Unit Study: Investigating Isaac Newton
Celebrate the birthday of the renowned physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian on January 4 with an Isaac Newton homeschool unit study.
Celebrate the birthday of the renowned physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian on January 4 with an Isaac Newton homeschool unit study.
Newton was a radical whose insights transformed the scientific landscape and laid the ground for modern mathematics and physics. He was the first person to truly quantify the law of gravity, the discoverer (with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz) of calculus, and the first person to recognize the spectrum in white light. Perhaps even more significant was his method, which focused on the mechanics of nature rather than any attempt to discern a cause.
Start Here
These biographies make a solid introduction to Newton and his most important ideas.
Isaac Newton and Physics for Kids: His Life and Ideas with 21 Activities by Kerrie Logan Hollihan lets you get to know Newton by doing some of the same kinds of experiments he did.
Isaac Newton (Giants of Science) by Kathleen Krull is an intelligent, lucid look at a complex man, though it touches on is- sues that may be more appropriate for older readers.
Isaac Newton and His Apple (Dead Famous) by Kjartan Poskitt is as hilarious as it is informative (though you may have to help your kids translate the occasional British-ism to get the joke).
Get Hands On
After all, Newton helped codify the practice of science. He’d want you to get messy with it!
Newton Connection: This simple experiment gives you a hands-on look at how the forces of gravity work.
Newton Connection: If you punch a hole in a cup full of water, the water leaks out. But if you drop that cup with a hole in it, the water stays inside because of freefall weightlessness.
Keep Water in an Upside-Down Bucket
Newton Connection: If you’re spinning the bucket steadily, the forces of gravity will keep the water inside, even when the bucket’s upside-down.
Dig a Little Deeper
Sample Newton’s influence with these activities online.
So just how important was Isaac Newton’s work to modern science? Let Albert Einstein tell you.
Find out how Newton’s discoveries influenced the invention of the airplane.
PBS has a fun look at Newton’s laws in action at the Big Apple Circus — plus ideas for further activities and resources to learn more.
Newtonian Explainers
Newton’s theories seem obvious, but they can be surprisingly hard to explain. Taking a look at different explanations can help you make sense of what Newton’s laws really mean and not just what they say.
NEWTON’S THREE LAWS OF MOTION An entertaining and easy-to-follow look at Newton’s laws of motion.
NEWTON’S PHYSICS NOTEBOOK A great introduction to Newton and his ideas.
MR. TRASK’S PHYSICS With required reading, extra resources, and lab projects, this online supplement is an in-depth look at Newton’s laws.
Newton in Action
Newton on the Bumper Cars Newton’s third law of motion is what makes riding in bumper cars so much fun.
Newton’s Favorite Toy Learn about Newton’s Cradle, a model used to demonstrate principles of physics.
Marble Maze Newton’s laws of motion determine how your marble moves.
Moon Craters The moon’s gravity attracts objects and pulls them to its surface at super-fast speeds, creating craters.
Advanced Reading
A Portrait of Isaac Newton by Frank Manuel paints a psychological picture of Newton’s life, picking up the threads left by John Maynard Keynes 1947 character study. What kind of person dedicates his life to understanding the world in this particular way? That's the question Manuel wants to answer.
Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy by Niccolo Guicciardini summarizes the most current view of Newton — weaving together the different threads of his scientific and philosophical interests to explore intersections and contradictions.
Homeschool Unit Study: King John of England
Why is it so easy to hate England's notorious King John? Oh, let us count the ways in this trash-talking unit study.
Why is it so easy to hate England's notorious King John? Oh, let us count the ways in this trash-talking unit study.
“Foul as it is, hell itself is made fouler by the presence of King John,” wrote Matthew Paris just a few short years after England’s much-despised ruler died of dysentery. There’s no question that the son of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine was universally despised by his subjects, so it’s kind of ironic that John’s legacy includes—however reluctantly—the foundation for modern-day democracy. Mark the anniversary of King John’s death this fall by learning more about the worst king of England.
He was notoriously treacherous, lecherous, and cruel, but we owe our democratic government in part to King John, whose sheer terribleness inspired British nobles to curtail the rights of the monarchy and invest the nobility with rights of their own. When John signed the Magna Carta—after arranging this nephew’s murder, scheming against his Crusading brother, and generally being the worst ruler in Christendom—he forever changed the relationship between ruler and subjects.
READ THIS
Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott’s historical romance paints Prince John (acting king for Richard III, who’s off fighting in the Crusades) as scheming, tyrannical monarch, which is pretty much how his contemporaries and modern historians have viewed him.
(Middle grades)
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
Scott’s influence is apparent in Howard Pyle’s collection of Robin Hood stories, which cast tax-happy John as the tale’s central villain.
(Middle grades)
King John: Treachery and Tyranny in Medieval England: The Road to Magna Carta
John’s life of “intrigues, quarrels, battles, sieges, negotiations, truces, and betrayals” is illuminated through contemporary chronicles and his own letters in Marc Morris’ scholarly, readable tome.
(High school)
WATCH THIS
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Set in 1183, during Henry II’s reign, this film adaptation of the play by James Goldman focuses on the contentious relationship between John’s parents and certainly doesn’t cast a positive light on the effete, unpleasant prince—even if you might feel a little sorry for him when you imagine his childhood.
Robin Hood (1973)
Disney’s animated animal take on the Robin Hood legend includes a thumb-sucking, greedy Prince Johns whose comeuppance at the film’s conclusion feels well-deserved.
This was originally published in the Fall 2016 issue of HSL. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The Readaloud Day Guide: A 52-Week Reading List for World Mythology and Folk Tales
Think of mythology as the building blocks for future literature studies — though, admittedly, they can be messy, complicated, ambiguous building blocks. This 52-week reading list is designed to cover a full year of mythology studies, and while it’s accessible for elementary students just diving into the wide world of literature, older students looking for a place to start a systematic comparative literature study may also find this a place to begin.
Think of mythology as the building blocks for future literature studies — though, admittedly, they can be messy, complicated, ambiguous building blocks. This 52-week reading list is designed to cover a full year of mythology studies, adaptable for students of all ages.
Why mythology? These are the stories that inform our cultural landscape, influencing art, music, literature, and pretty much everything else we encounter on an everyday basis. Think of mythology as the building blocks for future literature studies — though, admittedly, they can be messy, complicated, ambiguous building blocks. This 52-week reading list is designed to cover a full year of mythology studies, and while it’s accessible for elementary students just diving into the wide world of literature, older students looking for a place to start a systematic comparative literature study may also find this a place to begin.
D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths
Greek mythology is the perfect place to start diving into the world’s great myths. For so many of us, these stories — of all-powerful Zeus’s antics, Persephone’s pomegranate seeds, the heroes of the Trojan War — are touchstones that echo throughout western literature and our imaginations. Some of the big problems of mythology — notably rape and violence — are glossed over a bit here; depending on your child, you may want to talk a little about why these dark ideas are softened here.
Black Ships Before Troy
There are several young reader-friendly versions of The Iliad; I like this one because it echoes the jump-around style of the original instead of telling everything around the story of Achilles. For the ancient Greeks, the Trojan War marked a metaphorical line between the Age of Myth and everyday life — the war represented the end of the time of heroes. The Greeks believed that death with honor was better than a long and peaceful life, and the exploits of this war story reflect that hyper-masculine philosophy.
Greek Myths
With superficially simple but deeply complicated stories like world myths, the more versions you can read, the better your understanding will be of the ideas, values, and world views of the people who wrote them. Olivia Coolidge’s slightly old-fashioned take on Greek mythology (it was published in 1949) scrupulously attempts to give space to every god’s story, with an emphasis on drama and adventure. Compare these stories to the D’Aulaires’ to see what changes between retellings.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
Say what you will about Rick Riordan’s uber-popular series, few middle grades books have made Greek mythology as urgent and fascinating to a modern audience as the adventures of Percy and his friends. By now, the heroes, monsters, and gods of the pantheon will be familiar friends, and kids will love seeing Riordan’s modern-day take on Greek myth.
The Children's Homer: The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy
Padraic Colum’s kid-friendly translation captures all the twists and turns of Odysseus’s long journey home, which help set the standard for what an epic journey should look like. Omniscient narrator? Check. Hero who faces death? Check. Geographical and emotional journey? Check. Odysseus’s adventures are interesting enough on their own, but they can also inspire other activities. Draw a map of Odysseus’s voyage, or make a board game based on his adventure.
Tales from the Odyssey
Mary Pope Osborne’s two-part retelling of Odysseus’s story is one of the best. Osborne manages to channel the non-stop excitement of the original (sorcerers! cannibals! shipwrecks!) in a way that’s easy to follow and fun to read. With stories like this that were told for centuries before they were finally written down, reading lots of different versions can be illuminating.
Aesop’s Fables
Aesop’s morality stories were written down in the sixth century B.C.E. and focus on many of the same lessons and ideas that Greece’s mythology hones in on: How should we treat each other? What makes a good leader? How do you deal with bullies? Jerry Pinkney retells more than 60 of Aesop’s best known fables with lush illustrations in a book. Kids may enjoy looking for instances of characters not following Aesop’s advice in other traditional myths.
