Catalog Search Results
Author
Description
"It's 1863, and Thomas and his little sister, Birdie, have fled the farm where they were born and raised as slaves. Following the North Star, looking for freedom, they soon cross paths with a Union soldier. Everything changes: Corporal Henry Green brings Thomas and Birdie back to his regiment, and suddenly it feels like they've found a new home. Best of all, they don't have to find their way north alone--they're marching with the army. But then orders...
Author
Appears on list
Description
"Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a force he doesn't understand, a blue light that lifts him up and lands him a mile away. This strange brush with death forces a new urgency on Hiram's private rebellion. Spurred on by his improvised plantation...
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
"An illuminating history of the banjo, revealing its origins at the crossroads of slavery, religion, and music. In an extraordinary story unfolding across two hundred years, Kristina Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the seventeenth century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from...
Author
Appears on these lists
Diverse Books - African American/ Black Experience in the U.S.
Juneteenth for All Ages
Learning and Teaching About Juneteenth Using Children's Literature
The Work of Author-Illustrator Floyd Cooper
Juneteenth for All Ages
Learning and Teaching About Juneteenth Using Children's Literature
The Work of Author-Illustrator Floyd Cooper
Description
Little Mazie wants the freedom to stay up late, but her father explains what freedom really means in the story of Juneteenth, and how her ancestors celebrated their true freedom.
Author
Appears on list
Description
"Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader's guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother....
8) Harriet
Description
Based on the thrilling and inspirational life of an iconic American freedom fighter, the movie tells the extraordinary tale of Harriet Tubman's escape from slavery and transformation into one of America's greatest heroes. Her courage, ingenuity, and tenacity freed hundreds of slaves and changed the course of history.
Author
Appears on these lists
Description
"Deeply emotional, evocative free verse by poet and activist Sojourner Kincaid Rolle traces the solemnity and celebration of Juneteenth from its 1865 origins in Galveston, Texas to contemporary observances all over the United States. This is an ode to the strength of Black Americans and a call to remember and honor a holiday whose importance reverberates far beyond the borders of Texas"--
10) Yonder: a novel
Author
Appears on list
Description
"The Water Dancer meets The Prophets in this spare, gripping, and beautifully rendered novel exploring love and friendship among a group of enslaved Black strivers in the mid-nineteenth century"--
Formats
Description
"The life, contributions, and erasure of America's culinary founding father are explored by food historians, celebrated chefs, experts on race and the African American diaspora. Through their words and the persistence of a curious chef, Ashbell McElveen, the life of America's missing icon comes into focus. Mac & Cheese, French fries, whipped cream, and many other foodie favorites disseminated from a slave kitchen in Charlottesville from the hands...
12) The wolf den
Author
Description
A slave and prostitute in Pompeii's notorious Wolf Den brothel, Amara, once the beloved daughter of a doctor in Greece, is buoyed by the sisterhood she forges with the other women and dreams of a new beginning--if she can pay the high price for her freedom.
Author
Appears on list
Description
"The definitive, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major...
Author
Appears on list
Description
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo's firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave...
Author
Appears on these lists
Learning and Teaching About Juneteenth Using Children's Literature
Picture Books for Black History Month
Picture Books for Black History Month
Description
"The true story of Black activist Opal Lee and her vision of Juneteenth as a holiday for everyone will inspire children to be brave and make a difference. Growing up in Texas, Opal knew the history of Juneteenth, but she soon discovered that most Americans had never heard of the holiday that represents the nation's creed of "freedom for all.""--
"The true story of Black activist Opal Lee and her vision of Juneteenth as a holiday for everyone celebrates...
17) Juneteenth
Author
Formats
Description
"Juneteenth celebrates the emancipation of enslaved people in the United States. Across the country, people observe the day with speeches, poetry readings, festivals, picnics, street fairs, and family reunions. It is a day for people to come together and continue working toward equality. Readers will discover how a shared holiday can have multiple traditions and be celebrated in all sorts of ways"--
Author
Description
"The life of a courtesan in Pompeii is glamorous yet perilous. Amara has escaped her life as a slave in the Wolf Den, the city's most notorious brothel, but now her survival depends on the affections of her patron: a man she might not know as well as she once thought. At night in the home he bought for her, the house with the golden door, Amara's dreams are haunted by her past. She longs for her sisterhood of friends--the women she was forced to leave...
Author
Description
"When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad's leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings ... Eden, a modern woman desperate to conceive a child with her husband, moves to an old house in the suburbs and discovers a porcelain head hidden in...
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Nashville can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service. Submit Request