Amelia Earhart (The First Names Series) , livre ebook

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105 pages

English

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See how Amelia Earhart went from a little Kansas tomboy to a high-flying feminist icon Before Amelia Earhart (1897-1939) became a world-famous pilot, she was a little tomboy from Kansas with a taste for adventure. When she visited an airfield and took a short plane ride, she knew she had to be a pilot. She signed up for flying lessons and cropped her hair short so that the other pilots would take her seriously. She became the first woman to make a solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. With each flight she took and each record she broke, Amelia became more and more of a celebrity. Her final flight was intended to be a trip around the whole world, but her plane disappeared after takeoff-and her disappearance is still a mystery today. Inspirational, highly illustrated, and full of adventure, Amelia Earhart tells the story of the feminist icon who changed the world of aviation. It includes a timeline, glossary, and index.

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	13 août 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781683355748
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	5 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0540€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The facts in First Names: Amelia Earhart have been carefully checked and are accurate to the best of our knowledge. Some of the passages in this book are actual quotes from Amelia and other important people. You ll be able to tell which ones are actual quotes by this style of type: I did not kill a cow on landing-unless one died of fright .
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-3741-1
eISBN 978-1-6833-5574-8
Text copyright 2019 Andrew Prentice Illustrations copyright 2019 Mike Smith Book design by Max Temescu
2019 as UK edition. First published in 2019 by David Fickling Books Limited
Published under license from David Fickling Books Limited
Published in 2019 by Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Abrams Books for Young Readers are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact specialsales@abramsbooks.com or the address below.
Abrams is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com

C ONTENTS
I NTRODUCTION
1 - A MELIA A RRIVES
2 - A MELIA G ETS A C HANCE
3 - A MELIA T AKES TO THE S KY
4 - A MELIA E ARNS H ER W INGS
5 - A MELIA T AKES THE P LUNGE
6 - A MELIA F INDS F AME
7 - A MELIA G OES S OLO
8 - A MELIA S OARS E VEN H IGHER
9 - A MELIA F LIES THE W ORLD
10 - A MELIA S F INAL F LIGHT
T IMELINE
G LOSSARY
N OTES
S ELECT B IBLIOGRAPHY
I NDEX OF S EARCHABLE T ERMS

I NTRODUCTION
K ANSAS , W INTER 1907
It hadn t been this cold since eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death, but that didn t stop Amelia. She crouched over her sled and went through her pre-jump routine. Check the runners were free of ice. Check the snow was good. Check there weren t no lollygagging slowpokes clogging up her run.
Check. Check. Check .
Here we go! Amelia jumped, landed hard on her belly and shot down the hill like a comet.
When it snowed-and in Kansas, snow meant deep, glorious, school-obliterating blizzards-all the children in town knew there was only one place to be. The hill that ran from the top of North Second Street was perfect for sledding.
Traditionally, only the boys belly-slammed. This meant they rode down the hill on their stomachs, head first. All the girls sat upright for a more ladylike trip.
Except for Amelia. She loved speed more than anything and didn t care what anyone thought. Amelia had always been different-and she never got scared .

A cart pootled out into the middle of the road. The hill was so icy that Amelia couldn t turn or stop. And she was going much too fast anyway. The horse had enormous blinkers, so it couldn t see her coming. The driver couldn t hear everyone s screams of warning. Amelia had about three seconds to save her own life . Plunging toward certain death, Amelia didn t blink. Instead she went faster, steering with her toes as she aimed for the only gap she could see.

Whoosh! Her sled zipped between the front and back legs of the horse so fast that the driver didn t even notice.
Soon, plenty of people would take notice of Amelia Earhart. In fact within thirty years she d become the most famous woman in the world . She was bigger than the biggest movie stars. Hotter than the sun itself.
Amelia, you see, moved on from sleds to planes. She became a pilot-and back then, in the great golden age of flying, pilots were the best of the best. They soared across the heavens like heroes from legends. Adventure, danger and death were never far away.
Amelia became the most famous pilot of them all. She broke records, crossed oceans and achieved things that no one-man or woman-had ever achieved before.
She stayed different-and she never got scared.

Well, that s how it seemed to everyone who knew you.

