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United States Historical Fiction

Post Revolutionary Period to Start of Civil War - 1784 to 1859

All books can be found by the author's last name in the Juvenile Fiction area unless noted on the booklist.

Armstrong, Jennifer (J)
Thomas Jefferson: Letters From A Philadelphia Bookworm
An educated, inquisitive young girl in Philadelphia corresponds with President Thomas Jefferson about current events, including the Lewis and Clark expedition, new inventions, and life at Monticello.

Atkins, Jeannine (J)
Becoming Little Women: A Novel About Louisa May
At Fruitlands Relates events in author Louisa May Alcott's tenth year, 1843, when her family moved from Boston to a farm where, along with an odd assortment of idealists, they try to establish a community based on equality and love.

Bradley, Kimberly Brubaker (J and also sound recording)
Weaver's Daughter
In 1791 after her family's journey from Pennsylvania, ten-year-old Lizzie suffers from the disease of asthma in her new home in the Southwest Territory (present-day Tennessee).

Bruchac, Joseph (J My Name Is)
The Journal Of Jesse Smoke: A Cherokee Boy
Jesse Smoke, a sixteen-year-old Cherokee, begins a journal in 1837 to record stories of his people and their difficulties as they face removal along the Trail of Tears. Includes a historical note giving details of the removal.

Bruchac, Joseph (J)
Sacajawea: The Story Of Bird Woman And The Lewis And Clark Expedition
Sacajawea, a Shoshoni Indian, interpreter, peacemaker, and guide, and William Clark alternate in describing their experiences on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, to the Northwest.

Cannon, A. E. (Ann Edwards) (J)
Charlotte's Rose
As a twelve-year-old Welsh immigrant carries a motherless baby along the Mormon Trail in 1856, she comes to love the baby as her own and fear the day the baby's father will reclaim her.

Clements, Bruce (J)
A Chapel Of Thieves
In 1849, Henry, a resourceful young man, sets off from Missouri to Paris in hopes of saving his older brother, a self-styled preacher, from the clutches of a clever charlatan.

Cullen, Lynn (J)
Nelly
In The Wilderness In the Indiana wilderness in 1821, twelve-year-old Nelly Vandorn and her older brother hold fast to their rough frontier ways when their father brings home a fancy new city wife not long after burying their mother.

Fleischman, Paul (J)
Bull Run
Northerners, Southerners, generals, couriers, dreaming boys, and worried sisters describe the glory, the horror, the thrill and the disillusionment of the first battle of the Civil War.

Holm, Jennifer L. (J)
Boston Jane: Wilderness Days
Far from her native Philadelphia, Miss Jane Peck continues to prove that she's more than an etiquette-schooled graduate of Miss Hepplewhite's Young Ladies Academy as she braves the untamed wilderness of Washington Territory in the mid 1850s. *Sequel to: Boston Jane: An Adventure.

Myers, Laurie (J)
Lewis And Clark And Me: A Dog's Tale
Seaman, Meriwether Lewis's Newfoundland dog, describes Lewis and Clark's expedition, which he accompanied from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean.

Pearsall, Shelley (J)
Trouble Don't Last
Samuel, an eleven-year-old Kentucky slave, and Harrison, the elderly slave who helped raise him, attempts to escape to Canada via the Underground Railroad.

Wood, Frances (Frances M.) (J)
Daughter Of Madrugada
With the arrival of more and more Americans in the part of California that was lost to Mexico in the war of 1846, Cesa believes her world is closing in on her, yet she finds the strength to take a stand to do something positive for the benefit of her people.

Wyeth, Sharon Dennis (J My America)
Flying Free: Corey's Underground Railroad Diary
In 1858, nine-year-old Corey Birdsong and his family, fugitive slaves from Kentucky, build a new life in Amherstburg, Canada, while still hoping to help those they left behind.

Finley, Mary Peace (YAPB)
White Grizzly
In 1845, when he leaves the Cheyenne village where he has been living and sets out from Bent's Fort along the Santa Fe Trail in search of his white grandfather, Julio faces danger from renegade Texans, the Pawnee Indians, and a grizzly bear, before finding where he truly belongs.