"Sixteen-year-old Lorena Leland's dreams of a rich and fulfilling life as a writer are dashed when the stock market crashes in 1929. Seven years into the Great Depression, Rena's banker father has retreated into the bottle, her sister is married to a lazy charlatan and gambler, and Rena is an unemployed newspaper reporter. Eager for any writing job, Rena accepts a position interviewing former slaves for the Federal Writers' Project. There, she meets...

Born on a plantation but set apart from the others by her mother's position as a medicine woman, a young slave is forced to leave home at eighteen and unexpectedly finds herself in an infamously cruel jail. Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mothers position as the estates medicine woman and cherished by the Masters sister, she is set apart from the others on...

Lu Wonder, a bright, curious girl who hopes to be a scientist, sets out from her Kansas home in 1855 with her best friend Eustace, a slave, on a journey to Antarctica to protect a mysterious artifact and hide it from the man responsible for her father's death.

While living on a Vermont poor farm during 1855 and 1856, Jip learns his identity and that of his mother and comes to understand how he arrived at this place.

"Kept as forced labor on a chocolate plantation in the Ivory Coast, Amadou and his younger brother Seydou had given up hope, until a young girl arrives at the camp who rekindles the urge to escape"-- They only wanted to make some money during the dry season to help their impoverished family; instead they were tricked into forced labor on a plantation in the Ivory Coast. For two years what has mattered are the number of cacao pods Amadou and his younger...

"Slavery did not end without an organized and impassioned struggle. Many Americans, both black and white, thought it was inhumane and morally wrong to enslave another human being, no matter the color of his or her skin, and fought for the freedom of enslaved Africans in the United States. Learn about these abolitionists and freedom fighters from colonial days through emancipation, and discover how their work brought the country as far as it has come."...

"Queen of diverse historicals Vanessa Riley brings readers a vivid, sweeping novel of the Haitian Revolution based on the true-life stories of two extraordinary women: the first Empress of Haiti, Marie-Claire Bonheur, and Gran Toya, a West African-born warrior who helped lead the rebellion that drove out the French and freed the enslaved people of Haiti"-- Gran Toya: Born in West Africa, Abdaraya Toya was one of the legendary minoswomen called {28}Dahomeyan...

Henry Brown wrote that long before he came to be know as "Box," he "entered the world a slave." He was put to work as a child and passed down from one generation to the next -- as property. When he was an adult, his wife and children were sold away from him out of spite. Henry Brown watched as his family left, bound in chains, headed to the deeper South. What more could be taken from him? But then hope -- and help -- came in the from of the Underground...

A multi-generational family history told in the voices of the author's ancestors, spanning enslavement alongside Frederick Douglass at Maryland's Wye House plantation, service in the U.S. Colored Troops, and the founding of all-Black Reconstruction-era communities.

By following the directions in a song, "The Drinking Gourd," taught them by an old sailor named Peg Leg Joe, runaway slaves journey north along the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada.