Prehistory and Ancient Kingdoms
Cooney, Caroline Goddess of Yesterday
Anaxandra, companion to Princess Callisto, the only survivor of a destroyed island, pretends to be Callisto in order to survive. During the Trojan War she gets caught in a battle of gods and men. Can she save herself?
The Roman Empire: 27 B.C. -A.D. 476
Sutcliff, Rosemary Song for a Dark Queen
This is the story of Queen Boadicea who led British tribes in a revolt against the Roman Conquerers.
The Middle Ages / MedievalO
Crispin is on the run after being accused of a crime he did not commit. Along the way, he meets a juggler named Bear, who promises to protect him. It soon becomes obvious Crispin is still being followed. Who is after him? How is Crispin to save himself? Set in medieval England this story is full of secrets, plot twists, and great characters. 2003 Newbery medal winner.
Cadnum, Michael The Book of the Lion
In twelfth-century England, after his master is brutally punished for alleged cheating, Edmund finds himself traveling to the Holy Land as squire to a knight crusader on his way to join the forces of Richard Lionheart.
Cushman, Karen Catherine, Called Birdy
The thirteen-year-old daughter of an English country knight keeps a journal in which she records the events of her life, particularly her longing for adventure and her efforts to avoid an arranged marriage.
Cushman, Karen The Midwife’s Apprentice
In medieval England, homeless girl is taken in by a sharp-tempered midwife, and despite obstacles and hardship, eventually gains the three things she most wants: a full belly, a contented heart, and a place in this world. 1996 Newbery Award.
Grant, K.M. Blood Red Horse
A special horse named Hosanna changes the lives of two English brothers and those around them as they fight with King Richard I against Saladin's armies during the Third Crusades.
McKinley, Robin Outlaws of Sherwood
The author retells the adventures of Robin Hood and his band of outlaws who live in Sherwood Forest in twelfth-century England.
Temple, Frances The Ramsay Scallop
At the turn of the fourteenth century in England, fourteen-year-old Elenor finds her betrothal to an ambitious lord's son launching her on a memorable pilgrimage to far-off Spain.
1400s & 1500s
Bosse, Malcolm The Examination
Hong and his older brother Chen face famine, flood, pirates, and jealous rivals on their journey through fifteenth century China as Chen pursues his calling as a scholar and Hong becomes involved with a secret society known as the White Lotus.
1600s and 1700s
Gardener, Sally The Red Necklace
In the late eighteenth-century, Sido, the twelve-year-old daughter of a self-indulgent marquis, and Yann, a fourteen-year-old Gypsy orphan raised to perform in a magic show, face a common enemy at the start of the French Revolution.
Sutcliff, Rosemary Flame-Colored Taffeta
Twelve-year-old Damaris and her friends become involved with smugglers and a young man who may be a spy, in a rural community near the southern coast of England in the eighteenth century.
The New World
Hart, Lenore The Treasure of Savage Island
After Rafe, a runaway slave, stows away on a ship that wrecks off an island near the Eastern Shore, he is helped by thirteen-year-old Molly, and the two of them share an adventure involving pirates, spies, and a lost treasure.
Rees, Celia Pirates!
In 1722, after arriving with her brother at the family's Jamaican plantation where she is to be married off, sixteen-year-old Nancy Kington escapes with her slave friend, Minerva Sharpe, and together they become pirates traveling the world in search of treasure.
American Colonial
Rinaldi, Ann A Break with Charity: a story of the Salem Witch Trials
While waiting for a church meeting in 1706, Susanna English, of a wealthy Salem merchant, recalls the malice, fear, accusations of witchcraft that tore her village apart in 1692.
United States Revolutionary War
Avi Fighting Ground
Thirteen-year-old Jonathan goes off to fight in the Revolutionary War and discovers the real war is being fought within himself.
Collier, James Lincoln War Comes to Willy Freeman
A free thirteen-year-old black girl in Connecticut is caught up in the horror of the Revolutionary War and the danger of being returned to slavery when her patriot father is killed by the British and her mother disappears.
O'Dell, Scott Sarah Bishop
Left alone after the deaths of her father and brother who take opposite sides in the War for Independence, and fleeing from the British who seek to arrest her, Sarah Bishop struggles to shape a new life for herself in the wilderness.
Rinaldi, Ann A Ride into Morning: the Story of Tempe Wick
When unrest spreads at the Revolutionary War camp in Morristown, Jersey, under the command of General Anthony Wayne, a young woman cleverly hides her horse from the mutinous soldiers who have need of it.
The 19th Century
Lester, Julius Day of Tears: a Novel in Dialogue
Emma has taken care of the Butler children since Sarah and Frances's mother, Fanny, left. Emma wants to raise the girls to have good hearts, as a rift over slavery has ripped the Butler household apart. Now, to pay off debts, Pierce Butler wants to cash in his slave "assets", possibly including Emma.
Paterson, Katherine Rebels of the Heavenly Kingdom
Abducted from his home by bandits, fifteen-year-old Wang Lee is rescued from slavery by a mysterious girl who introduces him to the Taiping Tienkuo, a secret society partly based on Christian principles and dedicated to the overthrow of the Manchu government. (1850-1864.)
Rabin, Staton Betsy and the Emperor
In 1815 on the remote island of Saint Helena, fourteen-year-old Betsy Balcombe develops a friendship with Napoleon Bonaparte who, after his defeat at Waterloo, is brought there as an exile and is housed with her family.
Frontier and Pioneer Life
Fleischman, Paul The Borning Room
Lying at the end of her life in the room where she was born in 1851, Georgina remembers what it was like to grow up on the Ohio frontier.
