Alamosa Public Library

"It's 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She's immediately in awe of her employer -- brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women's suffrage. Now, at age...

"From the critically acclaimed author of Vox comes a suspenseful new novel that explores a disturbing alternate reality where the government has legalized eugenics. Elena Fairchild is a teacher at one of the state's new elite schools, where children undergo routine tests for their quotient (Q). Those who don't measure up are placed in the many state boarding schools that have cropped up under a new government mandate -- Elena's daughter, Freddie,...

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers, a novel inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, an isolated island off the coast of Maine that became one of the first racially integrated towns in the Northeast. In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys' descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated,...

It has been nearly seventy years since Hitler's armies won the war, and sixteen-year-old Zara St. James lives in the Shenandoah hills, part of the Eastern American Territories, under the rule of the Nazis--but a resistance movement is growing, and Zara, who dreams of freedom, may be the key to its success.

"A searing book club novel for fans of Where the Crawdad's Sing and The Girls in the Stilt House following one girl fighting for her family, her body, and her right to create a future all her own Some folks will do anything to control the wild spirit of a Carolina girl... For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is as simple as it is free. Devoted to her lumberjack father and running through the wilds where the forest...

Howard's family are Abenaki Indians who fled to New York from Vermont in the early twentieth century. They hid their Indian ancestry to avoid the Vermont Eugenics Project, an attempt to sterilize those who were infirm, mentally ill, of mixed heritage, or illegitimate. Many Abenaki were victims of this program and as a result the Abenaki culture faced possible extinction. In this story Howard's Uncle Louis, an Abenaki, tries to prevent that possibility...

The little known history of eugenics in America-a movement that began in the early twentieth century and resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 65,000 Americans. Buck v. Bell became a test case brought before the Supreme Court, which voted 8-1 to make sterilization a constitutionally valid way for the state to prevent anyone deemed "unfit" from having children. Eugenicists believed that the human race must begin to take control not just...

"One of America's great miscarriages of justice, the Supreme Court's infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling made government sterilization of "undesirable" citizens the law of the land. New York Times bestselling author Adam Cohen tells the story in Imbeciles of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court's decision to champion eugenic sterilization for the greater good of the country. In 1927, when the nation was caught...

In the early days of the Great Depression, faced with the difficulty of feeding his family on his meager earnings as a sharecropper in Alabama, Richard Rogers took his sisters, Dovie and Ruby, and Ruby's son Frank and Daughter Della Raye to the Partlow state Asylum for Mental Deficients and left them there.