1. When was New Orleans captured and occupied by the Union? Does this fit in with the events in Sarny?

2. Sarny's children are taken to a slave market and sold. How was a slave market in Georgia run in the 1860s?

3. Paulsen explains that "everything in it [Sarny] is true in the sense that it happened to someone" in real life. Can you find any of the events in Sarny in history books? What do you discover, and where do you discover it?

4. The Ku Klux Klan murders Stanley.

Where was the KKK founded? What was its purpose in the years just after the Civil War? Why did it lynch people?

5. Why would it have required money and political connections in New Orleans to have a guilty white man convicted for murdering Stanley?

6. Sarny mentions that Stanley had to be interred...