1775-1865

Describes the history of Massachusetts, one of the thirteen original English colonies in North America, discussing its early explorers, first settlements, and life in colonial America, and includes information on how Massachusetts became a state.

Presents a comprehensive study of the colony of Delaware and describes the Native peoples who inhabited the land, early explorers and settlements, conflicts with the Indians and later tensions with England, and the battles and events of the Revolutionary War.

Natty Bumppo, the Leatherstocking, now on the threshold of old age finds his way of life challenged as the land he has roamed becomes private property, and the laws of man supplant the laws of nature.

Nineteenth-century town librarian Glynis Tryon, a veteran of a number of political crusades, becomes involved in battling discrimination against the Seneca Iroquois by white settlers, but when one of her Iroquois friends is accused of murder, the fight becomes personal.

In 1805, a thirteen-year-old slave and his friend make a dangerous escape from Charleston, S.C. and stowaway to head north toward freedom.

In 1859, when Gilly's father goes to search for gold in the Rocky Mountains, the eleven-year-old is sent to stay with her aunt and uncle in Virginia, where she befriends one of her uncle's slave girls, finds out about the Underground Railroad, and discovers that people are not always exactly as they seem.

High Constable Jacob Hays, the first detective in New York City, takes on a casein 1841 that consumes the remaining years of his career when he sets out to investigate a series of murders linked to gang wars, grave robbers, and cryptic clues in the poems of Edgar Allan Poe.

When word spreads throughout New York's immigrant wards that a military draft is about to be implemented, three women struggle with their private fears as they wait to learn if the men they love will be forced to fight in the Civil War.

An exiled German king and his three daughters arrive in Pharoah, New York, where their fates become intertwined with that of an eleven-year-old ropemaker's apprentice named Roddy, whose supernatural abilities allow him to communicate with crows and dark forces.

Uses objects the Americans have saved through the centuries and stories they have passed along to chronicle the production of cloth in early America.