells this story, we observe how an atmosphere of natural disaster and impending war permitted broadcasters to create shared live national experiences for the first time. We follow Orson Welles's rise to fame and watch his manic energy and artistic genius at work in the play's hurried yet innovative production. And we trace the present-day popularity of "fake news" back to its source in Welles's show and its many imitators. Schwartz's original research, gifted storytelling, and thoughtful analysis make Broadcast Hysteria a groundbreaking new look at a crucial but little-understood episode in American history.