Living History

It’s important, I think, for kids to read about people who lived to a ripe old age. They can get a sense of a journey instead of a need to achieve one goal. Some books try a bit too hard to turn a life story into a smooth, straight narrative of divine inspiration as a child into immediate success as an adult. The real intrigue lies in exploring how a person found their own curvy path, around many obstacles, to a full life well lived.

Many people who would make interesting subjects for biographies could be considered late bloomers. It’s not their childhoods that are necessarily so interesting but how they developed later on. Churchill, for example, did not become Prime Minister until he was 65 years old—a senior citizen. I once interviewed an artist named Harry Lieberman who didn’t start painting until he was 76 years old. For the next 27 years he was quite prolific. Recently, the New York Times had a fascinating article on a New Yorker by the name of Ruth Proskauer Smith, currently 100 years old, who upon retiring began taking a bus and train downtown every day to teach a course on the Supreme Court. What kid wouldn’t admire her?

Kids certainly do need role models. So it’s encouraging to see Indiana Jones still fighting the good fight well into his 60s. A youngin’ could learn a thing or two from a guy like that. And if they could read books about real life senior citizen super heroes, even better.

Historians, however, must face the harsh reality that the next best thing to a live super hero is a recently deceased one. As many researchers will tell you, obituaries make the most fascinating reading. Especially today, when an entire generation of people who lived through a remarkable period in American history are beginning to die off. The pages of the obituaries have recently been including all too many holocaust survivors, World War II veterans, and people who actually knew Franklin D. Roosevelt as their President.

As a writer grows older, it becomes easier to relate to how complex a person’s life can be and how rich the details that can be shared in a book. Pete Seeger, who himself turned 90 this year (and, I’m happy to say, is the subject of a forthcoming pb biography by an esteemed nonfiction writer), has a great "traditional" song that includes a line about perusing the obituaries.

"I get up each morning and dust off my wits
Open the paper and read the obits
If I'm not there, I know I'm not dead
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed"

Take That, You Scoundrel!

It’s election season, so how about some Presidential Election History?

Candidate Thomas Jefferson described opponent John Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

During the 1828 election, John Quincy Adams and his Federalist Party called Andrew Jackson’ wife: a “dirty…wench”, a “convicted adulteress” who was prone to “open and notorious lewdness.”

(For the record, she was a perfectly respectable woman. It’s been said that the accusations killed the unwell Mrs. Jackson.)

While campaigning for President, Stephen Douglas called Abraham Lincoln: a “horrid-looking wretch, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman,” and “the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame.”

Lincoln returned the favor and described the diminutive Douglas as “about five feet nothing in height and about the same in diameter the other way.”

In the 1884 Blaine vs. Cleveland contest, news of Cleveland’s support of child he had fathered during his bachelorhood, led to opponents’ taunt of “Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?”

During the 1804 election, detractors of Thomas Jefferson reprised the outrageous claim that Jefferson, "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves…Her name is Sally," and that Jefferson had "several children" by her.”

…Of course, the outrageous claim ultimately proved to be true.

It reminds us that there is more than “Spin” on the the campaign trail; An important lesson for the hypocritical SOBs of the (Insert Party Name Here.)

Rock Stars of the I.N.K. Variety

In his post entitled, History: What's the Point? Don Brown points out that many kids are bored when they study history in school because, basically, the presentation stinks. The world of children's nonfiction still has a long way to go in figuring out how to write and present information in a way that truly appeals to kids.

There are some bright spots to be sure. A couple of weeks ago I had the giddy- with- excitement treat of hearing a talk at the New York Public Library with two writers who are rock stars at making history interesting for kids.

Their names: James Cross Giblin and Russell Freedman.


That's Mr. Giblin on the left, Mr. Freedman on the right.

They don't look like rock stars at first glance? Well, apparently they've been friends since 1960 (they described each other as their oldest publishing friend) so they must have learned how to go incognito by now.

I thought I'd share some of what they talked about with the hope that we can all better understand how it is possible-- albeit time consuming, strenuous, and far from straightforward-- to make history a great read that can appeal to a wide variety of kids.


Here’s a bit of what they had to say. Questions were posed by John Peters of the Donnell Library Center of the New York Public Library.

How did you come to write about history?

JCG: When he started writing, he was already an editor. This gave him the luxury to write what he was interested in. He was a child of WWII and became interested in history that way.

