Adventure 2 Now Available in Paperback!

TIME TRIP

ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE
UNDERGROUND RAILROAD 

Now available in paperback 
at Amazon and CreateSpace!

CHECK OUT THE REST OF THE SERIES AVAILABLE NOW!

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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To provide new guards for future security

“All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

          –The U.S. Declaration of Independence

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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Adventure 4 - Gettysburg Cover

                     “There is one thing that I didn’t understand about that sit-in, though,” said Zammie.

                “And what’s that?” asked Mr. G.

                “Why didn’t they fight back? Why just sit there and take that abuse? I was confused that Anne was mad at me for fighting off that guy. And then she helped him as if he was on her side.”

                “It’s because they were outnumbered, right, Mister G?” asked Kyla.

                “True, they were outnumbered, Kyla, but that’s not why they engaged in a peaceful protest. They were following the teachings of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. who taught that those who are acting in a lawful and just manner should never engage in violence even if violence is enacted against them.”

                “Not even for self-defense?” asked Zammie.

                “Self-preservation, sure. But that doesn’t require an assault on your enemy which is what I think you mean.”

                “What I mean is if someone is hitting you then you have to hit 'em back to get 'em off you,” said Zammie. 

                “In most situations that is true. But the point of the peaceful protest is to maintain the higher moral ground. With hope that there is enough just sentiment in the world watching that your argument of peace will overpower your opponent’s argument of hate. This is true whether it’s just a few people like Anne Moody and the other students or if it’s entire armies going to war.”

-- from Time Trip #4: Killing for Country

ADVENTURE 4 

GETTYSBURG COVER 

CHECK OUT THE REST OF THE SERIES AVAILABLE NOW!

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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Adventure 4: Killing for Country

"I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you, and I don't think it is. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse. Because that's the memory that haunts."

--Senator Bob Kerrey, Vietnam Veteran

From Civil War to Civil Rights . . .

From a simple pistol to the atomic bomb . . .

TIME TRIP #4: KILLING FOR COUNTRY
 is a journey through history 
unlike anything you've ever read.

The latest installment in the Time Trip series will push the boundaries of historical adventure once again, sending Zammie and Kyla on an epic path across three continents as they experience the lead up, breaking point, and culmination of war and its impact on the children who have to live through it.

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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Lunch Counter Sit-ins

February 1st, 1960, Greensboro NC.

Four students from North Carolina A&T sit down at a "whites-only" Woolworth's lunch counter and ask to be served. This action by David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil ignites a wave of student sit-ins and protests that flash like fire across the South. A fire for justice that no amount of beatings, jails, or fire hoses  can extinguish. Within days sit-ins are occurring in dozens of Southern towns, and in the North supporting picket-lines spring up at Woolworth and Kress stores from New York to San Francisco.

Just days after the Greensboro sit-in, students from American Baptist Theologic Seminary, Fisk University, Meharry Medical College, and Tennessee A&I begin confronting segregation in Nashville TN. They politely sit at "whites-only" lunch counters and restaurants. They are met with violence, brutality, and arrest. Hundreds are jailed, and thousands march in protests that continue for years.

--from CRMVET.org

Whites pour sugar, ketchup and mustard over the heads of sit-in demonstrators at a restaurant lunch counter in Jackson, Miss., in 1963.

Jean Wynona Fleming behind bars in the Nashville jail

     "Those students from Lane who were doing the sit-ins, they were the most disciplined young people I've ever seen in my life," said Parish, now retired and living in Franklin in Middle Tennessee. "They would sit there and ignore the taunts."

     The students had been trained to expect violence and to react peacefully. Each had agreed to a set of nonviolent principles based on the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

     Parish also acknowledged that the scene sometimes became ugly.

     "I can remember two or three occasions where it got out of hand, where hecklers came in there and would pick up tulip bulbs from a nearby counter and toss them at them.

     "I remember one time when somebody broke an egg over one guy's head and he just let it stream down his face and didn't say a thing or resist or anything."

--from The Jackson Sun

Students busted for protesting segregation fill the Nashville jail to overflowing.

