Markethia Mull
Juneteenth : Denial and Destiny
A necessary corrective for middle-grade readers who know about Emancipation Day but lack the specific Texas context and the nuance of how that history was historically denied.
Read this next
All picks after this →
A Daughter of the Seine: The Life of Madame Roland
by Jeanette Eaton
Nonfiction · ages 10–14 · 850L · 1929
A serious, sympathetic portrait of a woman at the center of the French Revolution; the 1929 prose is formal and demands attention, but the historical stakes are genuine and the subject matter is genuinely instructive about political conviction.
How the Word Is Passed (Adapted for Young Readers)
by Clint Smith
Nonfiction · ages 10–14 · 820L
The rare nonfiction book that treats 10-year-olds as people capable of grappling with hard history—Smith's prose is precise and age-appropriate without sanitizing, and the adapted format makes the original's rigor accessible.
Hurry Freedom: African Americans in Gold Rush California
by Jerry Stanley
Nonfiction · ages 10–14 · 780L · 2000
The only accessible narrative history of African Americans in the Gold Rush for this age—rigorous without being preachy, and it expands kids' sense of who 'pioneers' were.