Tomie dePaola's Book of Bible Stories
The stories of Jonah and the whale, Noah and the flood, Moses and the Pharaoh have influenced Western literature and art in significant ways, and it feels like a disservice to leave them out of your mythology studies. This collection isn’t intentionally secular, but its focus on the stories and characters rather than on religious principles makes it a good option for reading traditional Bible stories in their mythological context.
Usborne Children's Book of Bible Stories
One thing you’ll notice as you read through this collection of stories is how the motifs in them carry over into other literature: The baby floating down the river in a basket, the flood that reshapes the world, the hero who sacrifices himself to save the world — these ideas echo through mythological traditions around the world.
The City of Rainbows: A Tale from Ancient Sumer
As far as writing goes, this isn’t the most eloquent story you’ll ever read — its appeal is in its origin. Author Karen Polinger Foster is an archaeologist, and the story she’s retelling was preserved on clay tablets in ancient Sumeria. The story — of two kings whose different ways of seeing things cause confusion — is a classic folk tale that hints at the importance of the innovation of writing in Mesopotamia.
Gilgamesh the King
Ludmila Zeman focuses on the first part of the epic of Gilgamesh, where the not-so-nice king of Uruk meets his match — and ultimately his best friend — in the wild man Enkidu. Don’t make this the only version of Gilgamesh you read (see below); it’s bowdlerized to be kid-friendly in ways that may well annoy you, but the story is a good introduction to the world’s first epic, and the illustrations — inspired by Babylonian, Assyrian, and Sumerian art — are fantastic.
Gilgamesh the Hero
Once you’ve read the simplified picture-book, dive into this engaging retelling, which starts with Gilgamesh’s friendship with Enkidu but continues to his conflict with the goddess Inara and his (ultimately unsuccessful) quest for immortality after Enkidu’s death. Geraldine McCaughrean softens some of the R-rated elements of the story (including Gilgamesh’s rape culture mentality) without excising them.
Tales of Ancient Egypt
Greek mythology was heavily influenced by the more sophisticated philosophy of their Egyptian neighbors, and this chapter book by Roger Lancelyn Green focuses on the Egyptian pantheon, its heroes, and its ideas of magic and the supernatural. Reading it after you dive into the more popular Greek mythology lets you appreciate all those subtle points of influence that you might miss if you explore Egypt first.
Nelson Mandela's Favorite African Folktales
This collection includes 32 stories from across the continent of Africa — a broad swathe, to be sure, but it’s a vibrant sampler of African storytelling. A map at the beginning highlights the geographic region where each story originates, and you’ll find a mix of creation myths, hero stories, and trickster tales.
Kings, Gods, and Spirits from African Mythology
Jan Knappert retells 35 stories of gods, ghosts, heroes, warriors, tricksters, kings, and animals from the Zulu, Swahili, Bantu, Ashanti, and other African people. There’s no Wakanda, but there is definitely just as much magic in stories like “The Golden Stool” and “The Ogre Who Ate People.” Feel free to skip the less-than-thrilling introduction and cut straight to the stories.
The Star-Bearer: A Creation Myth from Ancient Egypt
Dianne Hofmeyer retells the odd but lovely Heliopolis creation myth, in which golden godchild Atun must separate Geb, god of Earth, and Nut, goddess of the sky, in order to make room for his creations. The story explains the different forces that the Egyptians believed governed their everyday lives: earth, wind, water, and sky.
Treasury of Egyptian Mythology: Classic Stories of Gods, Goddesses, Monsters, and Mortals
It’s surprising how few collections of Egyptian mythology there are compared to other cultures’ mythologies — perhaps it’s the air of weirdness that permeates Egyptian myth. Donna Jo Napoli’s retellings, collected in this book, are a step toward rectifying that omission, preserving the mythic weirdness while relating the stories in a way that resonates with younger readers.
Illustrated Arabian Nights
This luxe Usborne book edited by Alida Massari Anna Milbourne is a softened-for-kids version of the somewhat violent and misogynistic but also fantastic folktales from the Golden Age of Islam. You’ll find plenty of familiar names — Aladdin and his lamp, Sinbad the sailor, Scheherazade the storyteller — as well as more unusual stories.
Angels, Prophets, Rabbis, and Kings from the Stories of the Jewish People
These Jewish tales from the Talmud highlight the power of quick thinking, the benefits of good deeds, the importance of tradition, and the joys of family. Many of these tales date back to the Middle Ages, which makes them more recent than much of the other mythology on this list.
Seasons of Splendor: Tales, Myths and Legends of India
Cookbook author Jaffrey Madhur compiled this collection of Indian myths her mother told her as a child, organized according to the Hindu calendar, including the story of Rahu, the evil star who punishes the moon with an annual eclipse for trying to interfere in one of his nefarious schemes.
The Gita for Children
Roopa Pai tackles one of the most philosophically interesting conversations in mythological history, between Pandava prince Arjuna and his chariot driver, the god Krishna. This simplified version works on its own as a story, but layers of meaning are waiting to unpack with willing readers.
The Boys Who Fought: The Mahabharata for Children
The Mahabharata is one of India’s great epics, a complicated story about the Kuruksetra War between the wealthy Kauravas and their poor cousins the Pandavas. Devdutt Pattanaik retells the story in a simplified, comic book form, illuminating the ideas of dharma and karma in a kid-accessible way.
The Girl Who Chose: A New Way Of Narrating the Ramayana
Keep going with Devdutt Pattanaik’s take on India’s other great epic, the Ramayana, the story of Prince Rama’s quest to rescue his wife the Princess Sita from Ravana who has used an army of monkeys to kidnap her. Despite what the title suggests, this book isn’t a feminist take on the not-very-feminist story, but it does underscore the significance of choices in destiny.
Rama and The Demon King
Jessica Souhami takes an even simpler approach to the Ramayana in this picture book, which focuses on Rama’s battle with the ten-headed king of demons. The shadow puppet-style illustrations, following the traditional Indian art form, illuminate the story of Prince Rama’s life in the forest, which turns deadly when a demon vows revenge against him.
Amma Tell Me About Durga Puja
Bhakti Mathur does get some girl power going in this story about the mother goddess Durga who defeats the evil, shape-shifting, sneaky demon Mahishasura. The gods team up to create a super-powered ultra goddess, the only hero who can defeat this particularly villainous demon.
Aru Shah and the End of Time
It’s no surprise that the first book in Rick Riordan’s new Disney imprint features a hero who discovers she’s descended from a mythic hero — the twist is that 12-year-old Aru’s mythic heritage comes from Indian mythology. When she accidentally sets a sinister supernatural spirit free, she must channel her inner Pandava and discover the world of Indian myth lurking at the edges of the world she’s always known.
D’Aulaire’s Book of Norse Myths
Just as with Greek mythology, the D’Aulaires offer the perfect starting point for a deep dive into Norse mythology. (And just as with Greek mythology, this isn’t always easy because some of the original stories have dark and violent undertones.) From Odin the All-Father to Thor and his hammer to the great battle of Ragnarokk, these beautifully illustrated stories are a great introduction to the fantastic — if fatalistic — Norse pantheon.
Norse Mythology
Neil Gaiman definitely dives into the salty side of the Norse pantheon, so you may want to skim ahead to make sure you’re comfortable with the content — it’s totally consistent with the bawdy, violent world of Asgard, and Gaiman fully appreciates all the weird, wild antics of Norse mythology.
The Children of Odin: The Book of Northern Myths
Padraic Colum paints a fairy tale picture of life in Asgard once upon a time, emphasizing the fantastic elements of life in the world of the Norse gods.
Odd and the Frost Giants
Gaiman returns to Norse mythology with an invented story of a lonely boy who finds himself on a quest for the gods. Chris Riddell’s deliberate, slightly eccentric illustrations illuminate the story’s fairy tale nuance, while the story itself is steeped in Scandinavian myth.
Eight Days of Luke
Diana Wynne Jones beat Neil Gaiman to the punch by imagining a world peopled by undercover Norse gods and an ordinary boy who finds himself in the middle of an adventure he never anticipated. This is the perfect Wynne Jones mix of quotidian British life and high fantasy, but you’ll definitely want to save it for when you’re familiar with the fundamentals of the Norse pantheon — half the fun is identifying the secret identities of the different characters who crop up on David’s adventure.
Essential Chinese Mythology: Stories That Change the World
This collection of Chinese myth includes tales from Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian mythology and offers a fascinating glimpse into a world of ideas that both parallels and sharply departs from the Western traditions we know so well.
The Eight Immortals of Taoism: Legends and Fables of Popular Taoism
Daoist mythology is a compelling combination of historical figures and supernatural forces, and these stories are a good introduction. The eight immortals are a surprisingly (and pleasantly) diverse group, including a woman, a student, a person who is physically disabled, and an androgynous hero.
The Emperor and the Kite
Little Princess Djeow never gets any attention, but her kite-flying skills save the day when her father is kidnapped and imprisoned in a tall tower. Djeow’s skill, persistence, and clever thinking earn her family’s respect in this not-so-traditional princess story.
Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China
In this early Chinese Cinderella story, you’ll find a fish instead of a fairy godmother but otherwise the same jealous stepfamily, royal ball, magical shoes, and the happy ending.
The Great Race: The Story of the Chinese Zodiac
The Chinese zodiac is full of animals — but plenty also get left out. This playful tale tells the story of how the rat cheated the cat out of a victory in the Jade Emperor’s great river swimming race — and a spot in the zodiac.