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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Slavery in the Early United States

The first African slaves were brought to English mainland North America in the early 1600s. For the following two centuries few of them grew cotton or even lived in the region in the south that would later form the Confederacy. Historians such as Ira Berlin have broken those 200 years before the invention of the cotton gin and cotton culture into three sections: a Charter Generation made of the first arrivals, a Plantation Generation where the development of staple items and farm production expanded, and a Revolutionary Generation which evolved under the liberation and freedom movements of the late 1700s.

Depiction of the arrival of slaves to the English colonies. 

          Near the end of the 1700s, two trends washed across the thirteen colonies that would change the face of slavery in America. First was the democratic revolution and War for American Independence from England. Second was a religious upsurge that presumed all were equal in God’s eyes. The religious trend overlapped and reinforced the trend of revolutionary ideas and put increased pressures on slaveholders to be able to support their position and beliefs. Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers in particular were at the front of this religious wave of anti-slavery sentiment.

          Unfortunately, the American Revolution ultimately improved the power of the planters and plantation owners in the Southern states. After the war, they reopened the African slave trade until 1808 when Congress permanently ended American participation in international slave trading. After 1808, slave populations grew by way of internal or domestic trading. Male and female slaves would be paired up to produce children who in turn would be slaves. 

-- a brief history of early slavery in the U.S.

from Time Trip #2 

Video of Historian James O. Horton 

discussing slavery in the early years of the United States.

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

The U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in September of 1850, and it was signed into law by President Millard Fillmore. The law declared that all runaway (or fugitive) slaves must be returned to their masters even if they had successfully reached a free state. It even required that all free citizens cooperate with the authorities to help return these fugitives, and in effect legislated that all free Americans become slave-catchers including those who were abolitionists and hated slavery.

“A government,” said the Underground Railroad historian Wilbur Siebert, “whose first national manifesto contained the exalted principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, stooping to the task of slave-catching, violates all their ideas of national dignity, decency and consistency.” 

 Because of this unjustified use of force by the Federal Government, many people in the North soon began taking more creative and dangerous steps to secure the protection of fugitives who they happened to come in contact with.

-- background on the Fugitive Slave Laws of 1850

from Time Trip #2 

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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Splitting up the Family

          “Couldn’t your husband just buy you?”

          Harriet chuckled. “Lord, no. He ain’t got that kind a’money. My owner would charge him too much. Besides, if you buyin’ a slave then that means you approve of them bein’ property in the first place. If you don’t approve of human beings bein’ property then you don’t buy 'em. You just help 'em get away.”

          Zammie thought about that for a moment. “When did you first run away?”

          “Just last year,” she said. “Three of my sisters had already been sold off to traders down in Georgia an’ I wasn’t gonna be the one to go next so I ran off. The way I see it, there are two things we’ve all got a right to in this life. One is death, the other is liberty. And one or the other I intend to have.”

Slave Auction from Harper's Weekly

          Zammie liked the passion that Harriet spoke with. She imbued a confidence and electricity unlike anyone he had ever met before.

 “They sold away your sisters?” asked Zammie.

          “Yeah, they do that,” said Harriet. “Masters don’t care. Two sisters was separated from their own little girls. Kessiah was lucky she was being auctioned with her kids. A lot a’ women ain’t so lucky. Lot a’ kids lose their parents that way.”

          Zammie thought about his own parents, and how terrible it would be to have them taken away and sold like that, never to be seen again.

-- Harriet tells of her family

from Time Trip #2 (Chaper 7) 

1850s family of slaves from PBS

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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Child Slaves of The South

"If you were a slave child 150 years ago, your life would be hard. How hard? Harder if you worked on a huge plantation in the Deep South rather than on a smaller one in Virginia or Maryland. Harder if you worked in the fields rather than in the house. And hardest if your owner used cruel punishments or broke up your family by selling off a parent or sibling."

-- from "Life for slave children in 1861" 

The Washington Post

Young fugitive slave

Newly emancipated slave children.

