I really, really wish they had been able to write this book outside of the young adult framework. I am hungry for references, sources, citations, and footnotes. The streamlining necessary for a younger audience feels unfortunately reductive here, which is a great loss. Still, if you're looking for ways to diversify your historical fiction, there are several improbable potential heroes and heroines to be found here, as well as a nice slice of history that is criminally overlooked.

"Lucy Eldine Gonzalez Parsons (c. 1853 – March 7, 1942) was an American labor organizer, radical socialist and anarchist communist. She is remembered as a powerful orator. Parsons entered the radical movement following her marriage to newspaper editor Albert Parsons and moved with him from Texas to Chicago, where she contributed to the newspaper he famously edited, The Alarm. Following her husband's 1887 execution in conjunction with the Haymarket Affair, Parsons remained a leading American radical activist as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and other political organizations."

From Wikipedia: "Edmonia Lewis was an African/Native American sculptor (African, Ojibwe and Haitian) who worked for most of her career in Rome. Her heritage is African-American and Native American and she gained fame and recognition as a sculptor in the international fine arts world."

Though Canadian students are not taught American History in any detail, most can likely name Plymouth Rock as the first foreign colony in the United States.

Some might even dredge up Jamestown, or the Lost Colony of Roanoke.

But they will not name the colony on the mainland of South Carolina, established in the wake of Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón.

Even though that was six decades before Roanoke Island, eight decades before Jamestown, and almost 100 years before the Mayflower landed.

In fact, even American readers, even those who have recognized the complicated heritage which surrounds the celebration of holidays and anniversaries like Columbus Day, may not have heard of this colony. (Have you?)

"In the distant South Carolina forests, two and half centuries before the Declaration of Independence, two people of color first lit the fires of freedom and exalted its principles."

The legends of the white, Christian, European settlers are much more pervasive. They're the folks that schoolchildren draw and colour in social studies classrooms. Except that, ironically, most of the colours are left in the crayon box.

"Though neither white, Christian, nor European, they became the first settlement of any permanence on these shores to include people from overseas. As such, they qualify as our earliest inheritance."

Forget the frontier mythology, Katz suggests:

"In the real wilderness two dark people met and often united. They were not driven together by any special affinity based on a similar skin color. Their meetings were unwittingly arranged by their enemies, the Europeans, who exploited both."

The history that Katz discusses requires all of the crayons in the crayon box. He is not only discussing the races that are traditionally left out of the colonial versions of history, but also the intersections between them.

And he's not just talking about it. Every couple of pages, there is an image -- a photograph or a painting -- which along with quotes from original source documents and liberal use of sub-headings makes for a good reading pace.

These images do not show the string of pale faces that one most often sees in the plates of conventional history texts, and they often reveal a spectrum of pigmentation that demonstrates that there is nothing black-and-white about this history lesson.

My longer response to this work is available here.