American History books for kids with free printable lesson plans, games and craft projects

Hello my Omschooligans! Teacher Omi here with another recommended reading bibliography (book list) of children's literature on American history from westward expansion, Oregon Trail, the American Civil War (the English had one too), interaction with displacement American indigenous tribes, up to WW1 and WW2. Use these books for US history lesson plans, social studies activities and kids' book discussions. I've included some historical craft projects, recipes and period games for some living hi reenactment fun. 

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Historical Content & Language Warning

Some of these books are based on "primary sources" or first-hand accounts. They contain language that is offensive now but was period-correct then. I've included them because they show a snapshot of life that we could not see if we just read modern retellings.

Also, I'm morally opposed to banning books. It is a form of discrimination itself. Sanitizing content that tells it like it was is disrespectful to the memory of the people who lived it. And you know, we've all done and said things we wish we could change. Realizing how and why it is wrong, and doing our best to make amends is how we learn and foster healthier relationships. 

 

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🐎 Westward Expansion & Civil War (1800s)

• Ox-Cart Man 🏅 (Caldecott Medal Winner)

  • Author: Donald Hall (1979)

  • The History: Illustrated by Barbara Cooney, this gently pacing book details the daily, seasonal rhythms of an early 19th-century New England farming family as they pack up their year's goods and journey to market

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    Omschool Ox-Cart Man Living History Craft

    Project Card: Colonial-Style Cardboard Loom Weaving

    ⏱️ Time: 45-60 mins

    👦 Ages: 6 and up

    ♻️ Cost: Free (Upcycled)

    Supplies Needed:

    • A sturdy piece of corrugated cardboard (approx. 5" x 7" works beautifully)
    • Yarn (various colors and textures—scraps are perfect for this!)
    • A ruler and a pencil
    • Scissors
    • A large plastic yarn needle (or masking tape wrapped tightly around the yarn tip)

    Step-by-Step Instructions:

    1. Make the Loom: Use your ruler to draw a line 1/2 inch from the top and bottom edges of the cardboard piece. Along those lines, make a mark every 1/4 inch. Use scissors to cut small slits from the edge down to your pencil mark.
    2. String the Warp: Tape one end of your base yarn to the back of the cardboard. Bring the yarn through the first top slit, straight down to the first bottom slit, and guide it through. Wrap it around the back tab and up into the next slit. Repeat until the loom is threaded with parallel vertical lines. Tape the loose end down firmly on the back.
    3. Weave the Weft: Cut a manageable length of a new yarn color and thread your needle. Tie the tail end to the first vertical warp string at the bottom to secure it. Guide your needle across the loom using a simple over, under, over, under pattern.
    4. Turn and Repeat: When you reach the end of a row, pull the yarn through gently (don't pull too tight, or the sides will pull inward!). Turn around and weave back the other way, reversing your previous pattern (if you went under a string on the last row, go over it this time). Use your fingers or a fork to gently push the rows down tightly against each other.
    5. Finishing Up: To change colors, simply tie your old piece of yarn to a new color strip with a small knot on the back or edge. When your loom is full, cut the warp strings on the very back of the cardboard, carefully pull them out of the slits two at a time, and tie them together in double knots to create a beautiful, historical fringed mug rug!
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• Across Five Aprils 🏅 (Newbery Honor Book)

  • Author: Irene Hunt (1964)

  • The History: Spanning the exact duration of the Civil War—across five Aprils—this beautifully written masterpiece focuses on Jethro Creighton, a young boy growing up on a farm in southern Illinois. Because of their geographic location, Jethro’s family is tragically fractured as his older brothers choose to fight on opposite sides of the conflict. The novel brilliantly tracks the psychological and emotional burden borne by the home front.

• Rifles for Watie 🏅 (Newbery Medal Winner)

  • Author: Harold Keith (1957)

  • The History: A deeply researched, action-packed novel that follows Jefferson Davis Bussey, a young Union soldier from Kansas who becomes a scout and goes undercover behind enemy lines. Jeff ends up inadvertently joining Stand Watie’s Cherokee Rebel cavalry regiment. It provides an incredible, rare look at the Western theater of the Civil War and the complex involvement of the Cherokee Nation, forcing the young protagonist to realize that good and bad people exist on both sides of a line.

