An adventure with Frederick Douglass teaches a boy unable to fight with the Union soldiers to be proud of himself just as he is. Ages 8-12.

CAUGHT IN THE REBEL CAMP, Introducing Frederick Douglass -- The Civil War has just begun, and the controversy between the North and the South continues to heat up. Everybody seems to be getting into the action-except for Danny Sims. Danny wants nothing more than to fight with the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry, Frederick Douglass's newly formed black regiment. But his young age and a lame foot keep Danny from enlisting. The boy feels good for nothing until Frederick Douglass recommends Danny as the caretaker of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw's horses. Danny knows the importance of this task, and he's confident he will do an excellent job. But when the colonel's own horse escapes one night, Danny goes after him, only to find himself inside the Confederate soldiers' fort. In terror, he remembers the Fifty-Fourth's plans of immediate attack-what if the battle begins while he is inside? When Danny sees that the Confederates are making their own plans for the attack, Danny realizes that the Union soldiers are being set up for a trap! Can Danny escape in time to warn his troops? A CRIPPLED BOY HAS NO PLACE IN THE WAR . . . DOES HE?

The sad plight of the Five Civilized Tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), and Seminole—during America’s Civil War is both fascinating and often overlooked in the literature. From 1861-1865, the Indians fought their own bloody civil war on lands surrounded by the Kansas Territory, Arkansas, and Texas. Clint Crowe’s magisterial Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War reveals the complexity and the importance of this war within a war, and explains how it affected the surrounding states in the Trans-Mississippi West and the course of the broader war engulfing the country. The onset of the Civil War exacerbated the divergent politics of the five tribes and resulted in the Choctaw and Chickasaw contributing men for the Confederacy and the Seminoles contributing men for the Union. The Creeks were divided between the Union and the Confederacy, while the internal war split apart the Cherokee nation mostly between those who followed Stand Watie, a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, and John Ross, who threw his majority support behind the Union cause. Throughout, Union and Confederate authorities played on divisions within the tribes to further their own strategic goals by enlisting men, signing treaties, encouraging bloodshed, and even using the hard hand of war to turn a profit. Crowe’s well-written study is grounded upon a plethora of archival resources, newspapers, diaries, letter collections, and other accounts. Caught in the Maelstrom examines every facet of this complex and fascinating story in a manner sure to please the most demanding reader.

JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE EARTH, Introducing William Seymour -- Jerry Newman doesn't mean to keep getting into trouble-it just sort of happens. But when a practical joke goes wrong, burning down a church in his small east Texas town, Jerry's widowed mother quickly sends him to live with his journalist uncle in Los Angeles. Jerry is secretly pleased-not only to avoid being punished for his crime but also to live in California . . . the end of the earth! On the night before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Jerry and his uncle go to investigate a popular warehouse church in Los Angeles. There, they hear a man predict the coming quake. But Jerry is even more impressed by the powerful preacher, William Seymour, and by the hundreds of blacks and whites worshiping and praying together in strange "tongues." Jerry wants to believe Seymour's message, but will he do so when it means confessing his dangerous secret? A simple message that shakes the world ...

All for the Union is the eloquent and moving diary of Elisha Hunt Rhodes, featured throughout Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Civil War. Rhodes enlisted into the Union Army as a private in 1861 and left it four years later as a twenty-three-year-old colonel after fighting hard and honorably in battles from Bull Run to Appomattox. Anyone who heard these diaries excerpted in The Civil War will recognize his accounts of those campaigns, which remain outstanding for their clarity and detail. Most of all, Rhodes's words reveal the motivation of a common Yankee foot soldier, an otherwise ordinary young man who endured the rigors of combat and exhausting marches, short rations, fear, and homesickness for a salary of $13 a month and the satisfaction of giving "all for the union."

Set in modern-day Peru, this is the exciting tale of a young boy who sees the courage of a missionary in the face of the Shining Path. Ages 8-12.