United States History

FEVER, 1793
by Laurie Halse Anderson
In 1793 Philadelphia, sixteen-year-old Matilda Cook, separated from her sick mother, learns about perseverance and self-reliance when she is forced to cope with the horrors of a yellow fever epidemic.

BEYOND THE WESTERN SEA (BOOKS 1 & 2)
by Avi
Driven from their impoverished Irish village, fifteen-year-old Maura and her younger brother meet their landlord's runaway son in Liverpool while all three wait for a ship to America; their fates continue to intertwine on board ship and in the New World.

AL CAPONE DOES MY SHIRTS
by Gennifer Choldenko
A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards' families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.

PRAIRIE SONGS
by Pam Conrad
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.

THE RANSOM OF MERCY CARTER
by Caroline B. Cooney
In 1704, in the English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, eleven-year-old Mercy and her family and neighbors are captured by Mohawk Indians and their French allies, and forced to march through bitter cold to French Canada, where some adapt to new lives and some still hope to be ransomed.

A NORTHERN LIGHT
by Jennifer Donnelly
In 1906, sixteen-year-old Mattie, determined to attend college and be a writer against the wishes of her father and fiance, takes a job at a summer inn where she discovers the truth about the death of a guest. Based on a true story.

THE TRIALS OF KATE HOPE
by Wick Downing
At the young age of fourteen, Kate Hope is licensed to practice law in the state of Colorado in 1973, and with the help of her lawyer grandfather, and memories of her dead father, also a lawyer, she tries the case of a dog that is slated to be destroyed for attacking a baby.

SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE, 1906
by Kathleen Duey
A young housekeeper realizes it's time to face reality and remember her place in society. But when she meets the handsome son of a wealthy cattle rancher, the electricity that flows between them is impossible to ignore. His father's attempts to keep them apart are interrupted by the earthquake of the century.

A YELLOW WATERMELON
by Ted M. Dunagan
Growing up in poverty-stricken, racially segregated, rural Alabama in the late 1940s, a white boy named Ted and a black boy named Poudlum become secret friends, join forces to integrate the cotton field laborers, and try to stop evil forces from depriving Poudlum's family of their property and livelihood.

HEAR US OUT! LESBIAN AND GAY STORIES OF STRUGGLE, PROGRESS AND HOPE, 1950 TO THE PRESENT
by Nancy Garden
Going decade by decade, Nancy Garden discusses the social and political issues faced by GLBT youth from 1950 to the present, and adds two stories about gay young people from each decade.

MAP OF IRELAND
by Stephanie Grant
In 1974, the first year of busing in Boston, Massachusetts, seventeen-year-old Ann Ahern's lesbianism, which has isolated her from other white students, draws her to her African French teacher and leads her to insights into Blacks' struggles in the post-Civil Rights era.

OUT OF THE DUST
by Karen Hesse
In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

NEWES FROM THE DEAD: BEING A TRUE STORY OF ANNE GREEN, HANGED FOR INFANTICIDE AT OXFORD ASSIZES IN 1650, RESTORED TO THE WORLD AND DIED AGAIN 1665
by Mary Hooper
In 1650, while Robert, a young medical student, steels himself to assist with her dissection, twenty-two-year-old housemaid Anne Green recalls her life as she lies in her coffin, presumed dead after being hanged for murdering her child.

THE STONES OF MOURNING CREEK
by Diane Les Becquets
At first, 14-year-old Francie Grove trusts the sheriff's report-her mother's death was accidental-but odd events begin to change her mind. In this lyrically written, dramatically charged novel, a determined heroine crosses racial divides to expose her town's deadliest secrets.

THE GREAT CHICAGO FIRE, 1871
by Elizabeth Massie
After losing her family in the Civil War, 18-year-old Katrina disguises herself as a boy and takes acting jobs in Chicago. When a young law student offers her work in a shelter for the poor, love drives her to reveal her identity. As the couple dreams of a life together, the disastrous fire drives them from each other's arms.

MISS SPITFIRE: REACHING HELEN KELLER
by Sarah Miller
At age twenty-one, partially-blind, lonely but spirited Annie Sullivan travels from Massachusetts to Alabama to try and teach six-year-old Helen Keller, deaf and blind since age two, self-discipline and communication skills.

FALLEN ANGELS
by Walter Dean Myers
Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.