Treasury of Chinese Folk Tales
My favorite part of this eclectic collection of Chinese stories is that Shelly Fu and Patrick Yee give the historical and cultural context for each one.
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon
Grace Lin’s quest novel takes its magic from the Chinese myths and folk tales she grew up with, and the result is a delightful fantasy steeped in Chinese mythic tradition.
Tales Our Abuelitas Told: A Hispanic Folktale Collection
The tales in this collection reflect the diversity of the Hispanic world: Some are indigenous stories told by Latin American tribes, others come from Basque and the Middle East. Playful, chatty, and engaging, this is a lively introduction to some of the stories that have shaped Latinx culture around the world.
Hawaiian Myths of Earth, Sea and Sky
Vivian Thompson explores ten foundational Polynesian myths, focusing on the central core that runs through the islands’ mythological diversity. You’ll find strong parallels between the landmark-focused stories in these myths and those in Native American mythology.
Between Earth and Sky: Legends of Native American Sacred Places
Abenaki poet and author Joseph Bruchac tells the stories of ten spaces with sacred connections for various Native American tribes, including the Seneca story of Ne-ah-ga (Niagara Falls), to emphasize that all natural places are sacred spaces.
The Mud Pony
In this tale from the Skidi branch of the Pawnee Indians of the Plains, a boy must find his own strength after his sculpted mud pony — miraculously brought to life — returns to earth.
Raven: A Trickster Tale from the Pacific Northwest
This story from the Pacific Northwest people may remind you of the Prometheus myth: Feeling sorry for people trapped in the world’s eternal darkness, trickster Raven sneaks into the Sky Chief’s house to steal his light and warmth for the rest of the world.
How the Stars Fell into the Sky
In Navajo tradition, the chaos of the stars in the night sky reflects the chaos of life — and it’s no surprise that this starry chaos was caused in part by the trickster Coyote. First Woman patiently crafts a mosaic of laws in the sky, but impatient Coyote messes up her careful work, bringing chaos into the world.
Rabbit’s Snow Dance
The Bruchac pere et fils bring a much-needed jolt of charm and energy to this Iroquois fable about a rabbit who just can’t wait for snow — even though it’s the middle of summer. Compare this to the story of Pandora.
The Legend of the Bluebonnet
The theme of sacrifice in this Comanche folk tale will feel familiar after reading so many other myths: When She-Who-Is-Alone learns that the drought destroying her community is caused by the Great Spirit, who is angry with the Comanche for taking from the land without giving back, she understands that only a burnt offering of her most precious possession can save her people.
How Chipmunk Got His Stripes
This pourquoi story (or origin story) from East Coast Native American tradition isn’t particularly surprising, but the telling makes it feel that way: Brown Squirrel and Bear learn a lesson about bragging and teasing, and the chipmunk is created when Bear boasts that he can keep the sun from rising. It’s worth comparing this to some of the Greek origin stories.
Big Turtle
In this Huron-Iroquois creation story, Sky Girl is trapped between the water and the sky, and while she rides on the back of the Big Turtle, a series of animals attempt to bring enough earth from the bottom of the sea to give her a place to live. Little Toad succeeds, and Sky Girl’s descendants become Earth’s first people.
The Sun’s Daughter
You’ll be amazed by how much this Iroquois legend of the Corn Maiden reminds you of the story of Persephone and Demeter: When Maize slips away from her mother Sun to walk at night, she’s captured by the moon Silver. Just as in the Persephone myth, the resulting shared custody explains the origin of the seasons.
Kokopelli: Drum in Belly
It’s hard not to love Kokopelli, the fertility god musician who appears in the traditions of some Native American cultures in the Southwestern United States. In this origin tale, Kokopelli uses his music to lead the Ant People out of the Dark World and into the Green World, where they become the first people.
Arrow to the Sun: A Pueblo Indian Tale
The pattern of this tale set among the Pueblo people matches up to other traditional stories of virgin-born heroes who must face a series of trials, but the really interesting thing about it is how it represents a western mythology being superimposed on another culture. In fact, in Pueblo culture, illegitimate children are treated the same as other children, and the kivas are places of community, not of trial. Why would the author create a Western version of a Pueblo tale? This is a longstanding problem in telling the mythology of other people, and it’s one that after all the rest of your reading, you’re ready to tackle together.
Favorite Folktales from Around the World
Jane Yolen collects tales of tricksters, creation, the end of the world, and more in this collection of tales from Syria, Estonia, Peru, Haiti, and more countries whose mythological and folklore traditions may be less well known.
(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.) This book list was originally published in the spring 2018 issue of HSL.
Unit Study Idea: The African-American Struggle for Civil Rights, Past and Present
Carrie’s family wanted to study the history of civil rights in the United States, and they found the project incredibly rewarding. These were some of their favorite resources.
Early this year, I told my thirteen-year-old son I’d like to investigate a historical subject with him over an extended period, to give what we learned time to really sink in. He was game, so I showed him a list of potential topics I wanted to learn more about and asked if any intrigued him. He looked over my list and chose the American civil rights movement.
“It seems especially relevant to what’s going on in the news right now,” he commented. Neither of us had any idea just how relevant the topic was going to be.
The last few weeks have been tumultuous ones in America, with the shootings of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Charles Kinsey and of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge sparking grief, outrage, and renewed calls for change. Philando Castile’s death hit particularly close to home for our family; Castile was killed during a traffic stop only three miles north of our St. Paul neighborhood, and several of our friends and neighbors have children who attend the school where Castile worked as a beloved cafeteria supervisor.
The following resources are ones my son and I studied together over the last few months, as well as a few that I’ve found personally helpful. These resources are only a very small sampling of the wealth of materials and perspectives out there, but these resources have given my son and me a historical context about systemic racism and African-American resistance that I just didn’t get from my own school education—or from my life as a white person who’s privileged to ignore racism if I choose. I’ve really needed that historical context these last few weeks. I think everyone does.
BOOKS FOR KIDS AND ADULTS
(roughly for ages 13 and up, though obviously you’re the best judge of what your kids are ready for)
Freedman’s book provides a window into Jim Crow America, detailing opera singer Marian Anderson’s struggle to establish herself as an artist in spite of being rejected by a conservatory based on her race and barred from hotels and restaurants as she toured America. The story continues with her success in Europe, her groundbreaking 1939 performance at the Lincoln Memorial, and the rest of her trailblazing career.
The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Steve Sheinkin
Sheinkin tells the amazing true story of black sailors who were barred from combat duty during World War II and assigned to loading munitions at a segregated naval base at Port Chicago, California—without receiving proper training or supervision on safe munition handling. In July 1944, a massive explosion at the base killed 300 sailors. In response to the unsafe conditions and unjustly segregated work environment, 244 sailors refused to go back to work until their grievances were addressed, ultimately leading to fifty of the men being charged with mutiny. Sheinkin takes an in-depth look at this important early case in the fight for civil rights.
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King wrote this essay in April 1963 in response to a statement by eight white Alabama clergymen criticizing King’s methods of nonviolent civil disobedience. King’s argument, begun while he was in jail for breaking an injunction against demonstrating, is a powerful defense of breaking unjust laws in order to fight for a higher good, as well as an excellent model of persuasive writing. It’s also helpful for putting current Black Lives Matter protests into historical context; both King and many Black Lives Matter activists argue that in order to get the powerful to come to the table to negotiate, it’s sometimes necessary to break laws and disrupt “business as usual.”
March, Books One and Two by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
In these graphic-novel style memoirs, Representative John Lewis tells the story of his childhood on an Alabama sharecropping farm and his role in the 1963 March on Washington and the Selma Voting Rights March, among other highlights of a life spent fighting for human rights. Lewis's role in the recent Capitol Hill sitdown strike for gun control makes this an even more timely read.
Marching for Freedom: Walk Together, Children, and Don’t You Grow Weary by Elizabeth Partridge
This account of the 1965 voting rights march from Selma, Alabama begins in compelling fashion: “The first time Joanne Blackmon was arrested, she was just ten years old.” Partridge keeps her focus on ordinary children and teens involved in the historic march and does an excellent job of making the march accessible and understandable for kids. I also love that she shows that there were sometimes disagreements and missteps within the movement; too often, I think we tend to envision the civil rights movement as a perfectly unified, top-down movement led by Martin Luther King. The reality was much messier and more grassroots than the oversimplified version of history enshrined in most school textbooks. This is a great book to read in conjunction with Turning Fifteen on the Road to Freedom by Lynda Blackmon Lowery, a firsthand account by a young person who participated in the Selma March, and We've Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children's March by Cynthia Levinson.
How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon
Kekla Magoon’s young-adult novel tells the story of a black teenaged boy shot by a white man who mistakes him for a dangerous thief and gang member when he’s actually carrying home groceries from the local corner store. Narrated from multiple points of view, the book reveals how painfully difficult it can be to find the truth in the aftermath of a racially charged shooting.
Myers’s 1999 young-adult novel uses an innovative structure — part imaginary screenplay, part diary — to tell the story of Steve Harmon, an African-American teen on trial for murder. Through fragmentary flashbacks, readers gradually piece together Steve’s role in the crime and his journey through a criminal justice system that is predisposed to see a boy who looks like him as a “monster.” For my son and me, this was an eye-opening introduction to the problem of racial bias in our justice system.
