ABOUT THIS BOOK

For more than three decades, the same children's historical novels have been taught across the United States. Honored for their literary quality and appreciated for their alignment with social studies curricula, the books have flourished as schools moved from whole-language to phonics and from student-centered learning to standardized testing.

Books like Johnny Tremain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry stimulate children's imagination, transporting them into the American past and projecting them into an American future. As works of historical interpretation, however, many are startlingly out of step with current historiography and social sensibilities, especially with regard to race. Unlike textbooks, which are replaced on regular cycles and subjected to public tugs-of-war between the left and right, historical novels have simply--and quietly--endured. Taken individually, many present troubling interpretations of the American past. But embraced collectively, this classroom canon provides a rare pedagogical opportunity: it captures a range of interpretive voices across time and place, a kind of "people's history" far removed from today's state-sanctioned textbooks.

Teachers who employ historical novels in the classroom can help students recognize and interpret historical narrative as the product of research, analytical perspective, and the politics of the time. In doing so, they sensitize students to the ways in which the past is put to moral and ideological uses in the present.

Featuring separate chapters on American Indians, war, and slavery, Child-Sized History tracks the changes in how young readers are taught to conceptualize history and the American nation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sara L. Schwebel is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of South Carolina. She received her Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University and has taught middle-school English and history in Connecticut and Virginia. She is the co-author of The Student Teacher's Handbook, 4th Edition.

REVIEWS

"Book jackets are notorious for the superlatives that adorn them. But every once in a while a work comes along--so arresting in its freshness, originality, and incandescent brilliance--that it defines an entire field. You are holding such a book."
--Sam Wineburg, Margaret Jacks Professor of Education and History, Stanford University

"This study should be required reading for middle-school teachers who use historical fiction in their classrooms. It's also an important resource for critics who take children's books seriously as literature but may not give sufficient attention to the ways in which texts are actually employed by teachers, and not just for building literacy. Schwebel considers teacher training, school curricula, and classroom practices, and she also offers close and critical readings of literary texts that are currently used in schools as supplements to or even substitutes for history textbooks. Finally, instead of simply criticizing existing pedagogy, she offers practical guidelines for thinking about how to effectively use historical fiction--in conjunction with sources from both the period being portrayed and the period in which the book was written--to deepen historical understanding."
--Julia L. Mickenberg, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Texas

"A brilliant investigation of the intersections of curriculum, historiography, children's literature studies, and book history. Sara Schwebel has found ingenious ways of determining which historical fiction is most frequently taught, and she provides astute textual and contextual analyses of juvenile novels addressing American Indians, war, and African Americans."
--Beverly Lyon Clark, Professor of English, Wheaton College

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Classroom Entry

2. Indians Mythic and Human

3. War Novels

4. Black and White

5. Historical Fiction in the Classroom

Afterword: Pedagogical Possibilities

Appendix A: Nationwide Trends in Middle-Grade Historical Fiction

Appendix B: Historical Sources Discussed in Pedagogy Charts

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Back Cover