American Girls
Addy Saves the Day by Connie Porter, 1994.
Now that the Civil War is over, families are looking forward to the soldiers returning home and reuniting with loved ones. Some families have been split forever because loved ones died in the war. Addy‘s family still doesn’t know what happened to her brother Sam or her little sister Esther. She and her parents have been making inquiries at various aid societies that have been helping people who were sick, injured, or displaced by the war, but so far, they haven’t received any word about Sam or Esther. To help raise more money for their search, they’ve started growing vegetables in a community garden that they can sell.
The Walkers aren’t the only family in this position, and their church has decided to hold a public fair to raise money for victims of the war and families in need. Addy and Sarah are looking forward to taking part in the fair, but they are annoyed because they’ll have to work with bossy Harriet, a snobby girl from their school. Harriet’s family is wealthier than most black families, and Harriet loves to brag about the things they have that others don’t. Although many families, like Addy’s, are worried about not knowing where their relatives are or whether they are alive or dead, Harriet brags about knowing exactly which army unit her uncle is in and what a distinguished career he has had. Harriet is eager to take part in the fair and tell the other children what to do, but her family doesn’t need any charity themselves.
Harriet tries to tell the children’s group at the church what they should do for their act at the fair, and it mainly involves her being the star of the show. However, the group decides to take Addy’s suggestion instead. They are going to make puppets out of old thread spools and put on a puppet show. They can also sell some of the puppets they make. Addy is proud that her idea was the one that the group chose because she thinks of it as a victory over snobby Harriet, but her parents remind her that the fair isn’t supposed to be a contest.
The purpose of the fair is to raise money to help people, and no one is supposed to compete with anyone. If the act for the fair is going to be a success, Addy and Harriet will have to find a way of working together to make it happen. When Harriet picks a fight with Addy while the children are making their puppets, the minister’s wife tells them that she’s going to make them work with each other at the puppet show, forcing them to sort out their differences.
It isn’t until Harriet receives some bad news that she comes to understand the pain that other families, like Addy’s, have been feeling, and Addy comes to see that, in the end, Harriet is just an ordinary person, a little girl with feelings that can be hurt. With a new understanding of each other, the girls find the motivation that they need to work together and make the fair a success. Then, when someone tries to steal their group’s hard-earned money, the two of them find a way to stop the thief and get the money back!
This is the book where Addy’s brother rejoins the family. When he was freed from slavery, he joined the Union army and lost his arm to a battle wound. He shows up at the fair and recognizes the jokes and riddles Addy tells at the puppet show as ones that he used to tell her.
In the back of the book, there is a section with historical information about the changes taking place in American society around the time of the Civil War with increased immigration and urbanization. It describes public parks and monuments built after the war. Since this book took place in summer, it also talks about what people would do in order to cool off from the summer heat. Wealthier people would travel to resorts, but poorer people would make do with enjoying the relatively cool public parks, swimming (less so for women and girls than men and boys), and taking part in outdoor activities. In all cases, the various summer activities were still segregated by race with separate areas in public parks and sports teams for black people.
After escaping from slavery, 
Although Addy and her mother are frightened at the idea of running away, they decide that this is their only chance to escape together. Addy is upset when her mother tells her that they can’t bring her baby sister with them. She is too young for the journey, and if she cries, it might give them away. Instead, they will leave little Esther with their close friends, Auntie Lula and Uncle Solomon Morgan. They plan to find a way to send for them when the war is over.
This book is about games people would play in 19th century America. There is a variety of different types of games, although the main focus is on parlor games. Many of them have been passed on for generations by word of mouth and are still played today, such as Charades and Blind Man’s Buff, although the book discusses games that are no longer common.
It’s 1851, and Professor Carver of Boston is living in an apartment above a candle shop with his wife and two children, his son Jamie and daughter Lorna. One day, a man named Mr. Giddings comes to see Professor Carver to request his help. For years, he has wanted to buy a particular farm with a beautiful house called Windy Hill. However, when he finally succeeded in buying the house and he and his wife went to live there, his wife became very upset. She said that she felt strange in the house and that she had seen a ghost. Now, she is too upset to return to Windy Hill. Mr. Giddings has heard that Professor Carver once helped a friend get rid of a ghost haunting his house, and he asks the professor if he would be willing to do the same for him.
Jamie and Lorna are thrilled by the house, which is much bigger than their apartment in town. They can each have their own room, and there is an old tower in the house that was built by a former owner, who was always paranoid about Indian (Native American) attacks (something which had never actually happened). However, their new neighbors are kind of strange. Stover, the handyman, warns them that the house is haunted and also tells them about another neighbor, Miss Miggie. Miss Miggie is an old woman who wanders around, all dressed in white, and likes to spy on people. There is also a boy named Bruno, who apparently can’t walk and often begs at the side of the road with his pet goat, and his father, Tench, who is often drunk and doesn’t want people to make friends with Bruno.
Then, strange things do start happening in the house. The quilt that Lorna has been making disappears and reappears in another room in the middle of the night. At first, the family thinks maybe she was walking in her sleep because she had done it before, when she was younger. However, there is someone who has been entering the house without the Carvers’ knowledge, and Jamie and Lorna set a trap that catches the mysterious “ghost.”
Ten-year-old Kat is going to be living with her Aunt Jessie for the next year. Her parents are botanists, and they are spending a year in South America, studying rain forest plants. Aunt Jessie lives in a house in the same town as Kat and her parents so, by staying with her, Kat can continue going to the same school and see her friends.
The General Store by Bobbie Kalman, 1997.
Store owners also had to decide how much they should charge for each item or how much they would be willing to take in trade. Farmers often bartered for goods with the produce from their farms, and it was common for store owners to use a form of credit to keep track of what their customers owed and what they owed to their customers. Farmers would typically sell their goods at harvest time, and the store owners would give them a certain amount of credit at their store, based on what they thought the farmers’ produce was worth. Then, the farmers could use the credit on their account at the store until the next harvest and selling time. If a farmer ran out of credit before the next harvest, the store owner would usually extend credit at the store to the farmer to allow him and his family to buy some necessities, knowing that the farmer could make up for it when he came to sell his next batch of produce.
Another odd kind of code that the book mentions was the kind that people would use on mailed letters. Instead of the sender paying the postage, as they do now, people receiving letters were supposed to pay for them when they picked them up from the general store. If a receiver returned a letter unopened, they wouldn’t need to pay anything, so some people would try to cheat the system by writing a message in code on the outside of the envelope so the receiver would know the most important part of what the writer wanted to tell them for free.
Cousins in the Castle by Barbara Brooks Wallace, 1996.
