Frontier & Pioneer Life

Armstrong — Black-Eyed Susan
Ten-year-old Susie and her father love living on the South Dakota prairie with its vast, uninterrupted views of land and sky, but Susie's mother greatly misses their old life in Ohio.

Byars — Trouble River
When he builds his raft, a twelve-year-old boy never dreams that it will serve as the sole means of escape for himself and his grandmother when hostile Indians threaten their prairie cabin.

Conrad — Prairie Songs
Louisa's life in a loving pioneer family on
the Nebraska prairie is altered by the
arrival of a new doctor and his beautiful,
tragically frail wife.

Couloumbis — The Misadventures of Maude March
After the death of the stern aunt who raised them since they were orphaned, eleven-year-old Sallie and her fifteen-year-old sister escape their self-serving guardians and begin an adventure resembling those in the dime novels Sallie loves to read.

Cushman — Ballad of Lucy Whipple
In 1849, twelve-year-old California Morning Whipple, who renames herself Lucy, is distraught when her mother moves the family from Massachusetts to a rough California mining town.

DeFelice — Weasel
Alone in the frontier wilderness in the winter of 1839 while his father is recovering from an injury, eleven-year-old Nathan runs afoul of the renegade killer known as Weasel and makes a surprising discovery about the concept of revenge.

Fleishman — The Borning Room
Lying in the room where she was born in 1851, Georgina remembers what it was like to grow up on the Ohio frontier.

Holland — Journey Home
Two orphan sisters in the late 1800s leave New York on the orphan train to seek a new home in the West.

Meyer — Where The Broken Heart Still Beats
Having been taken as a child and raised by Comanche Indians, thirty-four-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker is forcibly returned to her white relatives, where she longs for her Indian life.

Slavery

Armstrong — Steal Away
In 1855 two thirteen-year-old girls, one white and one black, run away from a southern farm and make the difficult journey north to freedom, living to recount their story forty-one years later to two similar young girls.

Fox — Slave Dancer
Kidnapped by the crew of an Africa-bound ship, a thirteen-year-old boy discovers to his horror that he is on a slaver and his job is to play music for the exercise periods of the human cargo.

Howard — When Daylight Comes
After a slave uprising on an eighteenth century settlement in the Virgin Islands, a white girl held prisoner by the rebels follows a slow pas- sage to understanding her captors.

Hurmence — A Girl Called Boy
A pampered young black girl who has been mysteriously transported back to the days of slavery, struggles to escape her bondage.

Lyons — Letters From A Slave Girl
A fictionalized version of the life of Harriet Jacobs, told in the form of letters, possibly written while she was a slave in North Carolina, as she prepared for escape to the North in 1842.

 

 

 

Paulsen — Nightjohn
Twelve-year-old Sarny's brutal life as a slave becomes even more dangerous when a newly arrived slave offers to teach her how to read.

Pearsall — Trouble Don't Last
Samuel, an eleven-year-old Kentucky slave, and Harrison, the elderly slave who helped raise him, attempt to escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

Turner — Running for our Lives
A family of fugitive slaves becomes separated while traveling to freedom aboard the Underground Railroad.

Woodruff — Dear Austin
In 1853, in letters to his older brother, eleven-year-old Levi describes his adventures in the Pennsylvania countryside with his black friend Jupiter and his experiences with the Underground Railroad.

Civil War

Alphin — Ghost Cadet
Twelve-year-old Benjy, in Virginia visiting the grandmother he has never met, meets the ghost of a Military Institute cadet who was killed in the Battle of New Market in 1864 and helps him recover his family's treasured gold watch.

Beatty — Charley Skedaddle
During the Civil War, a twelve-year-old Bowery Boy from New York City joins the Union Army as a drummer, deserts during a battle in Virginia, and encounters a hostile old mountain woman.

Beatty — Who Comes with Cannons
In 1861 twelve-year-old Truth, a Quaker girl from Indiana, is staying with relatives who run a North Carolina station of the Underground Railroad, when her world is changed by the beginning of the Civil War

Collier — With Every Drop of Blood
While trying to transport food to Richmond, Virginia, during the Civil War, fourteen- year-old Johnny is captured by a black Union soldier.

Fleishman — Bull Run
Northerners, Southerners, generals, couriers, dreaming boys, and worried sisters describe the glory, the horror, the thrill, and the disillusionment of the first battle of the Civil War.

Hunt — Across Five Aprils
During the Civil War, nine-year-old Jethro must run the family farm in southern Illinois almost alone.

Reeder — Shades of Gray
At the end of the Civil War, twelve-year-old Will, having lost all his immediate family, reluctantly leaves his city home to live in the Virginia countryside with his aunt and the uncle he considers a "traitor" because he refused to take part in the war.

Reeder — Across the Lines
Edward, the son of a white plantation owner, and his black house servant and friend Simon, witness the siege of Petersburg during the Civil War.

Reit — Ironclad
Presents the historic Civil War battle at Hampton Roads, Virginia between two ironclad ships, the Merrimac and the Monitor, from the viewpoint of a youth serving aboard the Monitor.

Wisler — Red Cap
A young Yankee drummer boy displays great courage when he's captured and sent to Andersonville Prison.