Central Kansas Library System

Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation. After his rescue, Northup published...

The day nine-year-old Grace is called to work in the kitchen in the Big House, everyone warns her to to keep her head down and her thoughts to herself, but the more she sees of the oppressive Master and his hateful wife, the more she questions things until one day her thoughts escape--and to avoid being separated she and her family flee into the Dismal Swamp, to join the other escaped slaves who live there.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway,...

Biography of the black woman who escaped from slavery to become famous as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

Fleeing his violent master at the side of abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in mid-nineteenth-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to hide his identity throughout the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. Henry is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857. When his master has a violent argument with John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, Henry is forced to leave town with Brown, who believes he is a...

A compilation, selected from various sources and arranged chronologically, of the reminiscences of slaves and ex-slaves about their experiences from the leaving of Africa through the Civil War and into the early twentieth century. Paired with historical commentary and powerful paintings, Julius Lester's book presents what it felt like to be a slave in America through the words of black men and women who lived it rather than filtering through the eyes...

Underground station routes and their management come alive in a picturebook which blends color photos, discussions of slave and 'conductor' experiences, and surveys of history based on written accounts and history. This brings alive the underground railroad's past: the photos succeed in making it all come to life.

"A nonfiction picture book compilation of the stories of 13 American women who persisted in overcoming obstacles and changing the world"--Provided by publisher. "Chelsea Clinton introduces tiny feminists, mini activists and little kids who are ready to take on the world to thirteen inspirational women who never took no for an answer, and who always, inevitably and without fail, persisted. Throughout American history, there have always been women...

Recounts the journey of Black slaves to freedom via the underground railroad, an extended group of people who helped fugitive slaves in many ways.

Surveys the life of Harriet Tubman, who spent her childhood in slavery and later worked to help other slaves escape north to freedom through the Underground Railroad.