American Orphan

Download or read book American Orphan written by Jimmy Santiago Baca and published by . This book was released on 2021-03-31 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This picaresque novel by acclaimed writer Jimmy Santiago Baca follows Orlando Lucero after he is released from a lifetime of imprisonment, first in an orphanage and then in prison, and learns to live on the outside, ultimately finding his way as a writer and artist.

Download or read book Autobiography of an American Orphan written by Walter James and published by Strategic Book Publishing. This book was released on 2009-08 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: in a confrontation with his past, the author reveals this heart-wrenching depiction of childhood in a New York City multicultural orphanage during the nineteen fifties.Funds were scarce and discipline severe.He describes the relationships between the orphans, the counselors, the nuns, and the priests, with an emphasis on how it shaped his life.As he grows and moves through various houses into his teenage years, the orphanage is faced with a surge of gang members.He befriends a Puerto Rican his own age, which ultimately leads them both to follow his friend’s brother, a heroin pusher and addict, into Spanish Harlem just at the beginning of the civil rights movement. His account entails descriptions of ghetto life there and in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg district as well, underlining the devastating effects from the separation of his Irish-American family and siblings.While awaiting his next group of students in an empty classroom in South Korea, Walter James attempted to remember his past in an orphanage. The experiences that surfaced put him in a rage.He knew then that he had to confront his past and exorcize his demons.his book, which began as a psychological self-study, became the emotional account of his story, and took him to places he never thought he would visit again.

Download or read book Escape from Saigon written by Andrea Warren and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An unforgettable true story of an orphan caught in the midst of war Over a million South Vietnamese children were orphaned by the Vietnam War. This affecting true account tells the story of Long, who, like more than 40,000 other orphans, is Amerasian -- a mixed-race child -- with little future in Vietnam. Escape from Saigon allows readers to experience Long's struggle to survive in war-torn Vietnam, his dramatic escape to America as part of "Operation Babylift" during the last chaotic days before the fall of Saigon, and his life in the United States as "Matt," part of a loving Ohio family. Finally, as a young doctor, he journeys back to Vietnam, ready to reconcile his Vietnamese past with his American present. As the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, this compelling account provides a fascinating introduction to the war and the plight of children caught in the middle of it.

Download or read book The Orphan Trains written by Annette R. Fry and published by Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. This book was released on 1994 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the placing out of orphaned, poor, and abandoned children from eastern cities such as New York and Boston to homes in the West, begin by the children's Aid Society.

Download or read book Orphan Trains written by Marylin Irvin Holt and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1994-02-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From 1850 to 1930 America witnessed a unique emigration and resettlement of at least 200,000 children and several thousand adults, primarily from the East Coast to the West. This 'placing out,' an attempt to find homes for the urban poor, was best known by the 'orphan trains' that carried the children. Holt carefully analyzes the system, initially instituted by the New York Children's Aid Society in 1853, tracking its imitators as well as the reasons for its creation and demise. She captures the children's perspective with the judicious use of oral histories, institutional records, and newspaper accounts. This well-written volume sheds new light on the multifaceted experience of children's immigration, changing concepts of welfare, and Western expansion. It is good, scholarly social history."—Library Journal

Download or read book The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction written by Linda Gordon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-09 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1904, New York nuns brought forty Irish orphans to a remote Arizona mining camp, to be placed with Catholic families. The Catholic families were Mexican, as was the majority of the population. Soon the town's Anglos, furious at this "interracial" transgression, formed a vigilante squad that kidnapped the children and nearly lynched the nuns and the local priest. The Catholic Church sued to get its wards back, but all the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled in favor of the vigilantes. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction tells this disturbing and dramatic tale to illuminate the creation of racial boundaries along the Mexican border. Clifton/Morenci, Arizona, was a "wild West" boomtown, where the mines and smelters pulled in thousands of Mexican immigrant workers. Racial walls hardened as the mines became big business and whiteness became a marker of superiority. These already volatile race and class relations produced passions that erupted in the "orphan incident." To the Anglos of Clifton/Morenci, placing a white child with a Mexican family was tantamount to child abuse, and they saw their kidnapping as a rescue. Women initiated both sides of this confrontation. Mexican women agreed to take in these orphans, both serving their church and asserting a maternal prerogative; Anglo women believed they had to "save" the orphans, and they organized a vigilante squad to do it. In retelling this nearly forgotten piece of American history, Linda Gordon brilliantly recreates and dissects the tangled intersection of family and racial values, in a gripping story that resonates with today's conflicts over the "best interests of the child."

Download or read book Orphan Trains written by Stephen O'Connor and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story behind Christina Baker Kline’s bestselling novel is revealed in this “engaging and thoughtful history” of the Children’s Aid Society (Los Angeles Times). A powerful blend of history, biography, and adventure, Orphan Trains fills a grievous gap in the American story. Tracing the evolution of the Children’s Aid Society, this dramatic narrative tells the fascinating tale of one of the most famous—and sometimes infamous—child welfare programs: the orphan trains, which spirited away some two hundred fifty thousand abandoned children into the homes of rural families in the Midwest. In mid-nineteenth-century New York, vagrant children, whether orphans or runaways, filled the streets. The city’s solution for years had been to sweep these children into prisons or almshouses. But a young minister named Charles Loring Brace took a different tack. With the creation of the Children’s Aid Society in 1853, he provided homeless youngsters with shelter, education, and, for many, a new family out west. The family matching process was haphazard, to say the least: at town meetings, farming families took their pick of the orphan train riders. Some children, such as James Brady, who became governor of Alaska, found loving homes, while others, such as Charley Miller, who shot two boys on a train in Wyoming, saw no end to their misery. Complete with extraordinary photographs and deeply moving stories, Orphan Trains gives invaluable insights into a creative genius whose pioneering, if controversial, efforts inform child rescue work today.