History & Current Events
Why teach history to children? Answers vary, but many would say history provides an opportunity for young people to think about what they value and who they want to be like, both now and when they grow up. What would they have done in a particular situation? How do they feel about how a historical event played out? Does the way history is recorded seem fair, accurate, and complete? Users of the Prelutsky Collection will find a small selection of poetry books that speak to these questions.
One example is Ransford Beach’s Playmates in America. Published in 1926, its lack of culturally diverse perspectives was a problem then as now, but the book occasionally urged readers to put themselves in others’ shoes. For instance, the poem “Red Clouds of 1876” begins: “I wonder how we all would act, or what we’d do or say, / If someone came along and said, in voice both harsh and gray, / ‘I want your land, so move along and don’t you dare resist,’ / Would we just laugh and joke it off, or shake a doubled fist?”
Part of growing out of childhood is learning that grownups are a mix of good and bad qualities. Studying history takes this up a level. It also invites children to question the conventional narrative. Are the men of violence in Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon’s Heroes and Heroines (1933) really as admirable as the book’s title suggests? Then again, are some of the British monarchs in the Farjeons’ Kings and Queens (1932) as comical or simplistic as the popular view of history makes them out to be?
History also checks off a box for those who think that the most important thing children’s literature can do is spark the imagination. No matter how much documentation we have about a historical person, place, or event, stepping into the past always requires creative thinking. Children have to imagine, too, how someone from long ago might have felt while trying to overcome an obstacle. The result, hopefully, will be greater empathy for people living in the present day—a skill everyone should have.
One of the more creative attempts at using poetry to get kids interested in times gone by is History in Rhymes and Jingles (1901). The author, Alexander Clarence Flick, was a professor of history at Syracuse University. In combining the style of Mother Goose with the content of a history textbook, Flick’s goal was “to put new wine in old bottles, to clothe what ought to be well-known personages in time-honored garments, to set new songs to familiar music, to retain the common forms, rhythm, verse, sound, alliteration, and jingle, but to use material of a more elevating and instructive character.” (The professor was not into nonsense!)
A few books in the Prelutsky Collection relate to events that are now historical but were still unfolding when the books were new. Helen Husted’s Timothy Taylor, Ambassador of Goodwill (1941), for example, is a poem about an English boy who goes to America to escape the Blitz. However, most of the books on current events that are available in the collection were probably intended more for adults than children. The Tremendous Twins, or How the Boers were Beaten (1900) is a make-believe story in which two toddlers get Britain out of the mess its politicians and military leaders had made in South Africa during the Boer War. Harold Begbie’s The Struwwelpeter Alphabet, also published in 1900, is even harsher and is undoubtedly not for children. Modeled on Heinrich Hoffmann’s 1845 illustrated collection of cautionary tales—sometimes considered a precursor to comic books—the rhyming burlesque disparages Europe’s political establishment on the eve of the First World War. In No Kids Allowed, a study of children’s literature for adults, Michelle Ann Abate observes that historically, people who were “outside of the hegemonic order were commonly denigrated by being likened to children. Fueled by prevailing beliefs in Darwinian theory, a variety of perceived similarities to children were used to affirm the inferiority of groups like women, blacks, and indigenous tribal peoples and thus justify denying them full social, economic, and political rights.” Women were considered unfit to vote because they were held to be intellectually “closer to children than adults,” and non-Europeans “were routinely likened to children in social and scientific efforts to justify their subjugation.” In this context, masking satire as children’s literature made it all the more scathing.