What-? by Who HQ

No one knows where the term Underground Railroad came from - there were no trains or tracks, only "conductors" who helped escaping slaves to freedom. Including real stories about "passengers" on the "railroad", this audiobook chronicles slaves' close calls with bounty hunters, their exhausting struggles on the road, and what they sacrificed for freedom.

Step back in time to the birth of America and meet the real-life rebels who made this country free! On a hot summer day near Philadelphia in 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his desk and wrote furiously until early the next morning. He was drafting the Declaration of Independence, a document that would sever this country's ties with Britain and announce a new nation - The United States of America. Colonists were willing to risk their lives for freedom, and the Declaration of Independence made that official.

On October 29, 1929, life in the United States took a turn for the worst. The stock market – the system that controls money in America – plunged to a record low. But this event was only the beginning of many bad years to come. By the early 1930s, one out of three people was not working. People lost their jobs, their houses, or both and ended up in shantytowns called “Hoovervilles”, named for the president at the time of the crash. By 1933, many banks had gone under.

A thoughtful and age-appropriate introduction to an unimaginable event. The Holocaust was a genocide on a scale never before seen, with as many as twelve million people killed in Nazi death camps - six million of them Jews. Gail Herman traces the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, whose rabid anti-Semitism led first to humiliating anti-Jewish laws, then to ghettos all over Eastern Europe, and ultimately to the Final Solution. She presents just enough information for an elementary-school audience in a well-researched book that covers one of the most horrible events in history.

From the number one New York Times best-selling series comes the latest title in the Who HQ Now format for trending topics. It tells the history of a political and social movement that advocates for nonviolent civil disobedience and protests against incidents of police brutality - and all racially motivated violence - against Black people.

On November 24, 1971, an unidentified man hijacked an airplane that was flying from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. He demanded $200,000 and told a flight attendant that he had weapons. After stopping in Seattle, the hijacker was given the money and he released the attendants. But he demanded that the pilots stay on-board, refuel, and fly him to Mexico City. Just thirty minutes after the plane took off, the man jumped out of the aircraft and parachuted away...never to be seen or heard from again. Did he escape with the money? Did he even survive the jump?

Ever since it was established in 1789, the United States Supreme Court has had a major impact on the lives of all Americans. Some of its landmark decisions have helped end segregation, protected a person’s privacy, and allowed people to marry whomever they love.

Billie Jean King grew up in a family of athletes. It was no surprise when she quickly began to excel at tennis. She became the top female singles player in the world and won 129 career singles titles, including Wimbledon and the US Open. Beyond being an excellent athlete, Billie Jean King used her voice to stand up for other women playing tennis who were not paid nearly as much as male players. In 1973, Billie Jean captured the world's attention when she beat Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes," proving women were just as good at tennis as men.

Castles may conjure up a romantic fairy tale world; however, in real life, during the Middle Ages, castles were fortresses, providing shelter and protection for the lord as well as for the peasants who lived on his land. For an army, a lord depended on young soldiers in armor called knights who spent years at the castle learning the skills of warfare.

Travel back in time to the 1920s and 1930s to the sounds of jazz in nightclubs and the 24-hours-a-day bustle of the famous Black neighborhood of Harlem in uptown Manhattan. It was a dazzling time when there was an outpouring of the arts of African Americans - the poetry of Langston Hughes; the novels of Zora Neale Hurston; the sculptures of Augusta Savage; and that brand-new music called jazz as only Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong could play it.

While the coronavirus COVID-19 changed the world in 2020, it still isn't the largest and deadliest pandemic in history. That title is held by the Plague. This disease, also known as the "Black Death", spread throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe in the 14th century and claimed an astonishing 50 million lives by the time it officially ended. Author Roberta Edwards takes listeners back to these grimy and horrific years, explaining just how this pandemic began, how society reacted to the disease, and the impact it left on the world.

Can a person catch on fire without any reasonable explanation? Find out all we know about spontaneous human combustion in this exciting new book!

On July 1, 1916, witnesses watched in horror as twenty-eight-year-old Charles Vansant was attacked and killed by a shark in shallow water off Beach Haven, New Jersey—the first recorded shark attack in American history. Scientists claimed a shark could not be responsible, but more deadly attacks soon followed along the Jersey Shore and up the freshwater Matawan Creek, setting off a nationwide panic that led the White House to declare a “War on Sharks.”

The morning of August 24, AD 79, seemed like any other in the Roman city of Pompeii. So no one was prepared when the nearby volcano Mount Vesuvius suddenly erupted, spouting ash that buried the city and its inhabitants. The disaster left thousands dead, and Pompeii was no more than a memory for almost 1,700 years. In 1748, explorers rediscovered the port city with intact buildings and beautiful mosaics.

In the early 1980s, the first cases of a devastating and fatal new disease appeared, a disease that at first struck only gay men and was later identified as HIV/AIDS. It was the beginning of what became a worldwide health crisis that the US government ignored for years and that unfairly heightened prejudice against the LGBTQ+ community. To this day, the AIDS Crisis continues to disproportionately affect both the LGBTQ+ community and people of color.

Reconstruction—the period after the Civil War—was meant to give newly freed Black people the same rights as white people. And indeed there were monumental changes once slavery ended—thriving new Black communities, the first Black members in Congress, and a new sense of dignity for many Black Americans. But this time of hope didn’t last long and instead, a deeply segregated United States continued on for another hundred years. Find out what went wrong in this fascinating overview of a troubled time.

At 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic, the largest passenger steamship of this time, met its catastrophic end after crashing into an iceberg. Of the 2,240 passengers and crew onboard, only 705 survived. More than 100 years later, today's listeners will be intrigued by the mystery that surrounds this ship that was originally labeled "unsinkable".

On December 7, 1941, Japanese war planes appeared out of nowhere to bomb the American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It was a highly secretive and devastating attack: Four battleships sunk, more than 2,000 servicemen died, and the United States was propelled into World War II. In a compelling, easy-to-digest narrative, children will learn all about a pivotal moment in American history.

Cada cuatro años, treinta y dos de los mejores equipos de fútbol masculino de todo el mundo compiten por el título de campeón de la Copa Mundial de la FIFA. Más de mil millones de personas sintonizaron sus TV en todo el mundo para ver el partido final de la competición de 2014, lo que convierte a la Copa del Mundo en el acontecimiento deportivo más visto del planeta, ¡incluso por encima de los Juegos Olímpicos de verano! Este libro repasa lo que ha cambiado desde el primer torneo en 1930 y lo que le espera al deporte más popular del mundo.

What Do We Know About Bigfoot? lets curious young listeners explore what we actually know about the creature's mysterious history. Dive into the facts behind the most well-known footage of the cryptid, the Patterson-Gimlin film, and learn about actual scientific studies conducted to learn whether or not Bigfoot actually exists. Filled with accounts of over a century of potential sightings, this book will have every reader looking for footprints on their next hike. Bigfoot has been the star subject of movies, TV shows, books, and more... but is he really out there?