RF: He was a history buff as a kid and read two books that taught him how interesting history could be.(The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Van Loon and This Believing World by Louis Browne). They both showed him the possibility of language and how well a nonfiction book could be written. He learned that it was impossible to tell the story without getting into the mind of characters (the beginning of his interest in biography). In addition, he learned that history lends itself to a narrative thread.

How do you approach biography?

JCG: He believes it always starts with character: getting to know them, what they did, etc. Out of that comes the narrative line. Then you find the character’s action line, in a similar way to a playwright.
RF: His philosophy: writing biography is like being married. He usually spends a year or longer on a book. He consciously chooses not to live with someone he thinks is despicable so he likes all the people he writes about.
JCG: He doesn’t mind writing about people he doesn’t like (for example, Adolph Hitler). He finds these kind of people complicated, sometimes contradictory, and thus good subjects for biography.

How do you approach your writing?

JCG: To begin researching, he reads as much as he can. He outlines a lot, overall and then chapter by chapter. He’s a very slow writer. Every sentence and paragraph must sound right before he goes on. Usually this produces one major draft,then touch ups, and then he's finished.

RF: He spends 3 or 4 months reading and researching before attempting to start writing. His first draft includes everything he can think of. He usually writes six or seven drafts. He feels a book is never really finished. He never achieves the ideal image of the book he had in mind when he started.

How did you become involved with photo biography?

JCG: RF claims JCG first mentioned the term to him years ago. RF then said the first subject should be Lincoln because he was the first President to be photographed. RF: He believes photos are an enhancement. The language must evoke the world and the person or else you are lost.


Best rock star advice in a nutshell for writers of history for kids:

When asked how they make their writing appropriate for children, RF responded, "You don't simplify, you distill."



A few examples of their work that has led to their well deserved rock star status:

James Cross Giblin:
The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler
Good Brother, Bad Brother.The Story of Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth
The Many Rides of Paul Revere

Russell Freedman:
Lincoln: A Photobiography
Eleanor Roosevelt
Who Was First? Discovering the Americas

History: What's the Point?

I love history, always have, and I’m astonished that other people–most others!–don’t.

History is life and death, war and peace, courage and betrayal, sex and violence…a lot of sex and violence!

What’s not to like?

But dislike it they do, and from that distaste ignorance has grown.

“We are raising a generation of young Americans who are by-and-large historically illiterate,” popular historian David McCullough has warned.

Evidence of that illiteracy is rampant…and hilarious.

Dr. Anders Henriksson, a history professor, has collected college students’ history bloopers in a book, Non Campus Mentis. Among many other hysterical things, you will find that some students think:

Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

Gothic cathedrals were held up by flying buttocks.

At the end of World War Two, Hitler had his wife Evita put to sleep, and then shot himself in the bonker.

Ouch.

Appalling, right?

Yet another professor, Sam Wineburg, insists we shouldn’t be too, surprised or upset. Testing that dates back to 1917 has show American students have always had a tenuous grasp of history. He further notes that “ when historians trained at Stanford, Berkeley and Harvard answered questions from a leading high school textbook, they scored a mere 35 percent – in some cases lower than a comparison group of high school students taking Advanced Placement U.S. History.”

Geez, Prof, that’s supposed to make me feel better?

Most disturbingly, though, is a study in which people “were asked to "pick one word or phrase to describe your experience with history classes in elementary or high school.”

"Boring" was the most frequent answer.

David McCullough is not surprised, saying, “The textbooks are dreary, they’re done by committee, they’re often hilariously politically correct and they’re not doing any good.”

But there is a solution and it comes from famed historian Barbara Tuchman: “Tell stories.”

“That’s what history is: a story,” McCullough explains. A story “calls for empathy on the part of the teller…and of the reader or listener to the story…. (Children) should not have to read anything that we, you and I, wouldn’t want to read ourselves. And there are wonderful books, past and present. There is literature in history.”

For a writer of history, they’re not bad words to hang a career on.

Reading Between the Lines, Part 3

Here I will give another example from my book, Photo by Brady: A Picture of the Civil War. In doing research with photographs and other primary sources, one must always consider the source.  This famous photograph (in the National Archives) is entitled "Brady Under Fire."  On your screen it may be hard to make him out, but the celebrity photographer, Mathew B. Brady, is indeed in this picture, standing by the wheel of an artillery piece, wearing his distinctive straw boater.   "Wow," the viewer exclaims.  "That Brady risked life and limb to get his pictures of the war."

