Twelve-year-old Rosa and thirteen-year-old Jake form an unlikely friendship as they try to survive and understand the 1912 Bread and Roses strike of mill workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Discusses the labor strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company in Pullman, Illinois in 1894, and the federal government's use of force to keep the railroads operating and to crush the striking workers.
In 1867, while staying with her father in a small California mining town, ten-year-old Winnie meets a Chinese boy close to her age and discovers the role of his people in completing the transcontinental railroad.
In 1905 fifteen-year-old Otto describes in his journal how he travels from Finland to America, joining his father in a dreary iron mining community in Minnesota and becoming involved in a union fight for better working conditions.
A ten-year-old bobbin girl working in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1830s, must make a difficult decision--whether or not she will participate in the first workers' strike in Lowell.
