Presents an overview of life in America between the stock market crash and Roosevelt's inauguration, based on eyewitness accounts

A short history of the Jews in America from 1654 and their first permanent community of twenty-three persons in New Amsterdam to the present, stressing the difficulties they have continually faced as an ethnic minority.

Focusing on American railroad history but touching on other countries, award-winning author Milton Meltzer shows how something as ubiquitous as the railroad is, in fact, a force that changed the world.

In 1931 Worcester, Massachusetts, Joey Singer, the teenaged son of Jewish immigrants, suffers with his family through the early part of the Great Depression, trying to finish high school, working a milk delivery route, marching on Washington, and eventually even becoming a hobo, all the while trying to figure out how to go to college and realize his dream of becoming a writer. Includes author's note about the Depression.