A paperboy and his dog enjoy the quiet of the early morning as they go about their rounds.

"New York, August 1896. A "hot wave" has settled on the city with no end in sight, leaving tempers short and the streets littered with dead horses felled by the heat. At Police Headquarters, the gruff, politically ambitious commissioner Theodore Roosevelt has been struggling to reform his notoriously corrupt department. Meanwhile, the yellow press is ready to pounce on the peccadilloes of the Four Hundred, the city's social elite--the better to sell...

Needing to earn money after his father's death during the influenza epidemic of 1918, thirteen-year-old Joshua works as a newspaper boy in Boston, one day finding himself in the vicinity of an explosion that sends tons of molasses coursing through the streets.

In Cincinnati in 1927, paperboy Willie Brinkman tries to sell extras on the Dempsey-Tunney boxing match in his workingman's neighborhood.

In a small town near Chicago in 1953, twelve-year-old Tommy faces escalating problems at home, among his Catholic school friends, and with the threat of a communist living nearby, but taking over his hospitalized sister's paper route introduces him to neighbors who he comes to rely on for help.