Excuse me.  Just a moment, please.  Consider the source!  This photograph was produced and published by the Brady studio.  Brady was careful to include himself in many of his famous war images -- it helped solidify his reputation as the war photographer.  He created the title for the image.  It could just have easily been titled "Look at Me!  I'm the Dauntless Photographer Staring Into the Eyes of the Enemy!"  Okay, fair enough, you might think, if he did make this image under fire why not say so?  For decades this image was taken on faith as just what it was called.

However, photographic historians have debunked the photo and they did so without breaking a sweat.  The technological constraints of photography in this period were such that figures were required to stay motionless for several seconds -- as much as thirty seconds depending on light conditions.  Although you probably can't make it out on your screen, the U.S. flag in the background is blurred, showing that it was flapping in the wind during the exposure of the picture.  And yet all the men are clear and unblurred, meaning that they held still for the picture.

 Now think about it: can you imagine a crowd of some two dozen men standing perfectly still for the period of time required to compose the image and make the exposure -- during an artillery bombardment?   Oh, Mr. Brady, you humbug!  This picture is a publicity stunt worthy of your friend, P.T. Barnum.

Reading between the lines becomes easier with practice, and it also becomes easier with more specialized knowledge.  Without knowing how photographs were made in the Civil War you might not be able to deconstruct this picture.  But if you have the facts and you consider the source -- aha!  You discover you have a document that is interesting in a very different way than what you thought you had at first.  Facts and logic are two indispensable tools for writing nonfiction.  Consider the source!

In Praise of Edwin Tunis

I’ve written a book in which a biplane played a major part of the story. In another, it was an old time car. But you’d never be able to recreate the airplane from one of my drawing, nor build a car using my image of the auto. That’s okay. Biography is my interest, not machinery. The images did their job: to advance the story about a person.

But that doesn’t diminish my admiration for writers and artists who specialize in things.

One of the best was Edwin Tunis.

He was born in 1897. His father’s work took his family from town to town. Edwin studied art, became a World War One pilot, held design & art jobs, lost design & art jobs, and chased work as a freelancer.

“As a commercial artist I lacked the ‘snappy’ style beloved of advertising agents, but I could draw furniture, architecture, and historical stuff, so I made out well enough.” he said.

He designed a Maryland commemorative stamp, and painted historical murals. The Depression hit him hard and he took a momentary career detour as a radio announcer. World War Two arrived and he found himself working for the Black and Decker Company.

In 1943, the McCormick Company commissioned Tunis to paint a “History of Spices” mural in its Baltimore harbor office. It was 145’ long and took him two and a half years to finish. While researching the subject, he discovered “there was no one book which recounted the whole basic story of the development of ships in a simple way that might interest young people.”

“An outline, a dummy, some pages of text, and one finished illustration went to a literary agent who sold Oars, Sail and Steam within a week, he said”

It was published in 1952, launching fifty-five-year-old Edwin Tunis on a brand new career.

Other books followed: Weapons, 1954; Wheels, 1955; Colonial Living 1957; Indians, 1959; Frontier Living, (a Newberry Medal Honors winner), 1961; Colonial Craftsmen, 1965; Shaw’s Fortune, 1966; The Young United States, ( runner-up for the National Book Award), 1969; Chipmunks on the Doorstep, 1971; The Tavern at the Ferry, (an A.L.A. Notable Book), 1973.

Tunis believed that “illustrations should be as pleasing as the illustrator's abilities permit, but their prime purpose…is clear explanation. They must try…to put the object itself on the page.”

Chairs, chests, tilt-top table, gate-leg tables, sailor’s knots, samp mortars, stirrup stockings, sugar cutters, mill gears, wagon wheels, pugmills, saw mills, querns, hetchels, hats, horses, horns, pewter mugs, and pocket-hoop farthingales.

Do you want to learn how to scutch flax? Play huzzlecap? Pack a hogshead? Tunis shows you.

All are remarkably drawn with painstaking accuracy, yet with a buoyancy and immediacy that gives the images a singular liveliness.

I’m especially fond of Tunis’s elaborate scenes that combine landscape, houses, wagons, people… and horses. I’m jealous of his horses. Whenever I sketch horses, they have an odd anatomy of misplaced, jutting bones and it takes me forever to correct. (Don’t ask me about cows. They’re impossible. I’m convinced cows were designed in a rush on a late Friday before a long, holiday weekend.)

