A kid filled with rage, suspended from the football team for unsportsmanlike conduct, and his father, newly home from the war in Afghanistan, reckon with the injuries they’ve caused to others and themselves in this unflinching middle grade novel in verse about love and forgiveness.Hazard’s a military kid, best known for his prowess at football, and his short fuse. His dad’s been in Afghanistan, third tour. The worry and the pressure over school and his dad are gett...

Gloribella works as an executive chef at a trendy restaurant in the Boston Metro area, and every day she feeds hundreds of people. She even invents new recipes to ensure the continued success of the Belly of the Pig, until one day her best friend Luke is implicated in a crime.From then on, her "perfect life" begins to unravel. Believing in her friend's innocence, she hires a high-profile lawyer to keep him out of prison. However, a terrifying scene in her own home reveals more than...

"A remarkably fine work of creative scholarship." —C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of BooksIn 1860, when four million African Americans were enslaved, a quarter-million others, including William Ellison, were "free people of color." But Ellison was remarkable. Born a slave, his experience spans the history of the South from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. In a day when most Americans, black and white, worked t...

These thirty-four letters, written by members of the William Ellison family, comprise the only sustained correspondence by a free Afro-American family in the late antebellum South. Born a slave, Ellison was freed in 1816, set up a cotton gin business, and by his death in 1861, he owned sixty-three slaves and was the wealthiest free black in South Carolina. Although the early letters are indistinguishable from those of white contemporaries, the later correspondence is preoccupied with proof...

The summer of 1996. In nineteen days, six million visitors jostled about in a southern city grappling with white flight, urban decay and the stifling legacy of Jim Crow. Six years earlier, a bold, audacious partnership of a strong mayor, enlightened business leaders and Atlanta's Black political leadership dared to bid on hosting the 1996 Olympic Games. Unexpectedly, the city won, an achievement that ignited a loose but robust coalition that worked collectively, if sometimes contentiously,...

From Midnight to Dawn presents compelling portraits of the men and women who established the Underground Railroad and traveled it to find new lives in Canada. Evoking the turmoil and controversies of the time, Tobin illuminates the historic events that forever connected American and Canadian history by giving us the true stories behind well-known figures such as Harriet Tubman and John Brown. She also profiles lesser-known but equally heroic figures such as Mary Ann Shadd, who bec...

A look at how some of America's founding fathers—who fought for liberty and justice for all—were slave owners."[A] powerful examination of five enslaved individuals and their presidential owners. . . . In a thoroughly researched and reasoned account, Davis exposes the intricacies of this impossibly tangled web." — Publishers Weekly, starred reviewThrough the powerful stories of five enslaved people who were "owned" by four of our gre...

Noah Webster's name is now synonymous with the dictionary he created, but his story is not nearly so ubiquitous. Now acclaimed author of The Man Who Made Lists, Joshua Kendall sheds new light on Webster's life, and his far-reaching influence in establishing the American nation.Webster hobnobbed with various Founding Fathers and was a young confidant of George Washington and Ben Franklin. He started New York's first daily newspaper, predating Alexander Hamilton's New Yo...

Following his single term as President of the United States (1825-1829), John Quincy Adams, embittered by his loss to Andrew Jackson, boycotted his successor's inauguration, just as his father John Adams had done (the only two presidents ever to do so). Rather than retire, the sixty-two-year-old former president, U.S. senator, secretary of state, and Harvard professor was elected by his Massachusetts friends and neighbors to the House of Representatives to throw off the "incubus of Jackson...

A provocative and penetrating investigation into the rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, whose infamous duel left the Founding Father dead and turned a sitting Vice President into a fugitive.In the summer of 1804, two of America’s most eminent statesmen squared off, pistols raised, on a bluff along the Hudson River. Why would two such men risk not only their lives but the stability of the young country they helped forge?In War of Two...

Octavius Valentine Catto was an orator who shared stages with Frederick Douglass, a second baseman on Philadelphia’s best black baseball team, a teacher at the city’s finest black school and an activist who fought in the state capital and on the streets for equal rights. With his racially-charged murder, the nation lost a civil rights pioneer—one who risked his life a century before Selma and Birmingham.In Tasting Freedom Murray Dubin and Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Biddle p...

A multifaceted portrait of the early American republic as seen through the lens of the Burr ConspiracyIn 1805 and 1806, Aaron Burr, former vice president of the newly formed American republic, traveled through the Trans-Appalachian West gathering support for a mysterious enterprise, for which he was arrested and tried for treason in 1807. This book explores the political and cultural forces that shaped how Americans made sense of the uncertain rumors and reports ab...