In 1859, eleven-year-old Elijah Freeman, the first free-born child in Buxton, Canada, which is a haven for slaves fleeing the American south, uses his wits and skills to try to bring to justice the lying preacher who has stolen money that was to be used to buy a family's freedom.

After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

An aristocratic girl who is a member of a warmongering and enslaving empire purchases a slave, an act that sets in motion a rebellion that might overthrow her world as well as her heart.

The making of "Show ways," or quilts which once served as secret maps for freedom-seeking slaves, is a tradition passed from mother to daughter in the author's family.

In 1739, having escaped from slavery under the British, thirteen-year-old Jem finds himself in the custody of sharp-tongued Phaedra at Fort Mose in Spanish Florida, but his efforts to break free of Phaedra's will have surprising results.

Henry Brown copes with slavery by singing, but after his wife and children are sold away he is left with only his freedom song, which gives him strength when friends put him in a box and mail him to a free state.

Luc, a youth born with one ear and raised by a drunken father in fifteenth-century France, finds a better home with fisherman Pons, his sister Mattie, and their ward Beatrice, the daughter of a disgraced knight, and even after being kidnapped and sold into slavery in Africa, he remains remarkably fortunate.

In 1865, members of a family start their day as slaves, working in a Texas cotton field, and end it celebrating their freedom on what came to be known as Juneteenth.

The famous journey of Tom Sawyer's friend Huck Finn, along the Mississippi River. When Huckleberry Finn flees from his brutal father, he meets up with an old friend, the slave Jim, who is also running away. Together, they travel by raft down the Mississippi, tumbling in and out of amazing adventures -- from a floating house to a funeral, a shipwreck to a circus -- and experience some of the strange ways of people in the Deep South.

In 1849, Zeb's parents ship him off to St. Louis to become an apprentice tanner, but the naive twelve-year-old rebels, casts his lot with a cheating riverboat gambler, while a slave and an Indian medicine man try to get Zeb back on the right path.