women, white

Cecelia was a fifteen-year-old slave when she accompanied her mistress Frances "Fanny" Thruston Ballard on a holiday trip to Niagara Falls in 1846. While there, Cecelia made the decision to cross the Niagara River to freedom in Canada, leaving her enslaved mother and brother behind in Kentucky. Relationships between escaped slaves and their former owners are rare and a cache of letters from Fanny to Cecelia confirms their extraordinary link. Cecelia and Fanny's lives were very different. Fanny stayed in Louisville, married, raised a family and endured the war and its aftermath with difficulty but was protected by her wealth and status. Cecelia also married in Canada but lost her husband and then moved to Rochester, New York and remarried. This husband went off to fight in the Civil War. In 1865 Cecelia returned to Louisville and renewed her contact with Fanny and her family. Fanny's son recorded all the information he could in 1899 and preserved the correspondence between Fanny and Cecelia.

Documents the Battle of Gettysburg through the views of women, immigrant soldiers, and African Americans. Features the experiences of Mag Palm, a free black woman who was threatened by the arrival of the Confederate Army; Carl Schurz, a German exile and abolitionist for the Union Army; and Sadie Bushman, a nine-year-old girl who assisted a Union doctor at a field hospital.

Presents the true story of Salome Muller, a German immigrant girl who was lost to her family in the early 1800s and sold into slavery, her French master who claimed she was part African, and the desperate struggle for her freedom that led to the U.S. Supreme Court.