My name is America

A young Chinese boy nicknamed Runt records his experiences in a journal as he travels from southern China to California in 1852 to join his uncle during the Gold Rush.

Each harrowing day of battle in France convinces seventeen-year-old Scott Pendleton Collins that he may not survive. In desperation, he records his thoughts, fears, and hopes in a journal he has carried since his first days as a soldier in Basic Training at Fort Dix.

Mary Pope Osborne's book, part of the relaunch of the My America series, tells the story of Ginny, a young girl who keeps a journal during the Civil War's Battle of Gettysburg. Virginia Dickens has promised to keep a journal for her older brother Jed. And Ginny finds plenty to write Pennsylvania Volunteers arrive in the town square reporting a big battle in Virginia and calling for more men to join their ranks. Rumors fly that the Rebs are headed to Gettysburg, and the Battle of Gettysburg ensues. Suddenly, Ginny's quiet town is filled with the injured. Ginny's brother Jed has joined the Union army, and they find him wounded in a makeshift hospital. With Ginny's nursing, he recovers, and Ginny is is able to witness the President's Gettysburg Address.

The brother of an anti-war demonstrator, a young marine is fighting a war no one understands while his sister is fighting on the home front to end the war in Vietnam and bring her brother home. An agonizing dilemma plagues these brother-sister diarists. He is a Marine stationed in Vietnam. She is at home in America, far away from her brother's war zone, fighting for peace. As the marine writes in his journal about his experiences as a soldier, fighting an enemy he can't see, his siter seeks peace. In these gripping installments of DEAR AMERICA and MY NAME IS AMERICA, Ellen Emerson White captures the unique time period when America was at war both in a far-off place, and at home where adults and children alike marched in the streets for peace and freedo. Poignant and comlex, these two characters will give readers glimpse into perhaps the most tumultuous time in modern American history.