X by Ilyasah Shabazz and Kekla Magoon
This fact-based novel by Malcolm X’s daughter and her collaborator Kekla Magoon chronicles the African-American leader’s early struggles with racism as a young boy in Michigan, his years in Boston and Harlem, his imprisonment for burglary, and his subsequent conversion to Islam and decision to change his name from Malcolm Little to Malcolm X.
A FEW MORE BOOKS FOR ADULTS AND OLDER TEENS
Butler’s novel tells the story of Dana, a modern African-American woman transported through time from 1970s America to the antebellum South, where she encounters her ancestors, a white slave owner’s son and his black slave. Through multiple trips spaced over several years, Dana is forced to intervene in her ancestors’ lives in ways that test everything she believes. Butler’s novel is the most compelling, searing examination of slavery and its legacies that I’ve ever encountered, exploring issues of race, sex, family, and gender in mind-blowing ways.
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon
In this collection of essays, Kiese Laymon examines how racism damages African-American men, and how they in turn inflict pain and damage on themselves and the people they love, especially African-American women. Weaving together hip-hop, stand-up comedy, and other pop culture references, Laymon offers a passionate, introspective, vulnerable perspective on what it’s like to be young, black, Southern, and male in today’s America.
ON THE SCREEN
Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement 1954-1985 produced by Henry Hampton :: The first six episodes of this fourteen-hour PBS documentary series cover the civil rights movement from the 1954 Montgomery bus boycott to the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The next eight episodes focus on such key events as the rise of the Nation of Islam, the Detroit riot of 1967, the Black Panthers, and the clash over Boston school desegregation. The series features riveting, occasionally violent news footage and interviews with people involved on both sides of the movement.
All the Difference directed by Tod Lending :: This PBS documentary follows two low-income African-American young men from the violence-ridden South Side of Chicago who struggle to beat the odds and complete high school and graduate from college. The documentary offers a close-up look at what helped these two students overcome multiple obstacles and setbacks.
IDEAS FOR OTHER RESOURCES
In Memoriam of Philando Castile :: The Minneapolis-based community-building organization Pollen put together this collage of music, spoken word, art, and poetry as a response to the shooting of Philando Castile. Especially noteworthy for homeschoolers might be the list of resources compiled by Twin Cities spoken word artist and community organizer Guante. That list can also be found here: http://www.guante.info/2016/07/a-few-resources-links-and-readings.html
YOUR LOCAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY
One thing I didn’t want to do with my son was pretend that racism and civil rights abuses were only a southern problem. Up here in the Twin Cities, one of our most painful legacies is the fate of St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood, a thriving, vibrant African-American community that officials obliterated to make way for Interstate 94.
The same kind of destruction happened in many other cities, including Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Baltimore. The Minnesota Historical Society recently organized a bus and walking tour featuring Rondo history that my son and I were able to participate in. It was a great way for us to learn about the continuing effects of racism and meet people who’d been affected by losing their homes and businesses in the name of progress. A Google search of a phrase such as “How interstates damaged black neighborhoods” yields a plethora of articles. With just a little bit of digging, I suspect you could find similar stories and opportunities for investigation close to home, too—or if you already know about these stories, I’ll bet there are ways you and your family can take an even closer look at the racist legacies in your own back yard and on the roads you travel every day.
History at the Movies: A Prohibition Movie List
The passage of the 18th Amendment kicked off a weird and interesting period of U.S. history. These movies bring that period to life.
The passage of the 18th Amendment kicked off a weird and interesting period of U.S. history. These movies bring that period to life.
The Idle Class
Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 satire about a society lady who accidentally brings home the Little Tramp instead of her hard-partying husband (an understandable oops since Chaplin plays both the Tramp and the husband) gets right to the point: It’s the rich elite who waste their productive hours drinking illegal cocktails and dancing the night away, while the lower classes keep slogging at the factories, offices, and family homes.
The Roaring Twenties
In this gritty 1939 drama, it’s World War I that shapes both the excess and violence of the 1920s. The two main characters — good guy turned bootlegger Jimmy Cagney and his tough frenemy Humphrey Bogart first meet in the trenches and then again in the New York Prohibition scene. There’s no happy ending, just a chilling reminder that “at some distant date, we will be confronted with another period similar to the one depicted.”
Some Like It Hot
Though it was released in 1959, Some Like It Hot brings the turbulent 20s to life, especially the shifting position of women as seen through the eyes of Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe). Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon play two musicians who get on the wrong side of the mob and decide the best defense is a good disguise: They don the ubiquitous flapper garb and hook up with Sugar’s jazz band. Much fun and wackiness ensue, but the larger-than-life, heartsore 1920s is the backdrop.
The Untouchables
Brian De Palma’s 1987 classic takes on the criminal element of Prohibition, focusing on Elliot Ness and the FBI team tasked with taking down infamous gangster Al Capone. The train station scene has become a class in cinematography, but the movie perfectly captures the simmering violence always lurking beneath the flash and jazz of the 1920s.
The Thin Man
Nick and Nora Charles’s nonstop martini-drinking seems like it should seriously impair their detective abilities, but in this 1934 film, alcohol fuels everything for the very-very rich amateur detectives, whose main goal seems to be to look fabulous whatever insane situation comes their way.
This list is excerpted from the Prohibition unit study in the winter 2020 issue of HSL.
I Spy a Unit Study
This winter is the perfect time to take a chronological deep dive into some of history's most celebrated spies.
This winter is the perfect time to take a chronological deep dive into some of history's most celebrated spies.
Francis Walsingham (ca. 1532–1590)
Queen Elizabeth’s adviser was the first great English spymaster, and the culmination of his secret intelligence work was the frame-up, capture, and execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1586. Most of Walsingham’s efforts were directed against the Catholics, whom Walsingham, a staunch Protestant who vividly remembered the Protestant purges initiated by Elizabeth’s sister and predecessor, feared and mistrusted. Walsingham organized a spy network that would impress modern day intelligence agents, complete with forgers who could copy any seal, an army of letter interceptors, complex ciphers to protect his own mail, and spies everywhere.
Read This: The Queen’s Agent: Francis Walsingham at the Court of Elizabeth I by John Cooper
Benjamin Tallmadge (1778)
The so-called Culper Ring, led by Benjamin Tallmadge, tracked Tory troop activities in British-occupied New York City by actually joining Tory militias, feeding crucial information to the colonial army. They’re also credited with helping to bring down Benedict Arnold.
Read This: Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose
Mary Elizabeth Bowser (1860s)
Mary Bowser joined the Richmond Underground, a movement that worked to get enslaved people, Union prisoners, and Confederate deserters out of occupied Richmond, Virginia. When she managed to get work at the Confederate White House, Bowser was able to pass important confidential information on to the Union.
Read This: Spy on History: Mary Bowser and the Civil War Spy Ring by Enigma Alberti and Tony Cliff
Belle Boyd (1860s)
The Confederates had their spies, too, and 17-year-old Maria Isabella Boyd was one of them. Under guard for shooting a drunken Union solider who had insulted her and her mother, Belle charmed secret information out of her guard and passed it on to the Confederate troops.
Read This: Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War by Karen Abbott
Sidney Reilly (1890s-1925)
The “Ace of Spies” was the model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. The handsome, womanizing Russian-born British agent spied on 1890s Russian emigrants in London, in Manchuria on the cusp of the Russo-Japanese War, and participated in an attempted 1918 coup d’etat against Lenin’s Soviet government. Reilly disappeared in the Stalinist Soviet Russia of the 1920s.
Watch This: Reilly: Ace of Spies
Margarethe Zelle (1914-1917)
Better known as Mata Hari, Zelle became one of the most famous spies in history even though chances are pretty good that she never actually did any spying: She was recruited by the French and by the Germans, both of whom saw potential in her globe-trotting work as an exotic dancer, but she doesn’t appear to have given any intelligence to anyone. Still, when the Germans outed her as a double agent, the French had her arrested and executed tout suite, despite a lack of actual evidence.
Read This: Femme Fatale: A New Biography of Mata Hari by Pat Shipman
Virginia Hall (1930s-1940s)
“The limping lady” — so named because she’d shot herself in the foot and 1932 and replaced her amputated lower leg with a prosthetic limb — volunteered her services as a spy in occupied France, coordinating the activities of the Resistance under cover as a correspondent for the New York Post. Hall’s prosthetic foot, which she named Cuthbert, provided a convenient hiding place when smuggling top secret documents.
Read This: The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy by Judith L. Pearson
Klaus Fuchs (1940s-1950s)
Fuchs was a nuclear physicist who left Germany in 1933 to come to England, where he worked on “Tube Alloys,” the British atomic bomb project, before joining the Manhattan Project in the United States. Fuchs hated the Nazis, but he had complicated feelings about the post World War II world — which led him to feed information to contacts in the Soviet Union. Fuchs was arrested for espionage in the 1950s and imprisoned.
Read This: The Spy Who Changed the World: Klaus Fuchs, Physicist and Soviet Double Agent by Mark Rossiter
Melita Norwood (1962-1999)
Norwood worked as the assistant to the director at a British atomic research center for 37 years before her employers realized that she’d been passing secret information from her job on to the Soviets the whole time she’d worked there. By that time, Norwood was an 87-year-old grandmother, whose 1999 arrest made headlines and shocked everyone who knew her — including her family.
