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Across Five Aprils
Across Five Aprils ends with Jethro having taken responsibility for his family farm for the last four of the titular five Aprils. After Lincoln's assassination, Jethro feels there is no "beauty in...
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Across Five Aprils
The gift is a large quantity of logs. If you head to Chapter 8 and read about ten paragraphs in, you'll see where Jethro is pleasantly surprised, and somewhat embarrassed, to be the recipient of a...
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Across Five Aprils
Before Shadrach Yale, the other schoolmasters took turns living with different families throughout the district. When Shad, the new schoolmaster, petitioned for space and privacy, he was granted...
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Across Five Aprils
Caught between the competing visions of the war that is tearing apart his country, Jethro Creighton struggles to reconcile the disparate perspectives to which he has been privy just within his own...
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Across Five Aprils
Early in Across Five Aprils, Irene Hunt's novel of a family struggling to survive the divisions within families as well as across the nation during the American Civil War, there are hints of a...
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Across Five Aprils
In Chapter 4, Jethro's mother is so shaken after reading Tom's letter that she sends Jethro over to spend the evening with Shadrach Yale (Shad). Shad is the local schoolteacher, and definitely a...
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Across Five Aprils
duplicate question
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Across Five Aprils
The location of General Lee's surrender was Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. If all that you need is a date, that occurred in April of 1865. The book Across Five Aprils says that it happened on...
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Across Five Aprils
By the autumn of 1862, the Civil War is becoming more organized. The Confederate soldiers have advanced toward the Mississippi River, but control only a small piece of it. Then news arrives that...
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Across Five Aprils
In the final chapters of Irene Hunt's young reader's novel Across Five Aprils, we are not actually directly told what happens to John Creighton after the war. However, we can deduce what happens...
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Across Five Aprils
When Ross Milton, the editor of the local paper, treats Jethro to a meal at the restaurant, Jethro is grateful. During the meal, Milton asks Jethro whether he can read. Jethro tells him that his...
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Across Five Aprils
Chapter 5 starts out with Jethro's mother, Ellen, having a headache. It's a result of her body becoming dependent on caffeine from coffee. She is going through withdrawal symptoms. Jethro is...
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Across Five Aprils
Ed makes the remark about "being alone" with the letter because there is a very good chance that it will bring bad news. And in fact Jethro and his mother are alone when he reads Tom's letter to...
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Across Five Aprils
Chapter 5 opens, Ellen lay in her bed, limp with the agony of a headache. It always happened when the supply of coffee ran out. When coffee prices soar to seventy cents a pound, with predictions...
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Across Five Aprils
The various Creightons have different feelings about the war. Jethro, the youngest, initially shares the excitement of his older brother Tom and cousin Eb, who are under the delusion that war is a...
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Across Five Aprils
The following excerpt is from the summary section of the eNotes study guide for Across Five Aprils and describes the flashback found in the first chapter. "It is not that Jethro is unfamiliar with...
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Across Five Aprils
In the fall of 1862, many men in the community have come together on the Creighton property to help re-build the barn which was burned. Not long after the raising of the barn the Creightons receive...
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Across Five Aprils
According to most sources, Irene Hunt (1907-2001), the author of Across Five Aprils, died on her 94th birthday in 2001. However, I have found several conflicting dates and locations. Most dates...
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Across Five Aprils
Jenny recieves a letter from Shad, she does not read the whole letter to the family though, just the parts that concern them. Jethro is angry because he feels that Jenny should read the entire...
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Across Five Aprils
During the Civil War, there were a lot of people in the North who did not approve of the war. Many of them believed that the Southern states should be free to have slavery if they wanted. Many of...
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Across Five Aprils
At Gettysburg, there is a fierce and bloody battle, lasting over the course of three days, between Confederate troops led by Robert E. Lee and Union soldiers under Ulysses S. Grant. The North...
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Across Five Aprils
It is actually Jethro who is the "lonely boy," and Shad who sends things that are "like gifts." These things are letters, which Shad writes from Washington while he is recuperating from injuries...
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Across Five Aprils
In the immediate aftermath of the war, Jethro "went back to the fields and plowed the same furrows he had plowed for the past four years." His dogged industriousness reflects the Creightons'...
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Across Five Aprils
Eb returned to his old regiment, which was stationed in Mississippi; he determined to work hard and do a good job for them until his term of enlistment was fulfilled. Eb had been in a deep...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro gets frustrated while the men are talking after the barn has been built because they treat him like a little kid. One even goes so far as to tell him congenially, "Be glad you're a boy,...