In the above 2 images (from EastmanHouse.org)  are two slave children who were released by Union troops. They show a brother and sister who were freed from their owner, Thomas White of Mathews County, Virginia, by Captain Riley of the 6th U. S. 0.1. on February 20, 1864, and taken to the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Philadelphia to be educated at the Orphan’s Shelter. The cartes-de-visite were sold to raise funds to educate the children. The captions on the photographs explain that the children’s mother had been “beaten, branded and sold at auction because she was kind to Union Soldiers.” She had been taken away to be sold in Richmond only seven days before the children were freed. Their story puts the pain of the slave market into chilling perspective.

Time Trip Adventure 1 

The Journey to Ancient Greece 

PDF available FREE here!  

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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Henry "Box" Brown

          The crate was placed on the floor and everyone gathered quietly around as William Still knelt down beside it. He knocked on the top of the wooden box twice and called out, “All right?” 

          Zammie looked at William quizzically wondering who he was talking to when he heard a man’s voice come from inside the box. “All right, sir!”
           Harriet gasped. Robert and Henry exchanged shocked looks.
           “It can’t be!” said one of the men who had carried the crate.
           William grabbed the small saw that Leonard had brought and he used it to cut open the hickory hoops that were wrapped around the crate. After William sawed through the hoops, Leonard then used the crowbar to pry open the lid. The lid had been nailed down to the box but it was soon yanked off and everyone crowded in closer to see who was inside.
           They heard the man’s voice sing out a short psalm. “Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me.” Then a trembling black hand reached out from inside the crate. William grabbed the hand and helped the man to his feet. “How do you do, gentlemen?” said the man.  He looked around and saw Harriet and Jane. “And ladies?”

           The man’s name was Henry Brown. He had been a slave in Virginia, but had naturally grown sick of it. The time had come when he felt he had to do something -- anything -- to get away from his master and the daily drudgery of enslavement. Virginia had proven to be a very difficult place for slaves to escape from so Henry decided to take a novel approach to gaining his freedom by boxing himself up and having himself forwarded to Philadelphia direct by express. 

From Henry's Freedom Box

          
          He took some salted crackers and a container of water into the box with him, and relied on one of his friends to have the crate addressed and delivered by way of the Adams Express Company. His journey lasted twenty-six hours; twenty-six hours trapped inside a crate that was only three feet long and two feet wide. Several of those hours had passed with the crate actually being stacked upside-down on an overland express wagon. When Henry finally stood up inside the Anti-Slavery office that day in Philadelphia he was soaked with sweat, cramped, and very hungry. But he was free.
            William Still wrote down Henry Brown’s story of escape before a friend of Henry’s came and escorted him further north.

--The arrival of Henry "Box" Brown

from Time Trip #2 (Chapter 25) 

 

"The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown".

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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Blackbird Singing

     Zammie was slouched down on the padded bench in his school’s auditorium.  The twelve-year-old sat between his mother and a few of his teenage cousins while listening to a series of his fellow classmates performing songs and musical pieces at the seasonal Rosemont Middle School Recital Night. He was entertained by the novelty of seeing his peers performing before a full audience, but some of the music choices weren’t exactly to his liking. The violin and piano solos in particular just about put him to sleep. He had left the copy of Naruto that he was reading out in the car, and he wished he had it during certain parts of the show. 
     He quickly sat up, however, when his eleven-year-old cousin Kyla was introduced to the stage. She stepped into the spotlight in a navy blue dress with her long jet black hair styled up in an elegant sweep to the left side of her face. She was only four-and-a-half feet tall, but wearing the dress and the platform shoes she borrowed from one of her cousins made her feel like she was a giant.           
     “Yeah Kyla!” All of Kyla’s cousins yelled and cheered wildly for her as she approached the microphone. Mr. Werthers, the music teacher, plucked a familiar melody on an acoustic guitar while Kyla sweetly sang an old ballad.

-- Kyla sings "Blackbird" 

from Time Trip #2 (Kindle Locations 90-100). 

"Blackbird" performed by Paul McCartney

TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 4

KILLING FOR COUNTRY  

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 1

THE JOURNEY TO ANCIENT GREECE 

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 2

A RIDE ON THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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TIME TRIP ADVENTURE 3

WITNESS TO THE FIRST THANKSGIVING 

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