Tunis died in 1973. In time, his fabulous books fell from print.

But sometimes a bit of serendipitous good luck prevails, this time in the shape of Johns Hopkins University Press.

“Edward Tunis’s work has been known to me for years, owing to his Pratt Library (Baltimore) map of Maryland,” History Editor Bob Brugger said. “ We (at JHU Press) realized that rights to his books on early America were available and reprinted the major ones. ”

Good for them!

And great for us.

There is much to admire about Tunis: His extraordinary artistic skill, and his dedication to accuracy, to be sure. But his dogged pursuit of a life in the arts, one that didn’t find success until late in life is also inspirational, at least to this battered ex-freelancer who didn’t come to children’s books until he was over forty.

But life, being what it is, delivers a piquant end to the Tunis story.
In 1989, The McCormick Building was demolished. With it went Tunis’s Spice mural. And just like in the Joni Mitchell song, in its place they put up a parking lot.

When a Subject Finds You and He's Smoking a Big Cigar

My daughter and I were having one of our usual conversations about the sorry state of her school’s social studies curriculum. She was frustrated that, by 9th grade, they had yet to touch on the 20th century and it didn’t look like this year would be any different.

“I mentioned something about Winston Churchill to my friend J,” she said, “and she didn’t know who he was.”

She'd never heard of Churchill? Never heard his inspirational speeches, spoken with a lisp, of never surrendering to the Nazis? Never seen pictures of him in his blue coveralls, smoking his omnipresent cigar, giving his V for Victory sign? My mind started racing over our trip to England, the Churchill biographies I had read as a result, and the pages I had marked just recently when reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s NO ORDINARY TIME. After a long pause I said, “I just might have to do something about that.” My daughter gave me a big smile. She knew I had just met my next project.

Churchill had captured my attention a few years ago when I had convinced my family that a visit to the Cabinet War Rooms, where Churchill and his staff hunkered down during WWII, was a worthwhile way to spend our last morning in London. As they waved goodbye to their cousins who were off on a more lighthearted tour of Buckingham Palace, I tried to reassure them that they wouldn’t be disappointed. Luckily, I was right.

The self-guided tour was fascinating and we were all pulled right in. We learned a bit about the Blitz, how they made use of the different colored telephones, and how they charted everything out with paper and pins in the map room. It was a morning well spent, topped off by some chocolate cigars from the gift shop.

Is it possible to draw a kid into a book in the same way as that hands on experience? I think so.

In the official brochure of the Imperial War Museum, the photo of Churchill’s bedroom looks like this:



When I visited, I snapped a few photos, despite the darkness. The photo I took of Churchill's bedroom gives a slightly different view.

Notice anything in the bottom of my photo? Yes, I would definitely want the chamber pot included. Not only is it a visual kids would love but it reveals a lot about the time, place and circumstances. They were in a bunker because those were real bombs flying above; the closest bathroom was a up a floor or two. It would make a good contrast to talking about the conditions that FDR lived under at the same time and a great way to talk about the situation in Britain and the United States.

If done with the right approach, I'm confident kids would be interested. Books on Franklin D. Roosevelt certainly do well. What about a book that explores their relationship? But then why is there only one book on Churchill in the children’s section of my local library? Is it a gold mine waiting to be explored or a subject purposefully passed over? And there is the ever-present curriculum problem. If it is not a subject kids will study in school, the editors don’t think it will sell. Does this always need to be the first consideration regardless of a writer's knowledge or enthusiasm for a subject? More on this in another post.

Reading Between the Lines, Part 2

Using primary sources in the research process can be both rewarding and frustrating. Reading a letter or a diary can be exciting, but so often I find myself thinking "Why didn't he explain X?" -- or Y or Z?  So much is left out that the original audience was expected to know without being told!  My job is to figure out what went without saying, and to decide what the missing pieces might be.  This requires a certain amount of confidence, and the willingness to make logical inferences.
Let me give you an example. While doing research for a book about the Civil War (Photo by Brady: A Picture of the Civil War), I ran across a fascinating battlefield tidbit (of course, I ran across dozens, but I'm just going to use one right now.) The tidbit was the information that at the end of a battle, sodiers' faces would be black around the mouth from gunpowder, because they had to bite off the ends of their paper cartridges, and in the frenzy of battle the biting and tearing got a little messy with gunpowder splashing and spilling.  