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Across Five Aprils
His decision about deserters was most fair and was one of the reasons he became one of the most respected presidents of all time. Lincoln was not concerned with just winning the war, but with...
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Across Five Aprils
According to the narrator, the Battles of Fredricksburg and Stones River have a discouraging effect on the Union soldiers and their supporters. The former was a bitter defeat for the Union, while...
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Across Five Aprils
Most updates came from newspaper articles. They were not really reliable because the editorial staff would print whatever viewpoints reflected their own political leanings. Information, at least...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro is Ellen's youngest, and I think that in detaining him so long before sending him off to Shad's, she is trying to hold onto him, reluctant to let him go off by himself the mile through the...
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Across Five Aprils
In my opinion, Ed Turner simply means that a letter from a son or brother who is off fighting in a war is something that is too emotional for a family to share with others. Ed Turner does not want...
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Across Five Aprils
The letters added an air of authenticity to the story. They also let the reader know how the brothers were doing and kept the story moving toward the end. The letters seemed like they were real...
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Across Five Aprils
Trouble has been brewing between the North and South for many, many years, and when this novel begins, the adults are worrying about the possibility of war between the North and South. Abraham...
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Across Five Aprils
As the novel moves forward and he hears more and more discussion and argument about the war, from his brothers and other relations, his ideas about war being glorious or something to be celebrated...
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Across Five Aprils
One of the biggest changes that Jethro goes through is the change in his attitude towards the war and towards issues in general outside of the farm. From his beginning as the innocent boy who has...
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Across Five Aprils
The people of the north are beginning to doubt the leadership. McClellan had been well respected, but now people are questioning whether he can assure a victory. The army had victories at both...
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Across Five Aprils
When Jethro meets Bill on Walnut Hill, Bill tells him that he is leaving to fight for the Confederacy. Bill has just had a terrible fight with John, the brother with whom he has always been the...
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Across Five Aprils
This is a novel about the Civil War. The generals and the battles, then, are ones you would expect to read about in a novel about this sad period in U.S. history. The main character, Jethro, is...
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Across Five Aprils
Of all his brothers, Jethro has never been close to John. He does not dislike his older brother, but he has not enjoyed the rapport with him that he shares with Bill either. The same reserve...
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Across Five Aprils
When word comes that "the terms of peace had been signed by two tired men somewhere in Virginia at a place called Appomattox Court House", the Union can finally celebrate. Many people flock to...
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Across Five Aprils
Jethro is working out in the fields when he hears about Lincoln's assassination. He is still basking in the glow of the news of the long-awaited cease-fire, and when he thinks back on the moment,...
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Across Five Aprils
Three of John's letters are actually recounted in Chapter 11. In the first, which arrives sometime during the fall or early winter of 1863, John tells about the infamous Battle of Chickamauga and...
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Across Five Aprils
Matt Creighton first grants his daughter Jenny permission to travel to Washington to be by the side of her beau, Shadrach Yale, who has been critically wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg. He...
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Across Five Aprils
Shadrach Yale is critically injured at the Battle of Gettysburg. The Battle of Gettysburg occurred during "three hot July days" in 1863. It was "a battle of unbelievable bravery and unbelievable...
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Across Five Aprils
Ed Turner's young son Sammy is in South Carolina. The war is coming to an end, and in the South, Union soldiers, led by the likes of William Sherman and others, are running wild, looting and...
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Across Five Aprils
When Ross Milton warns Jeth, "Don't expect peace to be a perfect pearl", he is telling the youth not to expect that, with the ceasing of hostilities, the idyllic world he remembers will be...
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Across Five Aprils
As the war approaches its fifth April, Jethro is thirteen years old. He has grown tall, and although he is still "slender", his muscles have a tautness achieved through hard physical labor. His...
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Across Five Aprils
The Battle of Chickamauga took place in the mountains of Tennessee in September of 1863. In a significant Union defeat, the Northern Army of the Cumberland, led by Major General Rosecrans, faced...
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Across Five Aprils
John tells about finally meeting up with his brother Bill in a letter written soon after a battle in Nashville, Tennessee, in December of 1864. John, who is fighting for the North, is put in...
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Across Five Aprils
After his speech at Gettysburg, President Lincoln issued "a proclamation of amnesty, in which he promised pardon and full rights to any individual Confederate who would swear to protect the...
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Across Five Aprils
The Presidential Election of 1864 was notable for the vehemence of public opinion on both sides. Abraham Lincoln, who was running for reelection for the Republican Party, had, in the months before...