Watch This: Red Joan
Expand your study further with these spy books for kids:
Spy Science: 40 Secret-Sleuthing, Code-Cracking, Spy-Catching Activities for Kids by Jim Wiese
How to be an International Spy: Your Training Manual, Should You Choose to Accept It by Lonely Planet Kids
DK Eyewitness Books: Spy: Discover the World of Espionage from the Early Spymasters to the Electronic Surveillance of Today by Richard Platt
World War II Spies (You Choose: World War II) by Michael Burgan
50 Books for 50 States
Read your way across the United States with a book for every state in the union.
Read your way across the United States with a book for every state in the union.
Alabama
Inside Out & Back Again BY THANHHA LAI
Alabama comes to life through the eyes of Hà, a Vietnamese immigrant whose family leaves everything familiar in Saigon to make a new life away from the Vietnam War. And it’s not easy — Alabama may not have soldiers on the street corners, but it has people who make fun of Hà’s accent and appearance, adults who don’t seem to understand that you can miss your home even if it isn’t a safe place, and food and culture that feel totally unfamiliar. I love the way the free verse structure of this book echoes the way that learning a new language can feel — metaphors and allusions make up the gap between the words we know and the words we're still learning.
Alaska
Sweet Home Alaska BY CAROLE ESTBY DAGG
It’s 1934, and in an effort to develop Alaska and improve lives during the Great Depression, President Roosevelt has offered farmer families the opportunity to start a new life in an Alaskan colony. Thirteen-year-old Terpsichore has grown up reading the Little House series and convinces her struggling family to seize the opportunity to start a new life where all her book-learned pioneer knowledge will prove to be a handy resource.
Arizona
Saving Lucas Biggs BY MARISA DE LOS SANTOS AND DAVID TEAGUE
When her father is sentenced to death (on the first page of the book!), 13-year-old Margaret uses her family’s ability to travel back in time through the history of her Arizona mining town to understand why Judge Lucas Biggs has targeted her father — and how she can change the past in order to return to a different future.
Arkansas
Where the Red Fern Grows BY WILSON RAWLS
Go into this story of Billy’s backwoods childhood and the two dogs who are his best friends knowing it’s a tear-jerker. Billy’s farm is in the Ozarks, which sprawl from Arkansas to Oklahoma and which remain a largely rural area even in the 21st century.
California
One Crazy Summer BY RITA WILLIAMS-GARCIA
It’s the summer of 1968, and three sisters from Alabama are spending it in Oakland, California with their artist mother. Their mother is more interested in her own life than in her kids and sends them off to a summer camp run by the Black Panthers. Williams-Garcia is at her best writing the relationship between the book’s three sisters, but she also conjures a vivid image of what life was like for northern California’s Black community during the 1970s.
Colorado
Father and I Were Ranchers BY RALPH MOODY
Flashback to turn-of-the-20th-century Colorado through the eyes of 8-year-old Ralph, who moves from New Hampshire with his family to start a “dirt ranch” in the Colorado foothills. Ralph learns how to be a rancher at his father’s side, and when the time comes, he’s ready to take over the work of ranching himself.
Connecticut
Night Of The Moonjellies BY MARK SHASHA
In this quiet picture book, 7-year-old Mark spends the day helping at his family’s hot dog stand at the Connecticut, and when night comes, he finds the perfect place to release the mysterious jelly creature he found on the way there.
Delaware
The Book of Unknown Americans BY CRISTINA HENRIQUEZ
Maribel’s family has a new home in a Delaware apartment block. They’ve immigrated from Mexico and everything they know, hoping that the United States will hold the cure for Maribel’s traumatic brain injury. Mayor Toro, the son of Panamanian immigrants living in the same complex, develops a deep relationship with Maribel, but the suspicion and uncertainty of immigrant life makes things complicated.
Florida
Chomp BY CARL HIAASEN
The Everglades are the latest destination for "Expedition Survival!," and Wahoo and his animal trainer dad have the increasingly difficult job of keeping the show’s clueless-about-animals star from getting mauled, maimed, or otherwise destroyed by the Florida swamp’s wildlife.
Georgia
Truth with a Capital T BY BETHANY HEGEDUS
Maebelle is crushed when she’s bumped out of her school’s gifted-and-talented program, and she’s counting on a summer at her grandparents’ antebellum Georgia mansion to cheer her up. Instead, she finds a talented cousin and a locked room mystery that only she can solve.
Hawaii
Night of the Howling Dogs BY GRAHAM SALISBURY
A Boy Scout camping trip on the Big Island goes awry when an earthquake strikes, causing a tsunami. Dylan and Louie team up in this adventure, which captures the beauty and danger of the Hawaiian wilderness and some of the nuances of Hawaiian culture and tradition. Amazingly, it's based on a true story that happened to a group of young campers in 1975.
Idaho
Walk Two Moons BY SHANNON CREECH
On a road trip with her grand- parents from Ohio to Idaho, 13-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle spins a story for her grandparents about the mysterious disappearance of her new friend’s mother. Sal is on her way to visit her own mother’s final resting place in Lewiston, Idaho, and her story spinning starts to intersect more and more with her own life.
Illinois
The Ambrose Deception BY EMILY ECTON
Chicago becomes a giant game board in this book about three middle schoolers competing for a mysterious scholarship that sends them around the city following cryptic clues to city landmarks. Of course, the shadowy figures behind the competition may be up to more than an innocent scavenger hunt.
Indiana
The Fault in Our Stars BY JOHN GREEN
When they aren’t on a quest to Amsterdam, Hazel and Gus call Indianapolis home: The action in these teen love-story-tearjerker takes place at 100 Acres at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Castleton Square Mall, Holiday Park... and Crown Hill Cemetery.
Iowa
Tomás and the Library Lady BY PAT MORA
In this warm picture book, a transplanted-from-Texas boy who has come with his family to do seasonal work finds his Iowa home at the library, where a kind librarian gives him books — but also compassion, support, and the occasional glass of cold water. (Tomás is based on the real-life Tomás Rivera, who would grow up to become the chancellor of the University of California at Riverside.)
Kansas
May B. BY CAROLINE STARR ROSE
In this novel-in-verse, 12-year- old May B.’s parents hire her out to a homesteading couple on the Kansas prairie. She’s already upset about missing months of school, where she struggles but dreams of becoming a teacher, and lonely without her family, when she realizes that she’s been abandoned, 15 miles from home with winter bearing down on her. As May’s story becomes a tale of survival and inner strength, this book takes its place with other 19th century pioneer stories like Little House on the Prairie and Hattie Big Sky, as a novel that captures the beauty and danger of the wild in the west.
Kentucky
Chasing Redbird BY SHARON CREECH
I usually try not to duplicate authors on my lists, but I’m making an exception for Sharon Creech and this heart- wrenching story about a girl coming to terms with the loss of two people she loved. The Kentucky woods — and an ancient trail she discovers in them — play an important role in Zinny’s story.
Louisiana
A Place Where Hurricanes Happen BY RENÉE WATSON
The mixed media illustrations and free-verse storytelling make this story of Hurricane Katrina compelling for young readers. Adrienne, Keesha, Michael, and Tommy have lived on the same street in New Orleans for their whole lives, but everything changes after the hurricane strikes. The kids’ perspective brings a fresh hopefulness to this true story.
Maine
Welcome Home or Someplace Like It BY CHARLOTTE AGELL
Aggie and Thorne are used to getting dropped off in random places by their writer-mother, so it’s no surprise when she leaves them with their estranged grandfather in the quirky hamlet of Ludwig, Maine. Aggie is surprised when this strange and temporary place starts to feel like home. (Bonus points to this book for highlighting that classic soda of Maine life: Moxie!)
Maryland
Dicey's Song BY CYNTHIA VOIGT
In this sequel to Homecoming, Dicey and her siblings find a home with their grandmother on a rundown farm on Chesapeake Bay. Dicey, who is used to carrying the responsibilities her mentally ill mother can’t handle, doesn’t know what to do with herself now that she is free to be a regular teenager.
Massachusetts
Make Way for Ducklings BY ROBERT MCCLOSKEY
Boston landmarks are the backdrop for this classic picture book about a family of ducks on their way to the Public Gardens.
Michigan
Bud, Not Buddy BY CHRISTOPHER PAUL CURTIS
Ten-year-old Bud is in Flint, Michigan on the trail of his long-lost father, who he’s convinced plays in a band whose posters he’s seen in his mom’s things. Depression-era Michigan is a tough place for a boy on the run, but Bud’s a tough boy, and he’s determined to change his life for the better.
Minnesota
Emily of Deep Valley BY MAUD HART LOVELACE
Unlike Lovelace’s other heroines, Emily is a loner without a big, busy family. Instead, she lives with her beloved grand- father, taking care of him and trying to model her life after her hero Jane Addams. In that spirit, she finds a surprising sense of connection and be- longing when she starts working with the growing population of Syrian immigrants in her neighborhood.
Mississippi
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry BY MILDRED D. TAYLOR
This book perfectly captures the racial tensions in 1930s Mississippi, which means it’s not always an easy book to read. Racism stinks. But the Logans are a caring, intelligent, inspiring family to spend some time with, and talking about racism with our kids is more important now than ever.