    
    
    

• Caddie Woodlawn 🏅 (Newbery Medal Winner)

  • Author: Carol Ryrie Brink (1935)

  • The History: Set on the Wisconsin frontier in the 1860s, this novel follows a vibrant tomboy navigating pioneer life and forging friendships with the neighboring Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) tribe amidst local frontier panics.

• The Slave Dancer 🏅 (Newbery Medal Winner)

  • Author: Paula Fox (1973)

  • The History: A powerful, sober look at the maritime slave trade, telling the story of a white boy kidnapped and forced to play the fife aboard an illegal slave ship in 1840.

• The Journal of Jesse Smoke: A Cherokee Boy (1838)

  • Series: My Name Is America | Author: Joseph Bruchac

  • The History: A deeply impactful diary tracking the tragic geography, cultural resilience, and harsh reality of the Cherokee nation's forced relocation along the Trail of Tears.

• Josefina Montoya: An American Girl (1824)

  • Series: American Girl | Author: Valerie Tripp

  • The History: Showcases Spanish colonial and Mexican heritage in New Mexico, focusing on traditional rancho life and trading on the Santa Fe Trail before the Mexican-American War.

🏭 Immigration, Industry, and World Conflict (1900s)

• Samantha Parkington: An American Girl (1904)

  • Book to look for: Meet Samantha by Susan S. Adler.

  • The History: Set during the industrial boom of the Edwardian era, contrasting wealthy high society with the severe realities of the time, including child labor in factories, orphanages, and the early Women’s Suffrage movement.

• Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman (1903)

  • Series: Dear America

  • Author: Kathryn Lasky

  • The History: Follows a young Jewish immigrant girl arriving at Ellis Island from Russia, detailing life inside a crowded Lower East Side tenement house and the vibrant, bustling cultural mosaic of early 20th-century New York City.

• Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (1934)

  • Book to look for: Meet Kit by Valerie Tripp.

  • The History: Captures the economic hardships of the Great Depression, focusing on how everyday families learned to adapt, scrimp, garden, and "make do" with minimal resources after sudden job losses.

• The Journal of Ben Uchida: Citizen 13559 (1942)

  • Series: My Name Is America

  • Author: Barry Denenberg

  • The History: A deeply moving account of a Japanese-American boy whose family is forcibly removed from their California home following the attack on Pearl Harbor and placed behind barbed wire at the Mirror Lake Internment Camp.

• Molly McIntire: An American Girl (1944)

  • Book to look for: Meet Molly by Valerie Tripp.

  • The History: Explores the American home front during World War II, illustrating ration books, scrap metal drives, victory gardens, and the emotional toll of having a parent deployed overseas as a military doctor.

The Little House on the Prairie Series🪵 The Little House Series (Chronological Order) 

I include this series because I loved it as a kid. But as adult, I find deeply troubling aspects like racial slurs and Pa's squatting on native reserve land. This wasn't presented in the "charming" gingham covered books of the early 70s when I got my copies. I see now how stories like this, sanitized atrocities and soft-soaped in inherently dehumanizing themes of Manifest Destiny into popular fiction of the time. And we didn't even realize it. Or maybe I did but was conditioned to ignore it because it was "my family" being hurt. (Thank you Delores O'Riordan of the "Cranberries" for articulating that discrimination blindness.)

• Little House in the Big Woods

  • Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1932)

  • The History: Set in the deep woods of Wisconsin in the early 1870s, this book introduces 4-year-old Laura and her pioneering family. It beautifully details the self-sufficient rhythm of frontier life, focusing on traditional food preservation, maple sugaring, storytelling, and the deep safety of family.

• Farmer Boy

  • Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1933)

  • The History: Stepping away from the Ingalls family, this book chronicles the childhood of Laura’s future husband, Almanzo Wilder, growing up on a prosperous, established family farm in upstate New York in the late 1860s. It focuses heavily on 19th-century agricultural techniques, animal husbandry, and heavy seasonal labor.

Little House on the Prairie

• Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1935)

• The History: The Ingalls family packs their covered wagon and leaves Wisconsin, traveling southwest to settle in the Osage Diminished Reserve in Kansas. The narrative captures the intense physical labor of building a log house from scratch, surviving malaria, and encountering the local Osage people.