But when your instruments gave out, your engine was on fire, your plane was iced up and you started tumbling toward the hungry waves . . . you weren t scared at all then?
1 A MELIA A RRIVES
Amelia Mary Earhart zipped into the world on July 24, 1897. Her parents, Amy and Edwin Earhart, were delighted with their cheerful, fat little baby. They wrapped her up in blankets and nicknamed her Millie. A couple of years later they gave her a sister, Muriel. No one ever called her Muriel, though. The youngest Earhart was soon much better known as Pidge.
Millie s early years in Kansas and Iowa were happy ones. Her dad, Edwin, had a good job as a lawyer for the railways, though he dreamed of bigger things . In his spare time he tried to come up with an invention that would make his family s fortune. He squandered hundreds of dollars to make a new signal flag for trains, but sadly his flag never fluttered. As hard as Edwin tried, he never really got anywhere, which must have been frustrating.
There were some advantages to having a father who was a bit out of the ordinary. Take Christmas, for instance. Millie never wanted the girly presents she was expected to ask for. She wasn t interested in dolls, or pretty dresses; instead she went for baseballs and fishing rods and sleds . And her father gave them to her. He believed a girl should have what she wanted, no matter what anyone else said. And one Christmas, Millie received a very unusual present.

It was a .22 caliber Hamilton rifle, to go with the packet of bullets she d found in her stocking!
Not everyone was happy. Millie s grandparents were rich and they d never approved of Edwin and his strange ways (they thought their daughter was too good for him). Grandma almost fainted with surprise.

Millie and Pidge had cleaned out the barn by the next morning.
Millie s dad wasn t just generous at Christmas. He took his family on amazing adventures as well.

The World s Fair was not really like any fair that Millie had visited or seen before. It was more like a gigantic, crazy, newly- built city, crammed with rides and shows and people from all over the world. You could go every day for a month and still never see the same thing twice.

You could visit the actual cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born; have your photo taken with Geronimo, the famous Apache war chief; or watch a real sea battle fought on the lake. You could ride double-dipping log chutes, visit a fake cloud that was someone s idea of what Heaven is actually like, and swoop about on the greatest Ferris wheel ever built .
Even the food was mind-blowing. Some say the hot dog bun, the cheeseburger, and the ice-cream cone were all invented at the fair.

When Millie came back home she was so excited about the rides that she made her uncle help her build a roller coaster in their back yard.
Millie was always good at planning, but even more importantly for someone with big dreams, she didn t just have ideas, she finished them off too. Her roller coaster was greased with lard and in their test runs without a rider it ran pretty fast.

Amelia insisted on being the first person to try it. She climbed up high, sat herself inside the crate, took a deep breath, and plunged.
It worked even better than she d hoped. When she reached that little dip at the bottom, she didn t just coast to a stop, she actually took off , zooming through the air!

She came to rest meters away, covered in dust, cackling with laughter.
Oh, Pidge! Millie said. It s just like flying. I m going again.
This was too much for Millie s mom, who insisted that they take the coaster apart at once.
Dad s Sickness
In a way, that famous trip to the fair was too much for Edwin too. To fund the holiday, he d squandered money they didn t have-just another bad decision in the series of bad decisions that he d made and would keep on making. Soon, despite a promising career and a happy family, Edwin started drinking heavily.
Of course no one realized he had a problem, at first. To the children he was still their dad, as jolly and generous as ever. But the drinking was getting worse. He started making mistakes at work and hanging out in bars all afternoon. He broke promises and lied. He quarrelled with his wife.
Edwin s life spiralled quickly out of control and soon he was fired from his job. Millie and Pidge went away with their mom while he tried to sort himself out, but the family ran out of money and one winter they couldn t even pay for firewood .
Dad s sickness was awful for the girls. Not just because they lost their father, but because they d lost their way of life too. Back then, the American Midwest was ruled by a strict moral code. You did the right thing. You went to church. You kept your head down and worked hard. You got married, and had children. You certainly didn t lose all your money and have a drunk for a father.
The Earharts were shamed and shunned. Suddenly Millie was an outcast. She lost all her friends . The family moved to a different town, but her father disgraced himself again, so she lost her new friends too. Fed up, Amy sent Edwin away again, and they moved to another house. Amelia ended up changing schools four times as a teenager.

Those years must have been very tough. But Millie didn t react to her troubles the way you might think. Instead of trying to fit in and be like all the other girls in the new towns she moved to, she stubbornly insisted on doing things her own way.
Not Fair for Girls
Millie must have stuck out like a sore thumb. The other girls all wore skirts, but Millie wore trousers whenever she could-they felt more comfortable. She tried to play basketball with the boys. She complained that her teachers weren t teaching her properly. People always noticed how di