Books in American Kids in History Series series

Bring history to life for students in grades 6 and up using U.S. History: Inventors, Scientists, Artists, and Authors! This 128-page book provides a full-spectrum view of some of the most fascinating and influential lives in U.S. history. It features biographical sketches of historical figures such as George Washington Carver, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Alexander Graham Bell, and Ernest Hemingway. The book includes time lines and reinforcement questions and works perfectly as a full unit or classroom supplement. It supports NCSS standards and the National Standards for History.

Bring history to life for students in grades 5 and up using The American Revolution! This 144-page book highlights events, battles, and people from when the first inhabitants arrived in North America to when the new republic was created. The book covers topics such as the first colonies, slavery, New France, George III, the Boston Tea Party, and the Confederacy. It also includes biographies, time lines, maps, reproducible activities, and a complete answer key.

Take a journey through history with students in grades 4–7 using Discovering and Exploring the Americas! This 64-page book provides challenging activities that enable students to explore history, geography, and social studies topics. Activities include word searches, fact-or-opinion questions, and creative writing. The book includes answer keys, time lines, and suggested reading lists.

Almost immediately, the Civil War transformed the way Southerners ate, devastating fields and food transportation networks. The war also spurred Southerners to canonize prewar cooking styles, resulting in cuisine that retained nineteenth-century techniques in a way other American cuisines did not. This fascinating book presents a variety of Civil War-era recipes from the South, accompanied by eye-opening essays describing this tumultuous period in the way people lived and ate. The cookbooks excerpted here teem with the kinds of recipes we expect to find when we go looking for Southern food: grits and gumbo, succotash and Hopping John, catfish, coleslaw, watermelon pickles, and sweet potato pie. The cookbooks also offer plenty of surprises. This volume, the second in the American Food in History series, sheds new light on cooking and eating in the Civil War South, pointing out how seemingly neutral recipes can reveal unexpected things about life beyond the dinner plate, from responses to the anti-slavery movement to shifting economic imperatives to changing ideas about women’s roles. Together, these recipes and essays provide a unique portrait of Southern life via the flavors, textures, and techniques that grew out of a time of crisis.

Cookbooks offer a unique and valuable way to examine American life. Their lessons, however, are not always obvious. Direct references to the American Civil War were rare in cookbooks, even in those published right in the middle of it. In part, this is a reminder that lives went on and that dinner still appeared on most tables most nights, no matter how much the world was changing outside. But people accustomed to thinking of cookbooks as a source for recipes, and not much else, can be surprised by how much information they can reveal about the daily lives and ways of thinking of the people who wrote and used them. In this fascinating historical compilation, excerpts from five Civil War–era cookbooks present a compelling portrait of cooking and eating in the urban north of the 1860s United States.