Hyphenated Historical Picture Books

While many countries have recorded histories that date back thousands of years, America in comparison is a relatively young country with only a little over 200 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But for a child, 200 years is an immense amount of history, and often the history that the American children are taught are the stories of dead white men and some prominent white women with the occassional African-American. Since white men were the ones in power, and history is often written by those in power in the image of those in power, this is not a huge surprise.

But Americans of color born and raised in America did exist throughout America's 200 year history. The following books all have to do with specific moments in American history and re-focusing the historical story on the ethnic-American experience and the struggle to succed or sometimes even survive while living in a white dominated, racist society.

Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki and illustrated by Dom Lee and Flowers from Mariko by Rick Noguchi and Deneen Jenks and illustrated by Michelle Reiko Kumata are two very different stories about the the Japanese-American internment experience during World War II. Baseball Saved Us is about a boy adjusting to the new environment of the internment, and Flowers for Mariko is about a girl whose family returns to California after years of internment and find that they have lost everything.

Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson and illustrated by Hudson Talbot is a wonderful revisioning of American history through the perception of each mother's generation of the author's family, linked together with the Show Way quilts, which had their original purpose of guiding slaves to freedom for the Underground Railroad.

Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom by Carole Boston Weatherford and illustrated by Kadir Nelson focuses on the famous heroine's journey to lead African-American slaves to freedom.

Both illustrated by Bryan Collier, Martin's Big Words: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by Doreen Rappaport and Rosa by Nikki Giovanni profile two high-profile African-Americans who joined the thousands in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the Deep South.

Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez by Kathleen Krull and illustrated by Yuyi Morales highlights the life of the Latino leader who advocated for civil rights in the 1960s for migrant farm workers in California.

Sixteen Years in Sixteen Seconds: The Sammy Lee Story by Paula Yoo and illustrated by Dom Lee follows the struggles of the first Asian American to win a gold medal at the Olympics in 1948.

When Marian Sang: The True Recital of Marian Anderson by Pam Munoz Ryan and illustrated by Brian Selznick reveals how racism in America prevented the world-wide celebrated singer from singing at the Metropolitan Opera for most of her life.

As a side note, I never realized how many titles used colons until I looked at the biographies.