For many years, Ilsa Redlich has helped her parents run a hotel in South Amana. But as the United States enters the Great War, anti-German sentiment sweeps the country, and Amanans now face persecution from former friends. Jutta Schmitt is shocked when government agents demand that she return to Amana and report on un-American activities. Then Ilsa's childhood sweetheart is accused of something far worse than Jutta could imagine.

A monumental American novel about one man's rise from life as a penniless immigrant to the head of a family empire In the tradition of great writers like Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck, John Jakes crafts a sweeping family drama. In late-nineteenth-century Chicago, the tragedies and triumphs of the Crowns illustrate the power of the American Dream. As immigrants to America, their turbulent story spans a decade marked by the vicious Pullman Strike,...

A ten-year-old girl living in middle-class America during World War II learns the painful lesson that doing what's right is not always an easy thing to do.

Fourteen-year-old Daisy Meyer is angry and frustrated with her world: her German American town, New Ulm, is under surveillance, her father's newspaper was forced to shut down for criticizing the United States' entry into World War I, her beloved older sister Elsie's fiancé is deployed to France, and she deeply resents her stepmother--but worse is coming, because this is October 1918, and influenza is about to descend on her home and family, and it...