"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage -- and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child -- but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation...

"A picture book in verse that threads together past and present to explore the legacy of slavery during a classroom lesson"-- From the fireside tales in an African village, through the unspeakable passage across the Atlantic, to the backbreaking work in the fields of the South, this is a story of a people's struggle and strength, horror and hope. This is the story of American slavery, a story that needs to be told and understood by all of us. A testament...

Little Mazie wants the freedom to stay up late, but her father explains what freedom really means in the story of Juneteenth, and how her ancestors celebrated their true freedom.

"In the fall of 1863, the Union Army is in control of the Mississippi River. Much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is occupied. The Confederate Army is in disarray, corrupt structures are falling apart, and enslaved men and women are beginning to glimpse freedom. When Hannah Laveau, an enslaved woman working on the Lufkin plantation, is accused of murder, she goes on the run with Florence Milton, an abolitionist schoolteacher,...

"The book starts with an account of the arrival of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts in November 1620, which is to say that it endorses a very old idea of the best place to catch the first glimmer of the American republic: 1620, not 1619. I'm well aware that the claims of 1620 have their own weaknesses. The country's "very origin," as the Times puts it, isn't something that can be settled once and for all. Many threads from many origins all eventually...