"A president who governed a divided country has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization and political crisis. Abraham Lincoln was president when implacable secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions inextricably bound up with money, power, race, identity, and faith. He was hated and hailed, excoriated and revered. In Lincoln we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. At once familiar...

After a day of picking cotton in late 1860, Ella May, a young slave, joins her friends Bobby and Sue at their second job of listening outside the windows of their master's house for useful information.

In 1860 Louisiana, eighty-year-old Madame Sylvie decides to sit for a portrait, as horrific stories that span generations from the big house and the fields are revealed.

A fictionalized account of how in 1849 a Virginia slave, Henry "Box" Brown, escapes to freedom by shipping himself in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia.

The story of Addy Walker, a young girl who escapes a Southern plantation and flees slavery with her mother during the Civil War.

Listed by Abraham Lincoln, alongside the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, as one of the books that most influenced his life, few true tales of adventure and survival are as astonishing as this one. Shipwrecked off the western coast of North Africa in August of 1815, James Riley and his crew had no idea of the trials awaiting them as they gathered their beached belongings. They would be captured by a band of nomadic Arabs, herded across the Sahara Desert,...

"Explains the Missouri Compromise and its impact"--Provided by publisher.

A fictionalized look at the life of Joseph Jacobs, son of a slave, told in the form of letters that he might have written during his life in pre-Civil War North Carolina, on a whaling expedition, in New York, New England, and finally in California during the Gold Rush.

This time the mysterious box that Ranger the Golden retriever found transports him to a Maryland plantation before the Civil War, where he must help a young house slave named Sarah and her younger brother Jesse find their way to the underground railroad and North to freedom, before Jesse is sold to a plantation further South.