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Outstanding athlete, exceptional courage AND restraint in the face of violent hatred, Jackie Robinson is a hero for all ages.

Ellen and William Craft, an enslaved married couple, devised a daring plan to escape to freedom. Capitalizing on Ellen’s mixed race heritage and light skin, she would dress herself as a wealthy white man, while William posed as her slave.

Drama abounds in what might have happened if Austin Gollaher had not pulled the young Abraham Lincoln from a swollen Kentucky creek that day in 1816. This engaging tale was inspired and expanded from a real event noted by the author.

Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States, led the nation through its darkest hour — the Civil War. Find out about Lincoln’s childhood on a frontier farm, how a struggling small town lawyer became president, and why he is one of America’s most revered and beloved leaders.

The sons of one family fight on different sides while the youngest tries to make sense of the war.

In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance.

Amelia Earhart was a fiesty 11-year-old when she saw her first air show. Little did she know that a passing fancy for airplanes would develop into a full-throttled passion. As a committed social worker, feminist and record-breaking female pilot, Amelia’s disappearance while flying over the South Pacific remains one of our greatest mysteries.

Black teens Isaiah Wilson and Angel Hill start to fall in love in Greenwood, Oklahoma, just before the the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

The Civil War has broken out and Annie Sinclair’s Virginia home, Hickory Heights, is right in the line of battle. Caught up in the rising conflict, Annie and her mother tend to wounded soldiers while Annie’s older brother, Laurence, enlists in the Confederate cavalry under JEB Stuart.

Seventeen-year-old Sarah Jane’s journal entries chronicle her journey by clipper ship from Massachusetts to Alabama, then on to Russia and other European countries in 1857. Photos, maps, drawings, and letters accompany journal text and bring the passengers and setting to life.

After her sophomore year in high school, Apple Starkington, who grew up feeling like she didn’t fit in with her White father and stepmother, spends the summer at the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation getting to know her Native family members for the first time.

The lives of a tight-knit group of 14 young Nisei, second-generation Japanese American citizens, are irrevocably changed by the mass U.S. incarcerations of World War II when over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry are removed from their homes and forced into desolate incarceration camps.  

Watch as Traci Chee reads a short excerpt from We Are Not Free

By winning the state high school basketball championship in 1955, ten teens from an Indianapolis school meant to be the centerpiece of racially segregated education in the state shattered the myth of their inferiority. Anchored by the astonishing Oscar Robertson, a future college and NBA star, the Crispus Attucks Tigers went down in history as the first state champions from Indianapolis and the first all-black team in U.S. history to win a racially open championship tournament—an integration they had forced with their on-court prowess. From native Hoosier and award-winning author Phillip Hoose comes this true story of a team up against impossible odds, making a difference when it mattered most.

Before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in 1947, Black athletes played in the Negro Leagues — on teams coached by Black managers, cheered on by Black fans, and often run by Black owners. Here is the riveting true story of the woman at the center of the Black baseball world: Effa Manley, co-owner and business manager of the Newark Eagles. Elegant yet gutsy, she cultivated a powerhouse team. Yet just as her Eagles reached their pinnacle, so did calls to integrate baseball, a move that would all but extinguish the Negro Leagues. On and off the field, Effa hated to lose. She had devoted her life to Black empowerment — but in the battle for Black baseball, was the game rigged against her? 

During World War II, Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps. Isolated and bored, baseball became a life and soul-saving pastime which successfully brought very different people together. Darkly hued illustrations evoke the difficulty of the time, based on the author’s family story. Spanish version available.

Michelle Robinson was born on the South Side of Chicago. From her modest beginnings, she would become Michelle Obama, the inspiring and powerful First Lady of the United States, when her husband, Barack Obama, was elected the forty-fourth president. They would be the first Black First Family in the White House and serve the country for two terms. In this volume for young people, Michelle Obama shares her views on how all young people can help themselves as well as help others, no matter their status in life. She asks readers to realize that no one is perfect, and that the process of becoming is what matters, as finding yourself is ever evolving. In telling her story with boldness, she asks young readers: Who are you, and what do you want to become? This book is also available in Spanish.

This book captures the voices of the forgotten men, women, and children who worked in the cotton industry in America over the centuries. The voices of the slaves who toiled in the fields in the South, the poor sharecroppers who barely got by, and the girls who gave their lives to the New England mills spring to life through oral histories, archival photos, and an engaging narrative prose style. 

Benjamin Franklin’s many talents are presented here in word and image. The organization from Ben’s childhood to the end of his life is enhanced by the use of a scrapbook-like format.

Poems and photographs subtly introduce the stunning church bombing in which four girls were killed. Readers come to know each child as individuals as well as glimpse this sad, tumultuous period while looking toward a more hopeful future.

The Civil War was lost long before the first shot was ever fired, thanks to deep and violent divisions of class and political allegiance that resulted in “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

Publisher description: In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District — a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America’s Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives. In a few short hours, they’d razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in US history. But how did it come to pass? What exactly happened? And why are the events unknown to so many of us today? These are the questions that award-winning author Brandy Colbert seeks to answer in this unflinching nonfiction account of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

A look at African-American whalers and the whaling industry’s role in the Underground Railroad and the Civil War.

The story of the invasion and chaotic pullout of troops from Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 will appeal to those who like military stories. Bowden provides plenty of action and raises difficult questions about U.S. foreign and military policy.

Rich paintings in limited colors convey the power of a people and a piece of their history. Done in the cadence of the Blues, this unique and powerful picture book inspired by the uniquely African American music and related experience is for older readers.