American Hero: A Journey Through 400 Years of American History

All the adventure, romance, and teen angst of a young adult novel combined with historically accurate details of American history. This is history in the form of a diary of a teenaged sailor on Columbus's first voyage. He sacrifices his life for the native people only to be brought back as a "zemi," a spirit being that stands witness to the unfolding of the American experiment. The narrator meets Washington, Franklin, Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, and others who are not as well known (though they should be) such as Anacaona, Tisquantum, Nancy Ward, Benjamin Banneker, Joaquin Murrieta, and Harriet Tubman. This picaresque historical novel is also a love story and the narrator's attempts to find his long lost love, also a zemi, take him to Salem during the witch trials, Boston in the early days of the Revolution, battlefields throughout the Civil War, and the Wild West. This is the book we should have used to learn American history.