I love time travel stories. With a delightful storyline, the middle grade novel 11,000 Years Lost by Peni R. Griffin (Harry Abrams, 2004) tells about an eleven-year-old young girl who travels 11,000 years into the past, weaving true facts about the Clovis civilization (a prehistoric group who lived in the southwestern United States) and archaeological

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For a indigenous perspective on Christopher Columbus’ arrival to the new world, I read the picture book Encounter by Jane Yolen (illustrated by David Shannon; Harcourt, 1992). This showed the arrival of “strangers” on an island, from the perspective of a dreaming young boy who forebodes danger for his people. It’s clear that the strangers

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For the young adult reader, Charles C. Mann’s Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491 (Atheneum, 2009) provides the same information about pre-Columbian, Native American Indians as does the adult book 1491 (Vintage, 2006). The difference between the two books is that the young adult book leaves out the extensive quotes from archeologists, anthropologists, and others.

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Because I’m beginning to teach a year of light American history for my son, I have decided to read some books on various subjects in American history myself. Where else to begin but with a review of life in the Americas before Christopher Columbus and his fellow explorers brought Europeans en masse in the late

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