1775-1865

Describes the customs, recipes, poems, and songs used to celebrate Christmas in the big plantation houses and in the slave quarters just before the Civil War.

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.

Henry Brown copes with slavery by singing, but after his wife and children are sold away he is left with only his freedom song, which gives him strength when friends put him in a box and mail him to a free state.

In 1848, Rosetta, the nine-year-old daughter of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, becomes the only Black student at Miss Tracy's Female Seminary in Rochester, New York, and while the students are pleased she is there, the faculty is not. Includes facts about Frederick and Rosetta's lives.

Presents a concise history of slavery in the Americas with the arrival of the first Africans in the early 1600s, and describes the rise of the plantation South, the revival of slavery with the cotton gin, slave rebellions and the Underground Railroad, and the end of slavery in 1865.

Provides an account of the yellow fever epidemic that swept through Philadelphia in 1793, discussing the chaos that erupted when people began evacuating in droves, leaving the city without government, goods, or services, and examining efforts by physicians, the Free African Society, and others to cure and care for the sick.

In 1810s Massachusetts, young Mary Elizabeth Sawyer nurses a sickly lamb back to health and becomes the subject of a famous nursery rhyme. Includes facts about the real Mary, John Roulstone who wrote the rhyme, and Lowell Mason who set it to music.

Explores the colony of New York, and its importance before and during the American Revolution.

Describes the customs, recipes, poems, and songs used to celebrate Christmas in the big plantation houses and in the slave quarters just before the Civil War.

Discusses the life of the Shawnee warrior, orator, and leader who united a confederacy of Indians in an effort to save Indian land from the advance of white soldiers and settlers.