The real-world subjects this novel study leans into — the depth behind every Knowledge Bank and reading passage.
PRIMARY LENS
⚖ Slavery in the Northern Colonies
The part of American slavery most textbooks skip — how thousands of enslaved people lived and worked in New York, Rhode Island, and New England, what a will or a bill of sale could do to a family, and how both armies dangled freedom in front of Black colonists while writing them out of the founding documents.
PRIMARY LENS
⚓ Occupied New York and the War’s Civilians
The Revolution as the people who could not leave it experienced it — a fleet in the harbor, the Declaration read aloud in the streets, the great fire of September 1776 and the shanty town that grew from its ashes, prison churches, water carriers, ration lines, and a city changing hands.
SUPPORTING
📜 How Historical Fiction Is Built From Real Documents
The novelist’s workshop — period letters, diaries, newspapers, runaway notices, and account books; the difference between a primary and a secondary source; how a writer decides where the record stops and invention begins, and why an author’s note belongs at the back of a novel like this one.
