James Madison Book Award Winner, 2006

Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl
Author: Tonya Bolden
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams

Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl tells the story of a freeborn African American girl from her childhood days in New York City to her becoming the first black graduate of Providence High School in Rhode Island. Based upon Maritcha Rémond Lyons’s unpublished memoir, this expertly researched book embeds a young girl’s story into the context of the everyday life of free African Americans in New York City in the mid-1800s. Tonya Bolden also weaves the story of Maritcha’s life with critical events of the time, such as the Draft Riots of 1863. Accompanied by historical photographs, maps and illustrations, this inspiring, handsomely-presented story is appropriate for readers in grades four to seven.

Press Release: Lynne Cheney Announces 2006 James Madison Book Award Winner

James Madison Honor Books, 2006

Built to Last: Building America’s Amazing Bridges, Dams, Tunnels, and Skyscrapers
Author: George Sullivan
Publisher: Scholastic Nonfiction

Middle school students will learn about America’s great structures in this detailed and visually engaging collection of essays. In a book that spans history and geography, Sullivan explains America’s great engineering accomplishments from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Transcontinental Railroad and the Hoover Dam, placing each structure in historical, social and cultural context. Built to Last shows how each structure posed distinct design challenges and construction obstacles and how these challenges were addressed with the technology of the era. The book, which includes photographs, maps, and statistics, also examines the economic and social impact of each structure.

The Forbidden Schoolhouse: The True and Dramatic Story of Prudence Crandall and Her Students
Author: Suzanne Jurmain
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

In a dramatic narrative, Jurmain tells the story of Prudence Crandall, who in 1833 granted the request of a young African American woman to attend the boarding school Crandall was running for white upper-class women in Connecticut. As objections to educating an African American female alongside the white students escalated, Crandall decided to reopen her academy specifically for African American women. Schoolhouse tells the story of how Crandall and her students, under great pressure, bravely persisted for two years. Although she was finally forced to close, Crandall and her students, as The Forbidden Schoolhouse shows, established a landmark along the road toward racial equality. This beautifully designed book has source notes. Most appropriate for students in fifth to seventh grades.

Photo By Brady: A Picture of the Civil War
Author: Jennifer Armstrong
Publisher: Atheneum

“It is highly fortunate that a photographer of such undaunted enterprise as Mr. Brady has exerted himself so untiringly and with such success in the work of permanently fixing for future generations the fleeting scenes of our great civil war,” wrote a New York newspaper February 23,1866 of Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs. Advanced middle schoolers will be drawn to this depiction of the war’s events from the perspective of the photographers whom Brady hired and equipped to document the war. Over fifty stunning and often chilling photographs take students on a visual tour of the war through army camps, battlefields, hospitals, and burial sites. The text includes biographical information about Mathew Brady and an overview of the Civil War.

Read about the 2005 James Madison Book Award Winner