Missouri
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer BY MARK TWAIN
No one captures the small town, old-fashioned charm of childhood in rural Missouri the way Mark Twain does. Nobody likes Tom Sawyer, who’s all privilege and swagger, but it’s impossible not to enjoy his antics. Importantly, this book also captures some of the racism against Native Americans that permeated U.S. history, making it a great conversation starter for your family.
Montana
The Miseducation of Cameron Post BY EMILY DANFORTH
After her parents die in a car accident, still-in-the-closet Cam moves to Montana to live with her very old-fashioned grandmother and aunt. She’s determined to just blend in, but then she meets the cowgirl of her dreams, and she realizes that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life hiding who she really is.
Nebraska
Savvy BY INGRID LAW
Everyone in the Beaumont family has a superpower — Grandpa can move mountains. Fish can control the weather. And almost-13-year- old Mibs is about to discover her own superpower when word comes that her beloved Poppa has been in an accident. Mibs travels through the Nebraska countryside to reach her father, convinced that her still-to-be-revealed power can save him.
Nevada
Riding Freedom BY PAM MUÑOZ RYAN
Charlotte is supposed to be a proper Victorian-era young lady, but she’d rather just hang out with horses. After being raised in a boys’ orphanage, the idea of settling into the role of a young lady is enough to drive her to an inspired solution: She’ll disguise herself as a boy and run away to Nevada to become a horse rancher.
New Hampshire
The Enormous Egg BY OLIVER BUTTERWORTH
In Freedom, New Hampshire, a very unusual egg hatches into a baby dinosaur — and suddenly, the cozy little 1950s town is front-page news every- where. The little town of freedom is a picture-perfect flashback to the kind of small New England town that we still look back at nostalgically (even as we realize that it might not have actually existed for most people).
New Jersey
Ms. Marvel, Vol. 1: No Normal BY G. WILLOW WILSON
Kamala’s parents are super-strict Muslim immigrants, but Kamala’s just your average Jersey City girl — until she walks into a strange mist and emerges with shape-shifting super powers.
New Mexico
Kepler's Dream BY JULIET BELL
While her mother is in the hospital receiving an experimental cancer treatment, Ella has to go stay with her buttoned-up, book-obsessed grandmother in Albuquerque. Ella’s not sure how she’ll survive the heat, the boredom, or the endless list of rules — much less worrying about what’s happening with her mom. Then a book disappears from her grandmother’s be- loved library, and Ella teams up with a new friend to solve the mystery and get her grandmother's book back.
New York
The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street BY KARINA YAN GLASER
Five kids, two parents, and a host of pets call the first two floors of a Harlem brownstone home — and they can’t imagine living anywhere else. So when their landlord declines to renew their lease, Jessie, Isa, Oliver, Hyacinth, and Laney are determined to convince him that he’s making a big mistake. I love the way this book brings the small-town-in- a-big-city feel of Harlem to life.
North Carolina
Serafina and the Black Cloak BY ROBERT BEATTY
Serafina lives (secretly) in the basement of the Biltmore Estate with her grandfather, who is Vanderbilt family’s maintenance man. When children begin disappearing from the house, Serafina and her friend young Braeden Vanderbilt risk the perils of the surrounding forest to investigate — but the forest is full of secrets.
North Dakota
Apple In the Middle BY DAWN QUIGLEY
Apple is nonplussed to spend a summer on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation with her late mother’s family, but her dad doesn’t give her much of a choice. As Apple learns about her Native heritage — and comes to appreciate its emphasis on family, faith, nature, and humor — she also learns more about the mother she never knew and about herself.
Ohio
Unwind BY NEAL SHUSTERMAN
Ohio is the backdrop for this speculative fiction novel in which abortion is illegal but parents can “unwind” their teens’ lives between age 13 and 18 as long as their organs are donated to another person. Three kids scheduled to be unwound go on the lam across Ohio, determined to stay undercover until they turn 18 and can no longer be terminated.
Oklahoma
The Outsiders BY S.E. HINTON
The Greasers and the Socs face off in 1960s in Tulsa in this classic coming-of-age story about class, friendship, and hope. Teenage Ponyboy is a working class kid who gets caught up in the escalating violence between the city’s two socioeconomic factions. This was one of the first books to feature a teen protagonist with an authentic voice, and it’s been banned as often as it’s been praised since it was published.
Oregon
Roller Girl BY VICTORIA JAMIESON
Astrid’s roller derby team practices in Portland’s Oaks Park, and she’s determined to make her mark on the team, even though she’s not the best skater and even though her best friend doesn’t seem interested in being best friends anymore. This graphic novel charts a tough season in the life of a middle schooler, but Astrid’s persistence — and a little support from the people who love her — carries the day.
Pennsylvania
Maniac Magee BY JERRY SPINELLI
Jeffrey Magee achieves folk hero status in Two Mills, Pennsylvania, thanks to his amazing athletic abilities, but that doesn’t protect him from racism or the problems of growing up in poverty. This is an odd little book that bounces between slapstick and heartstring-tugging, but somehow, it all works.
Rhode Island
The Amazing Adventures of John Smith, Jr., a.k.a. Houdini BY PETER JOHNSON
John’s friends call him Houdini because he’s obsessed with magic, but he finds a new ob- session when an author visits his school in the rundown part of Providence. Houdini finds that his adventures with his friends make good literary fodder, but it’s harder to write about his dad’s job loss or his brother’s military PTSD.
South Carolina
Brown Girl Dreaming BY JACQUELINE WOODSON
The contrast between life as a young Black girl in 1960s in South Carolina and Brooklyn, New York, is the heart of this lyrical memoir in verse, based on Woodson’s own life. It’s simple enough to read with an elementary student, but it’s rich enough to be a rewarding read with a high schooler, too.
South Dakota
The Trickster and the Troll BY VIRGINIA DRIVING HAWK SNEVE
The cultural convergence is part of what makes North Dakota so interesting, and this picture book — featuring a Lakota trickster and a Norwegian troll — captures both. While trying to track down his recently immigrated family from Norway, a troll meets Iktomi, whose people have also gone missing.
Tennessee
A Snicker of Magic BY NATALIE LLOYD
There’s been no magic in Midnight Gulch, Tennessee, since the Brothers Threadbare left the town drained of magic and under a curse. Newcomer Felicity doesn't really care, though, since she’s never lived anywhere long enough to feel at home. But when she discovers an ability that suggests Midnight Gulch could be her real home, she’s determined to get to the roots of the town’s magical problem.
Texas
Love, Sugar, Magic: A Dash of Trouble BY ANNA MERIANO
Leo’s always getting told she’s too young to help with her family’s Rose Hill, Texas, bakery, but she’s thrilled when she accidentally discovers that her mom, aunt, and big sisters are all pastry brujas with the power to mix magic into everything they bake. Leo thinks that seems pretty cool — so cool that when her best friend comes to her with a problem, Leo decides to whip up a magical solution for her.
Utah
The Great Brain BY JOHN D. FITZGERALD
Tom — a.k.a. the Great Brain — and his brothers get up to all kinds of mischief in 1896, shortly after Utah officially joined the United States. The Great Brain isn’t a nice kid, exactly, but he’s a very entertain- ing one — and his stories paint a vivid picture of turn-of-the- 20th-century Utah.
Vermont
Witness BY KAREN HESSE
In this powerful novel-in-verse, 11 different characters tell the story of the year the Klu Klux Klan arrives in a small Vermont town, changing its in- habitants’ lives forever. Though the (true) story is set in 1924, readers will identify with the choice between fear and acceptance that permeated this book.
Virginia
Bridge to Terabithia BY KATHERINE PATERSON
Jess doesn’t love much about his life in rural Virginia until Leslie moves in next door and teaches him to see the world in new ways. This tearjerker classic about a boy and girl who imagine a magical world in the Virginia wilderness is a moving meditation on friendship, belonging, and identity.
Washington
Jackie's Wild Seattle BY WILL HOBBS
When their parents head overseas for the summer to work with Doctors Without Borders, Cody and Shannon stay in Seattle with their uncle, who drives the ambulance for a local wildlife rescue center. When their uncle is injured by a rescued hawk, the kids take over his job, and Seattle be- comes a backdrop for their animal adventures.
West Virginia
Shiloh BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
When Shiloh runs away from his abusive owner, Marty finds him and immediately knows the beagle is meant to be his dog. Marty's determined to keep Shiloh — and keep him safe — but in his rural West Virginia town, stealing someone else’s dog is something you shouldn’t do. Marty finds himself asking hard questions about what the right thing to do is when it feels like the rules should be broken.
Wisconsin
The Westing Game BY ELLEN RASKIN
A shiny new apartment building on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan is the setting for this classic mystery, in which an unconnected group of residents find they have a mystery in common. The millionaire Sam Westing has been murdered in his nearby mansion, and the resident who solves the mystery will inherit the Westing fortune.
Wyoming
My Friend Flicka BY MARY O’HARA
Ten-year-old Ken meets the untrained horse Flicka on his family’s horse ranch in Wyoming. As Ken trains Flicka, he gains confidence and comes to understand himself and his family better. The wildness and wide open spaces of Wyoming are almost a secondary character in the story.
This reading list was originally published in the fall 2019 issue of HSL.