HUSH: AN IRISH PRINCESS' TALE
by Donna Jo Napoli
Fifteen-year-old Melkorka, an Irish princess, is kidnapped by Russian slave traders and not only learns how to survive but to challenge some of the brutality of her captors, who are fascinated by her apparent muteness and the possibility that she is enchanted.

WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE
by Julie Otsuka
After a woman whose husband was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy sees notices posted around her neighborhood in Berkeley instructing Japanese residents to evacuate, she moves with her son and daughter to an internment camp. The next three years are spent in filthy, cramped and impersonal lodgings as the family is shuttled from one camp to another.

THE RIFLE
by Gary Paulsen
Chilling and thought provoking, this novel challenges the notion that "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." The history of a magnificent rifle is followed, from its creation by a revered gunsmith in 1768 to its final resting place in a fisherman's gun case in 1994.

NIGHTJOHN
by Gary Paulsen
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.

SARNY, A LIFE REMEMBERED
by Gary Paulsen
Finding herself a free woman after the end of the Civil War, Sarny begins to search for her sold-away children and begins a new life, giving readers a panoramic view of America in a time of trial, tragedy and hoped-for change.

SOLDIER’S HEART
by Gary Paulsen
Eager to enlist, fifteen-year-old Charley has a change of heart after experiencing both the physical horrors and mental anguish of Civil War combat.

WITCH CHILD
by Celia Rees
Mary's grandmother is executed for witchcraft, and Mary is forced to leave her home to avoid the same fate. At first she flees to the English countryside, but when the atmosphere of superstition and suspicion becomes all consuming she leaves on a boat for America in the hope that she can start over and forget her past.

THE EVER-AFTER BIRD
by Ann Rinaldi
In 1851, thirteen-year-old Cecilia has her eyes opened to the horrors of slavery when she accompanies her ornithologist uncle on an expedition in search of the rare "Scarlet Ibis," and watches as he shows slaves the way to the Underground Railroad.

HANG A THOUSAND TREES WITH RIBBONS: THE STORY OF PHILLIS WHEATLEY
by Ann Rinaldi
A fictionalized biography of the eighteenth-century African woman who, as a child, was brought to New England to be a slave, and after publishing her first poem when a teenager, gained renown throughout the colonies as an important black American poet.

WOLF BY THE EARS
by Ann Rinaldi
Harriet Hemings, rumored to be the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of his black slaves, struggles with the problems facing her-to escape from the velvet cage that is Monticello, or to stay, and thus remain a slave.

NEVERMORE
by Harold Schechter
A chilling piece of historical fiction, starring author Edgar Allan Poe. After Poe skewers the autobiography of Colonel David Crockett-and is unexpectedly confronted by the indignant congressman-the two men are led on a quest for a killer that will bring them face to face with the darkest impulses of the human heart.

ROLL OF THUNDER, HEAR MY CRY
by Mildred D. Taylor
A black family living in the South during the 1930's are faced with prejudice and discrimination which their children don't understand.

LET THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN
by Mildred D. Taylor
The sequel to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Four African American children growing up in rural Mississippi during the Depression experience racial antagonisms and hard times, but learn from their parents the pride and self-respect they need to survive.

A SEA SO FAR
by Jean Thesman
After surviving the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fires, two teenage girls, a wealthy semi-invalid and her hired companion, travel together to Ireland and discover they share much in common.

JOURNEY INTO MOHAWK COUNTRY
by H.M. van den Bogaert
An illustrated version of the journal of a young Dutch trader, Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert, who journeyed into the land of the Iroquois Indians, a Mowhawk tribe that controlled the trade routes in the area, in 1634, seeking to bolster the Dutch trade in what is now New York State.

RED MOON AT SHARPSBURG
by Rosemary Wells
As the Civil War breaks out, India, a young Southern girl, summons her sharp intelligence and the courage she didn't know she had to survive the war that threatens to destroy her family, her Virginia home, and the only life she has ever known.

BEFORE GREEN GABLES
by Budge Wilson
An authorized prequel to L.M. Montgomery's classic series about the irrepressible red-haired orphan follows Anne's early years before her adoption by the Cuthberts.

THE GADGET
by Paul Zindel
In 1945, having joined his father at Los Alamos, where he and other scientists are working on a secret project to end World War II, thirteen-year-old Stephen becomes caught in a web of secrecy and intrigue.

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