Slavery/Civil War
Elliott, L.M. Annie, Between the States
Instead of spending her teen years at parties and balls, Annie, an idealistic, poetry-loving patriot, finds herself nursing soldiers, hiding valuables, and running the household as the Civil War rages around her family's Virginia home.
McMullan, Margaret How I Found the Strong
Frank Russell wishes he could have gone with his father and brother to fight for the Confederacy, but his experiences with the war and his changing relationship with the family slave, Buck, change his thinking.
O'Dell, Scott My Name is Not Angelica
Relates the experiences of a young Senegalese girl brought as a slave to the Danish owned Caribbean island of St. John as she participates in the slave revolt of 1733-1734.
Industrialization
Paterson, Katherine Lyddie
Impoverished Vermont farm girl Lyddie Worthen is determined to gain her independence by becoming a factory worker in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1840s.
Women's Suffrage
Jocelyn, Marthe Mable Riley: a Reliable Record of Humdrum Peril and Romance
In 1901, fourteen-year-old Mable Riley dreams of being a writer and having adventures while stuck in Perth County, Ontario, assisting her sister in teaching school and secretly becoming friends with a neighbor who holds scandalous opinions on women's rights.
World War I
Spillebeen, Geert Kipling’s Choice
In 1915, mortally wounded in Loos, France, eighteen-year-old John Kipling, son of writer Rudyard Kipling, remembers his boyhood and the events leading to what is to be his first and last World War I battle.
Depression Era
Peck, Richard A Year Down Yonder
During the recession of 1937, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice is sent to live with her feisty, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois and comes to a better understanding of this fearsome woman. Newbery Winner
Taylor, Mildred D. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
A black family living in the South during the 1930's are faced with prejudice and discrimination which their children don't understand.
World War II
Homefront, Holocaust and Japanese Internment.
Bruchac, Joseph Code Talker
After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue.
Mazer, Harry Last Mission
In 1944 a 15-year-old Jewish boy tells his family he will travel in the West but instead, enlists in the United States Air Corps and is subsequently taken prisoner by the Germans.
Orlev, Uri Run, Boy, Run
Based on the true story of a nine-year-old boy who escapes the Warsaw Ghetto and must survive throughout the war in the Nazi-occupied Polish countryside.
Patneaude, David Thin Wood Walls
When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Joe Hamada and his family face growing prejudice, eventually being torn away from their home and sent to a relocation camp in California, even as his older brother joins the United States Army to fight in the war.
Pelgrom, Els The Winter When Time was Frozen
In Holland during the last months of World War II a 12-year-old girl and her father find shelter with a farm family who courageously give sanctuary to all in need of it.
Salisbury, Graham Eyes of the Emperor
Following orders from the United States Army, several young Japanese American men train K-9 units to hunt Asians during World War II.
Westall, Robert Kingdom by the Sea
During World War II twelve-year-old Harry and a stray dog travel through war-torn England in search of safety.
Westall, Robert The Machine Gunners
After an air raid, a group of English children find a German machine gun and hide it from adults who are looking for it.
Yolen, Jane The Devil's Arithmetic
Hannah resents stories of her Jewish heritage and of the past until, when opening the door during a Passover Seder, she finds herself in Poland during World War II where she experiences the horrors of a concentration camp, and learns why she—and we--need to remember the past.
Civil Rights
Curtis, Christopher Paul The Watsons go to Birmingham—1963: a Novel
The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, African American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.
Taylor, Mildred D. Road to Memphis
Sadistically teased by two white boys in 1940's rural Mississippi, a black youth severely injures one of the boys with a tire iron and enlists Cassie's help in trying to flee the state.
Vietnam
Couloumbis, Audrey Summer’s End
Three teenaged cousins worry about their uncle who is missing in Vietnam, their brothers--the one who was drafted and the two who are dodging the draft, and the effects of their absence on the four generations gathered at the family farm in the summer of 1965.
Crist-Evans, Craig Amaryllis
Jimmy and his older brother Frank share a love of surfing and their problems with a drunken father, until Frank turns eighteen and goes to Vietnam.
Myers, Walter Dean Fallen Angels
Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, just out of his Harlem high school, enlists in the Army in the summer of 1967 and spends a devastating year on active duty in Vietnam.
Sherlock, Patti Letters from Wolfie
Certain that he is doing the right thing by donating his dog, Wolfie, to the Army's scout program in Vietnam, thirteen-year-old Mark begins to have second thoughts when the Army refuses to say when and if Wolfie will ever return.
Misc.
Durbin, William The Darkest Evening
(Communism)
In the 1930s, a young Finnish-American boy reluctantly moves with his family to Karelia, a communist-Finnish state founded in Russia, where his idealistic father soon realizes that his conception of a communist utopia is flawed.
Levine, Ellen Catch a Tiger By the Toe
(McCarthyism)
In the Bronx, New York, during the McCarthy era, twelve-year-old Jamie keeps a terrible secret about her family, but when the truth is exposed, her parents lose their jobs and she is fired from the school newspaper.
McKernan, Victoria Shackleton’s Stowaway
A fictionalized account of the adventures of eighteen-year-old Perce Blackborow, who stowed away for the 1914 Shackleton Antarctic expedition and, after their ship Endurance was crushed by ice, endured many hardships, including the loss of the toes of his left foot to frostbite, during the nearly two-year return journey across sea and ice.
Schmidt, Gary Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy
In 1911, Turner Buckminster hates his new home of Phippsburg, Maine, but things improve when he meets Lizzie Bright Griffin, a girl from a poor, nearby island community founded by former slaves that the town fathers--and Turner's--want to change into a tourist spot.