Okay, what can we extrapolate from that?  I like to consider all the senses when I have to flesh out details.  "Faces black with gunpowder" is a vivid visual detail, but it also suggests other sensations: the gritty feel of gunpowder between the teeth, not to mention the taste of it in the back of the throat for hours at a time.  (Full disclosure: I have not tasted gunpowder so I don't know how to describe it.)  It suggests the sting of gunpowder in the eyes or up the nose; I can imagine spitting black spit and blowing black mucous into a hanky.  Does everything smell of gunpowder when it coats the inside of your nose?  Do you spend the first hour after battle spitting and rinsing out your mouth, provided you can get water?  The gunpowder must also be in the ears, the hair, down the shirt collar -- everywhere.  If you've been sweating no doubt you are smeared with black sweat, and the creases of your skin will be etched with black powder. Chances are that a right-handed soldier will have more powder on the right side of his face and head, and vice versa for a lefty. 

Thus with one sensory detail, I can extrapolate a whole panoply of contingent information.  It takes some  practice, but anyone can do it.  I find many kids are unaccustomed to making logical inferences, so when I demonstrate this process to young readers it looks a little like a magic trick, or like I'm just "making stuff up."  But trust me, it's not really pulling a rabbit out of a hat -- you just have to look carefully inside the hat and see what's in there.

In Celebration of Black History Month

Schools are usually closed on Martin Luther King, Jr. day. February is Black History Month but many kids are off for a whole week. Luckily there are some well-written books and related resources to take up the slack. One book can easily lead to another; read about the people who took a stand, scan the photos and artwork to get a feel for what it was like to be there and try to understand the culture of the time.

To more fully understand the Civil Rights movement, it helps to know your rights.

There are an overwhelming number of books on MLK,Jr. Where to start? A handful do a terrific job of giving an overview of the significance and impact of his his life.

Recognize his strength of character as a regular person who relied on a strong set of beliefs and those he admired to guide him in his philosophy of nonviolence.

He was not a lone voice. There were many who came before him
who had fought against discrimination and in support of equal rights for black Americans. And there were many, many others who fought along with him. People you might have heard of, like Rosa Parks, and others whose stories are still being told. Among those who did their part to fight for equality were singers, postmen, baseball players, schoolteachers and future Supreme Court Justices.


Dr. King's path was not an easy one to follow. Those who later practiced nonviolence on Freedom Rides got beaten and bloodied for their efforts.

The struggle was taken up on many fronts, including in the public schools. Read some first person accounts and histories of what it was like for kids who dreamed of freedom and fought to be allowed to go to a decent school.

Part of the difficulty came in simply making their voices heard. Most Americans were just living their ordinary lives. The culture of the 1950s and 60s was alive with people writing books, painting and a new kind of music called rock and roll.

Read the books, look at the art, and listen to the music of the time period. They are an important part of history.


Hear the beauty of Dr. King's oratory and the power of his words.

Reading Between the Lines, Part 1

A large part of what I do while researching historical documents or images is read between the lines, or draw logical inferences. Making historical information feel immediate and alive to readers means feeling my way into the material. This photograph from the Library of Congress website collection of Civil War photographs provides a good illustration. (Some details may be hard to see on your screen, so just bear with me. ) At first glance this photograph seems rather mute. Most kids seldom look at black and white images, and this picture might say nothing to a contemporary student. But with a little practice we can infer a great deal about the circumstances of this photograph, and paint a more colorful picture.
We can infer, to begin with, that the time of year is not winter -- we see leaves on the trees. Okay. Can we pin it down further? Yes, I think so. You notice how dusty the road looks -- the wheel tracks are deep but dry. I don't think it has rained for several weeks. This suggests late summer, right? And the shadows are crisp and sharp, so it's a bright sunny day, and probably hot. All at once I can bring all of my experience of "hot bright late summer day" to this photograph, and I can hear the cicadas buzzing in the trees, and see the swallows swooping for mosquitoes over the creek, and smell the damp stones in the arches of the bridge. I don't need direct, documentary evidence of the cicadas or the mosquitoes or the swallows; indirect evidence abounds. In doing historical research the writer (of fiction as well as nonfiction) can safely extrapolate a great deal from available evidence.