• ⚠️ Content Warning for Educators/Parents: This volume contains outdated colonial terminology, racial slurs, and highly prejudiced attitudes toward Native Americans expressed by frontier characters (specifically Ma Ingalls and the neighbor, Mr. Scott). It provides a crucial, though sensitive, entry point for discussing the historical realities of Manifest Destiny and indigenous displacement.

• On the Banks of Plum Creek 🏅 (Newbery Honor Book)

  • Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1937)

  • The History: Set near Walnut Grove, Minnesota, the family experiences living in a sod dugout before building a wonderful new timber house. This book vividly captures the devastating economic impact of the 1870s Rocky Mountain locust plague, which destroyed entire seasons of frontier wheat crops overnight.

• By the Shores of Silver Lake 🏅 (Newbery Honor Book)

  • Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1939)

  • The History: The family moves to the Dakota Territory just as the railroad boom begins. Laura witnesses the rapid transformation of the wilderness into a bustling railroad camp and eventually the birth of the town of De Smet, South Dakota, while adjusting to her sister Mary's sudden blindness.

• The Long Winter 🏅 (Newbery Honor Book)

  • Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1940)

  • The History: A gripping masterclass in historical survival. It details the legendary, brutal Dakota winter of 1880–1881, during which a series of relentless blizzards cut off all railroad supply trains, leaving the town of De Smet to survive on the brink of starvation by grinding seed wheat in coffee mills and twisting slough grass for fuel.

• Little Town on the Prairie 🏅 (Newbery Honor Book)

  • Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1941)

  • The History: Tracks the rapid social growth of De Smet as a settled community. A teenage Laura begins working as a seamstress in town to help pay for Mary's tuition at the College for the Blind, attends her first social socials, and earns her teaching certificate at age fifteen.

• These Happy Golden Years 🏅 (Newbery Honor Book)

  • Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (1943)

  • The History: Chronicles Laura's time teaching school at a lonely, distant settlement, her courtship with Almanzo Wilder, and their eventual marriage. It serves as the traditional, heartwarming conclusion to Laura's childhood journey.

• The First Four Years

  • Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder (Published posthumously in 1971)

  • The History: Found as an unedited draft after Laura’s death, this shorter, more adult-toned book covers the early years of Laura and Almanzo's marriage, dealing with severe debt, a devastating house fire, crop failures, and the joy of their daughter Rose's birth.

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📖 Recommended Non-Fiction Companions

• Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder 🏅 (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

  • Author: Caroline Fraser (2017)

  • The History: An incredible, thoroughly researched adult biography that unpacks the gritty, unvarnished truth of the Ingalls family's poverty, the severe environmental cycles of the Great Plains, and how Laura and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, collaborated to transform hard-edged memories into cozy children’s classics. Great background reading for the teacher!

• The Little House Cookbook

  • Author: Barbara M. Walker (1979)

  • The History: An educational treasure trove for homeschool lessons. It features over 100 authentic recipes based on the foods mentioned in the series (from hasty pudding to pancake men), complete with historical descriptions of 19th-century cooking tools and pioneering methods.

Osage Nation History: Heartbreaking Trail of Broken treaties and evictions to Land grabbing squatters

After writing my last article on the problems with Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie" series, I decided to research the history of the Osage Diminished Reserve in Kansas. The Ingalls family and other settlers were illegal squatters on Osage land. And despite being protected and helped by the Osage, the Ingalls still managed to prevail in their illegal land grab. The government protected the outlaw squatters against the legal residents of the land. And they got away with all this by weaponizing the native generosity in believing no one owns land. The Osage were marched off to another unfamiliar, unwanted plot of land so the white trespassers could have the land. 

And I got to wondering was this their original land or just another in a series of relocations. It is a heartbreaking "masterclass" lies, treaty violations and fraud by the U.S. government. I asked if this was just another shuffling and was told that 

"To answer your question directly: It was a heavily reduced, compromised fraction of their broader ancestral territory, serving as a temporary holding pen before they were forced off it completely. The distinction between their original ancestral home and the "Diminished Reserve" comes down to a timeline of systematic loss by encroachment and theft. 

