Recommended Children's and Pedagogy Literature: Slavery

Slavery and The Social Studies

I recommend the below books for use when teaching about slavery in the United States between 1700 and 1900 to students in intermediate-level grades. In some cases, I also include Google Lit Trips developed by teachers in the Teaching American History Grant program.

• Most Loved in All the World by Tonya Cherie Hegamin
• Under the Quilt of Night by Deborah Hopkinson
• Follow the Drinking Gourd by Jeanette Winter
• A Voice of Her Own: A Story of Phyllis Wheatly, Slave Poet by Katherine Lasky
• Alec's Primer by Mildred Pitts Walter
• Daily Life on a Southern Plantation by Paul Erickson
• Discovery Kids: Underground Railroad
• Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis
• Henry’s Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad by Ellen Levine
• If You Lived When There Was Slavery in America by Anna Kamma [Lit Trip by Laura Conway, Cathleen Mullen, and Rachel Robertson]
• If You Traveled on the Underground Railroad Ellen Levine
• Meet Addie: American Girl (Book One) by Connie Porter
• Night Boat to Freedom by Margot Thiels Raven [Lit Trip by Jill Hardin]
• Patchwork Path: A Quilt Map to Freedom by Bettye Stroud
• Priscilla and the Hollyhocks by Ann Broyles [Lit Trip by Jessica Graham]
• Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt by Deborah Hopkinson [See this Lit Trip by Megan Leider and a companion lesson plan by Cynthia Weeden]
• Time For Kids Biographies: Harriet Tubman A Woman of Courage by the Editors of Time for Kids with Renee Skelton
• Underground Railroad Interactive Adventure by Allison Lassiuer
• Freedom River by Doreen Rappaport
• Almost to Freedom by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
• Underground Railroad for Kids: From Slavery to Freedom with 21 Activities by Mary Kay Carson
• Almost to Freedom by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
• Mukambu of Ndongo by Patricia Procopi [Lit Trip by Andrea May and Jordan Savitt]
• Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa to Slavery and Emancipation: A Three-Dimensional Interactive Book with Photographs and Documents from the Black Holocaust Exhibit by Velma Maia Thomas
• Up the Learning Tree by Marcia K. Vaughan
• January's Sparrow by Patricia Pollaco (Note: This book contains graphic pictures and explicit text)
• Graphic Library: Graphic History
• Brave Escape of Ellen and William Craft by Donald Lemke
• Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad by Michael Martin [Lit Trip by Melissa Rea and Shelita Oliver]
• Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion by Michael Burgan
• John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry by Jason Glaser
• Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin by Jessica Gunderson