In 1857, having arrived in Minnesota Territory on her father's steamboat, twelve-year-old Libby continues to harbor the runaway slave boy Jordan while worrying about a fugitive who has escaped from the local prison.

After escaping a death sentence in the summer of 1775, Octavian and his tutor find shelter but no safe harbor in British-occupied Boston and, persuaded by Lord Dunmore's proclamation offering freedom to slaves who join his counterrevolutionary Royal Ethiopian Regiment, Octavian and his friends soon find themselves engaged in naval raids on the Virginia coastline as the Revolutionary War breaks out in full force.

In 1773, twelve-year-old Silence works to please her mother through household chores and weekly etiquette lessons in hopes of spending time with her beloved horse, Lily, while the men of Boston, including her Loyalist father and brother, discuss a possible war over taxation without representation.

A young girl who serves as letter writer for her blind stepmother is haunted by her unwitting role in Nat Turner's Rebellion, one of the bloodiest slave uprisings in the history of America.

In 1787 a fourteen-year-old slave, anxious to buy freedom for himself and his mother, escapes from his dishonest master and tries to find help in cashing the solidier's notes received by his father for fighting in the Revolution.

"Spanning two centuries and two continents, Dream Country is the story of five generations of young people caught in a spiral of death and exile between Liberia and the United States"-- "Dream Country is the story of five generations of young people from one African American family chasing an elusive dream across centuries and continents. Gibney conjures an ambitious, sinuous novel from a family tree twisted to its breaking point by slavery and colonialism...

Mumbet's Declaration of Independence tells the story of a Massachusetts slave from the Revolutionary era--in 1781, she successfully used the new Massachusetts Constitution to make a legal case that she should be free.

Number 47, a fourteen-year-old slave boy growing up under the watchful eye of a brutal master in 1832, meets the mysterious Tall John, who introduces him to a magical science and also teaches him the meaning of freedom.

Octavian Nothing is raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers. He and his mother are the only people in their household assigned names. Young Octavian begins to question the purpose behind his guardians' fanatical studies, only after he dares to open a forbidden door does he learn the hideous nature of their experiments.