Unit Study: The Legend of Blackbeard
The notorious English pirate was captured and killed by the forces of the Governor of Virginia more than 300 years ago this November, but his story is as fascinating as ever.
The notorious English pirate was captured and killed by the forces of the Governor of Virginia more than 300 years ago this November, but his story is as fascinating as ever.
Canons and gunfire broke the silence of Ocracoke Island in the early morning hours of November 18, 1718. The pirate Blackbeard’s ship had been ambushed unawares, but pirates are always ready for a fight, and for several hours, it seemed that the battle could go either way. In the end, though, the sloop Adventure couldn’t maneuver around the British fleet that surrounded it, and the notorious Blackbeard was dead. Royal Navy lieutenant Robert Maynard returned to port in triumph, with the pirate’s decapitated head swinging from his ship’s bowsprit.
Believe it or not, this story is only the tip of the iceberg: Blackbeard — who was probably originally christened Edward Thach or Teach — lived a life of drama befitting a, well, pirate. Likely, the man who would become Blackbeard — so called because of his long black beard — started out as a privateer, essentially a pirate who answered to the British government, but like many privateers, Thach realized that being his own master would be more lucrative than working for the royal government. Some of the stories you’ve heard about the infamous criminal are true — he really did light matches under his hat to give him a demonic appearance in battle, and he successfully blockaded the port of Charleston to get a chest of medical supplies — but the real-life history of Blackbeard is as interesting as any invention.
Read This
ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE
For a simple, concise introduction to Blackbeard’s life and times, pick up Who Was Blackbeard? by James Buckley.
OK, there’s actually no evidence that Blackbeard (or, indeed, the majority of pirates) ever buried treasure — the event that pulls three time-traveling boys into Blackbeard’s wake in The Not-So-Jolly Roger by Jon Scieszka — but it’s easy to give a little suspension of disbelief to this wickedly funny pirate adventure.
The snappy, infographic-filled Pirates by Brian Williams is designed for flip-and-dip readers — you can learn a lot just scanning the pages for the bits that interest you.
HIGH SCHOOL
The captivating The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard is a great place to start a more engaged study of Blackbeard. Woodard focuses on the Golden Age of Piracy, in which Blackbeard and peers established organized government, and on former privateer Woodes Rogers, who helps bring down the developing pirate empire.
Maritime historian Baylus C. Brooks used DNA databases like Ancestry.com to trace the history of Edward Thrace in Quest for Blackbeard: The True Story of Edward Thache and His World, making a fairly convincing argument that the Jamaican resident — son of Capt. Edward and Elizabeth Thache — is the historical Blackbeard. Brooks turns a critical eye on pirate legend, trying to objectively recreate the world of colonial piracy.
If you want a gung-ho history of Blackbeard that paints the pirate as the first real American revolutionary, pick up Blackbeard: The Birth of America by Samuel Marquis. It’s a pro-pirate narrative that wears its biases on its sleeve — which might not be surprising since it’s penned by a descendant of another infamous pirate, Captain Kidd — but it can lend a little perspective to your reading list if you’re planning to read a few books. (Don’t make this your only book, though.)
Watch This
If you want to get a taste of the stereotypical version of Blackbeard, 1952’s Blackbeard the Pirate is a swashbuckling package of pirate nonsense tied up in an entertaining bow. It’s historically accurate only in the sense that it portrays historically hilarious stereotypes about the villains of the high seas.
The 2008 docu-series Real Pirates features Blackbeard along with some of his contemporaries — Captain Kidd, Captain Morgan, Mary Reed, and Anne Bonny — for an interesting look at the wider world of colonial-era piracy.
Do This
Listen to Horrible Histories’ “Blackbeard the Pirate” ditty, which includes verses like:
What my enemies feared
Was my thick, black beard
Which I always enjoyed
setting light to, oh
Play Merchants and Marauders, a board game that lets you choose between a career as a law-abiding merchant or a dastardly buccaneer. Make your fortune through savvy trade, carefully chosen missions, a little risk-taking, and the occasional plunder. (If your clan loves this game, it’s worth springing for the Seas of Glory expansion pack.)
This unit study was originally published in the fall 2018 issue of HSL.
Bite Into a Unit Study on Apples This Fall
October is National Apple Month, which makes now the perfect time to take a bite out of the history of the fruit that started the Trojan war, bestowed immortality on the Norse gods, and featured in works by artists from Emily Dickinson to Magritte.
October is National Apple Month, which makes now the perfect time to take a bite out of the history of the fruit that started the Trojan war, bestowed immortality on the Norse gods, and featured in works by artists from Emily Dickinson to Magritte.
Some sources say that apples originated more than 4,000 years ago in the Middle East in an area called the Caucasus, which is at the border of Europe and Asia, situated between the Black and Caspian Seas, but according to Cornell University’s Albert R. Mann Library, a native apple of Kazakhstan, called Malus sieversii, is the ancestor of today’s apples.
Contrary to popular belief (and artistic renditions by Durer and Titian), the apple probably isn’t the fruit that got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. (Modern scholars blame the pomegranate; Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel points the finger at figs.) The text refers only to “fruit” on the forbidden tree. Apples may have gotten pulled into the mess because of an unfortunate translation error: malus in Latin can mean “apple” or “evil.”
Apples are heterozygous, which means that if you plant an appleseed, the tree that grows won’t have anything in common with the tree that produced it. In evolutionary terms, this is great — it means that apples are endlessly adaptable and diverse, and it helps explain how a few apple trees brought to the New World could turn into apples grown in every state in the United States. In terms of consistent flavor, however, this potential for variation can leave you with apples “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream,” as Thoreau famously said. The only way to ensure consistent apples is by grafting — attaching your preferred apple cultivar to a stock plant so that the vascular cambium tissues of the plants grow together.
John Chapman, of Leominster, Mass., earned the nickname Johnny Appleseed by collecting apple seeds from Pennsylvania cider mills and using them to set up apple nurseries among the settlers in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — Chapman’s seed-grown apples were mostly only good for making an alcoholic version of apple cider, which is why so many of the orchards he started were burned down during the Prohibition movement.
Of course, the apple may actually end up living up to its tawdry reputation as the fruit of knowledge of good and evil: Bio-artist Joe Davis, part of George Church’s Harvard Medical School lab, is working on a project that would incorporate Wikipedia into the apple genome. He’s using a 4,000-year-old variety of M. sieversii, the world’s oldest apple, to test the theory that binary code based on the four nucleotide bases of DNA will allow information to be stored in DNA. It would take an entire orchard to store all of Wikipedia and eating the apple wouldn’t make you smarter, but it’s still a pretty nifty project.
Great Hoaxes in History — and the Real Stories Behind Them
Researching one or two of them is a great way to highlight the appeal of “fake news” — and makes for a fun investigative unit study.
Researching one or two high-level hoaxes is a great way to highlight the effectiveness of “fake news” — and makes for a fun investigative unit study.
Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast — in which he spun the fictional tale of a happening-right-now alien invasion — probably didn’t freak out as many people as legend likes to suggest, but there have other hoaxes that successfully fooled people for years, sometimes centuries. Researching one or two of them is a great way to highlight the effectiveness of “fake news” — and makes for a fun investigative unit study.
Drake’s Plate
An inscribed brass marker left by Sir Francis Drake and the crew of the Golden Hind is one of those finds that must have seemed absolutely too good to be true when it was discovered in North Carolina in 1936. University of California, Berkeley, history professor — and major Drake buff — Herbert Bolton authenticated the plate himself — but when researchers in 1977 analyzed the artifact, they discovered it was a fake. The pranksters owned up: They’d created the plate as a joke on Bolton and didn’t know how to backpedal when he bought it for the Berkeley library collection.
Get the Real Story: You Wouldn't Want to Explore With Sir Francis Drake!: A Pirate You'd Rather Not Know by David Stewart
Archaeoraptor
Remember the Archaeoraptor liaoningensis? For a shining moment in 1999, it seemed like the link between present-day birds and dinosaurs had been discovered when a fossil found in China turned out to have the arms of a primitive bird and a dinosaur tail. National Geographic magazine published a feature on the fossil, which was immediately snapped up by a U.S. dinosaur museum. So plenty of people were embarrassed when the fossil was discovered to have been glued together by an enterprising Chinese farmer who did some fossil hunting in his spare time.
Get the Real Story: “The great dinosaur fossil hoax” (Cosmos)
The Bathtub’s Birthday
We talk a lot about how people share news on social media without ever fact-checking, but this isn’t a new problem: In 1917, journalist H.L. Mencken wanted to call people’s attention to that very gullibility. He published an article called “A Neglected Anniversary,” celebrating the not-at-all-correct anniversary of the modern bathtub with a lot of made-up “facts.” The joke was on Mencken, though — newspapers continued to reprint the story for years, and people believed the tale of the tub even after Mencken owned up to his trick.
Get the Real Story: Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water-Closet by Lawrence Wright
The Masked Marauders
Musical supergroups were all the rage in the late 1960s, and it’s hard to imagine a weirder and more must-hear collaboration than the Masked Marauders, a group that allegedly featured the vocal talents of Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and (Nobel Prize-winner) Bob Dylan. Greil Marcus invented the band for a Rolling Stone article, thinking that its over-the-top claims to fame (an extended jam between bass guitar and piano with Paul McCartney playing both parts, 18-minute cover songs) would clue people in on the joke. Of course it didn’t— the self-titled debut album (recorded as a spoof ) sold 100,000 copies.