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🗺️ 1. The True Ancestral Homeland: "The Middle Waters"

Long before European contact, the Osage people (who call themselves Ni-U-Kon-Ska, meaning "Children of the Middle Waters") were an incredibly powerful, dominant nation. Their ancestral domain was massive, spanning millions of acres across:

• Most of Missouri

• Large portions of Arkansas and Oklahoma

• Eastern Kansas

They weren’t just nomads; they had large, sophisticated permanent villages, vast agricultural networks of corn, squash, and beans, and controlled the prime hunting grounds between the Missouri, Mississippi, and Arkansas rivers.

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📉 2. From Ancestral Domain to the "Diminished Reserve"

When the United States acquired the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the government immediately targeted the Osage to clear land for white statehood and to make room for "displaced" tribes from the East Coast (like the Cherokee). To dump them like waste in a landfill. IN fact, I think we house our garbage better than our indigenous. Literally this hurts my soul. And provokes me to ask who do think we are, "rehoming" people like lost puppies, anyway? They aren't displaced, they were REplaced. They aren't evacuees from a danger zone. There was no disaster except the white horde. They are the original owners! They have homes! We stole them.  Displaced just sounds better than stolen from. It's what we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. 

And what would tribes from completely different natural habitats want with the prairies of Kansas. Anymore than the Osage would feel at home in the eastern woodlands. My gosh it would be like plunking a Siberian down in Miami. Or a Hawaiian in the outback. And it gets worse. Through a sequence of forced (forced!) treaties (1808, 1818, and 1825), the Osage were stripped of nearly 95% of their ancestral lands. And then those agreements they were coerced into signing, were VOIDED! 

• The 1825 Treaty: The government forced the Osage out of Missouri and Arkansas completely, cramming them onto a 50-freaking-mile-wide strip of land running along the southern border of Kansas. This is like putting an orca in a bathtub. Or a cat in a ring box. This was designated as the Osage Resident Reservation.

• The Civil War and the Land Grabs: After the Civil War, the pressure from railroad companies and illegal white squatters—like Charles Ingalls—intensified.

• The "Diminished" Part: To appease the overwhelming influx of illegal white settlers, the government forced yet another treaty on the Osage in 1865. The tribe was made to cede the outer edges of their already tiny Kansas reservation shrinking their land down to a heavily consolidated strip. This remaining, squeezed-down boundary is the "Osage Diminished Reserve" featured in Little House on the Prairie. 

So, while Kansas was technically part of the broader region they historically hunted and traveled across, the Reserve itself was an artificial prison cell constructed by the U.S. government—a tiny fraction of what had once been theirs.

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🚂 3. The Final Shuffle: Buying Their Own Freedom

Even shrinking the Osage down to the Diminished Reserve wasn't enough for the white settlers. By 1870, the pressure from illegal squatters and politicians reached a fever pitch, resulting in the Osage Removal Act. The Ingalls family and their neighbors successfully forced the government's hand to evict the tribe entirely from the state of Kansas.

When Ma and Pa Ingalls were looking out at the Osage in Little House, they weren't looking at "wild transients" wandering through. They were looking at a deeply sophisticated, historically powerful nation that had already been systematically robbed and squeezed into a corner of their own homeland—and the Ingalls family was there to take that corner, too. 

But the Osage did something incredibly brilliant and unique during this final shuffle:

Instead of accepting a piece of land handed to them "in trust" by the U.S. government (which the government could easily steal again later), the Osage leaders forced the government to sell their Kansas reserve to the settlers for cash. They then used that cash to directly buy 1.5 million acres of land from the Cherokee Nation in northern Oklahoma. Of their own land. Which had been stolen to warehouse Cherokee. So a buyback from many-times-over-thieves.  It boggles the mind. 

But here's the genius part! 

Because they purchased the land outright with their own money, they held the actual legal deeds. This unique legal standing allowed them to retain the communal mineral rights to the land—a strategic maneuver that would later make them the wealthiest people per capita in the world when oil was discovered on their reservation in the early 20th century (the era chronicled in Killers of the Flower Moon).

Era	Land Held	Legal Status
Pre-1808	Vast Ancestral Homelands (MO, AR, KS, OK)	Sovereign Domain
1825–1865	The Kansas Reservation (Southern KS Strip)	First Major Confinement
1865–1870	The Osage Diminished Reserve (The Little House Era)	Squeezed fraction of the KS strip
1872–Present	The Osage Reservation (Osage County, OK)	Purchased outright by the tribe