Get the Real Story: “Masked Marauders ‘Supergroup’ Exposed” (Rolling Stone)
(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.) This article originally appeared in the fall 2018 issue of HSL.
Get to Know Abigail Adams
A feminist and an abolitionist, Abigail Adams—wife of one U.S. President and mother of another—was a woman ahead of her time. Learn more about her with this relaxed unit study.
A feminist and an abolitionist, Abigail Adams—wife of one U.S. President and mother of another—was a woman ahead of her time.
“I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in this province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband while he was working on the still-evolving U.S. Constitution. She also pointed out that Adams and the rest of the country’s new leadership had an opportunity to make life a little fairer for women — a suggestion that her husband laughingly dismissed.
Abigail Smith married John Adams in 1764, and the letters they wrote to each other over five decades of marriage read like a history of the young United States. Between 1762 and 1801, the couple wrote more than 1,100 letters, with postmarks from Philadelphia (where John spent most of the Revolution), Europe (where John was an ambassador), New York, Boston, and Braintree, Massachusetts, where Abigail kept the family farm while John’s career took him around the world. “My dearest friend,” Abigail calls her husband, and Lysander, referring to the captain of the Spartan fleet. In the 1770s, she teasingly signs her letters Portia, alluding to the long-suffering wife of the Roman Brutus. In their letters they discuss everything from cattle to philosophy, from politics to smallpox, and Abigail never hesitates to express her opinions. It’s tempting to think about what the United States might have become if women like Abigail Adams had been given a voice in its creation—but while we may lament that lost possibility, there are still plenty of reasons to explore the life of this remarkable woman.
Read This
Elementary: Who Was Abigail Adams? by True Kelly: Don’t let the awful Netflix series put you off these books, which are a solid introduction to historical figures like Adams. This one focuses on homeschooled Adams’ insistence on the importance of education for boys and girls.
Elementary: Abigail Adams: Pirate of the Caribbean by Steve Shenkin: OK, the historical Adams never succumbed to the lure of piracy, but that aside, Shenkin’s twisted history does a great job highlighting the qualities that make Adams so interesting: her intelligence, resourcefulness, and willingness to bend the rules—or at least the societal expectations—for women. In Shenkin’s imagination, Adams decides to get out of the boring White House and onto the high seas.
High School: Abigail Adams: A Life by Woody Holton: Holton focuses on Adams’ early feminism, citing her authority-flouting will (which left her property to her granddaughters even though legally everything she owned was her husband’s), the investments that she made without her husband’s approval, and the reading lessons that she gave a free Black serving boy who worked for one of their neighbors.
High School: Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams by Lynne Withey: Withey celebrates Adams’ feminist innovations, but she also illuminates their very real limits in this biography, which focuses on the relationship between Adams and her husband, a marriage that was a genuine partnership.
High School: First Family by Joseph J. Ellis: Ellis’s Founding Brothers is essential reading for U.S. History, and this joint biography is a good book to balance out the more laudatory biographies of Adams — Ellis isn’t a fan. He emphasizes that she settled comfortably into her career as a wife and helpmeet, and that she often presents herself as a self-sacrificing, neglected wife giving her all to her husband. He also highlights Adams’ support of her husband’s icky Alien and Sedition Acts, which doesn’t match up to her more liberal statements.
High School: My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams edited by Margaret Hogan and James Taylor: Nothing compares to reading Adams’ own words. Though you can read the complete correspondence on the Massachusetts Historical Society website, this is a well-edited collection that offers a unique peek inside life in colonial and revolutionary American and the early days of the United States. It was common to destroy these kinds of personal letters and uncommon to have two such literate writing partners, so this collection is a real treasure.
High School: First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role by Jeanne E. Abrams: The first Presidential wives invented the modern-day First Lady role, and this book is a fascinating look at how Adams, Martha Washington, and Dolley Madison brought their personalities and interests to the position.
High School: The Ninth Daughter by Barbara Hamilton: If you like your history with a healthy dose of historical fiction, this series is a delight: Full of rich period details and peopled with familiar characters, The Ninth Daughter kicks off the Abigail Adams mystery series in 1773, where tension is brewing and John Adams has been accused of murder.
Watch This
John Adams (2008): HBO’s biopic miniseries (based on the David McCullough biography of John Adams) stars Laura Linney as a practical, intelligent Abigail Adams who manages the family home and farm while her husband’s politics take him around the country and the world.
American Experience: John and Abigail Adams (2005): This is pretty standard American Experience fare, but it’s a good introduction to Adams’ life and the turbulent period of U.S. history in which she lived.
Do This
Use The Culinary Lives of John & Abigail Adams: A Cookbook to whip up a meal like the ones the Adamses would have eaten—roast turkey, plum pudding, and strawberry fool. The 54 recipes in this book are pulled from the Adams’ letters and contemporary cookbooks, and the history of the included dishes is interesting in its own right.
Write a letter to friend, detailing your opinions on what you believe to be the most important issues of the present day. Be sure to include plenty of details of your life (what did you eat for lunch? what did you do for fun? what are you reading?).
(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.) This article originally appeared in the fall 2018 issue of HSL.
Learn More about Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Who knew an octogenarian former attorney could become a pop culture sensation? Ginsburg makes a great feminist unit study.
Who knew an octogenarian former attorney could become a pop culture sensation? That probably wasn’t President Clinton’s plan when he appointed the gender equality and women’s rights activist to the Supreme Court in 1993, but 25 years later, Ginsburg is one of the court’s most recognized justices.
READ THIS
Ginsburg is one of one hundred women featured in Bad Girls Throughout History: 100 Remarkable Women Who Changed the World, a collective biography that might deserve a spot on your bookshelf.
Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg started out as a Tumblr blog focused on the justice’s feisty, fiery dissents, inspired by the fact that Justice Ginsburg made a point of reading her dissents from the bench instead of politely publishing them for private consumption. The resulting book is a quirky mix of biography, scrapbook, and legal commentary, but the best part is definitely its chronicling of the pop culture art (from tattoos to surrealist watercolors) that Ginsburg has inspired.
Ginsburg’s dissents are also the focus of I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark. Even older readers will appreciate this picture book biography, which includes information about Ginsburg’s work on the Court as well as her childhood, when the left-handed student protested being forced to write with her right hand and objected to being steered into home economics classes when she really wanted to take shop.
To read some of Ginsburg’s impassioned dissents for yourself, visit the Ruth Bader Ginsburg Reading List at the Library at Washington and Lee University. Sure, there are some legal complexities, but for the most part, you’ll be surprised by how readable and comprehensible Ginsburg’s legal writing is.
And finally, find out what Ginsburg thinks about everything from depictions of lawyers in opera to legal problems with wiretapping in My Own Words. The collection includes a broad selection of Ginsburg’s essays and opinions, from her days as a Cornell undergrad to her current role as Supreme Court justice.
WATCH THIS
The 2018 documentary RBG celebrates Ginsburg's early activism, focusing on her early (and largely successful) efforts to redress gender gaps in business and public policy by arguing that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause applied to women. This may not seem controversial now, but it was groundbreaking at the time, and the film’s emotional resonance and buoyant spirit is a welcome note in challenging political times.
(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.) This was originally published in the summer 2018 issue of HSL.
How We Do It: 4 Ways to Teach U.S. Pioneer History
Tackling this period of U.S. history as homeschoolers can be a rewarding experience since you have all the freedom to move outside the textbook and really dive into the complicated history, sociology, and geography of the West. We asked four homeschool families how they studied pioneer history, and we love their answers!
The idea that the United States was somehow destined to spread “from sea to shining sea” is often a philosophical cornerstone of U.S. history, with manifest destiny problematically tangled with the notion of the American dream. Tackling this period of U.S. history as homeschoolers can be a rewarding experience since you have all the freedom to move outside the textbook and really dive into the complicated history, sociology, and geography of the West. We asked four homeschool families how they studied pioneer history.
AS A MONTH-LONG ROAD TRIP
“It’s one thing to talk about the prairie and another thing to see it in person — it really is like a giant ocean of grass. I decided that our family would spend our month-long summer camping trip headed west, just like early pioneers.”
What we used: To gear up for the trip, we watched the PBS documentary The West, and I scoped out the relevant Junior Ranger badge information at the sites where we planned to stop.
Our route: We made reservations for a few places and left some days open for spontaneous exploration, which has always been a good combination for us. We followed the Nebraska Pioneer Trail, stopping at the Oregon National Historic Trail, the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer, the Willa Cather State Historic Site, Buffalo Bill Ranch State Historical Park, and other spots.
Major output: We kept a family journal of our trip that all of took turns writing and drawing in along the way.
—C.H.*
FROM THE OTHER PERSPECTIVE
“When we watched Get Out, my daughter had the idea to turn our study of westward expansion into a horror movie about an invasion. We skipped all the pioneer diaries and Oregon Trail romance and stuck to resources that focused on the lives of people in Native American nations during the age of pioneers.”
What we used: A lot of primary sources (including the Cherokee Constitution), Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and Joseph Bruhac’s Our Stories Remember: American Indian History, Culture, and Values through Storytelling.
Field trip: The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian was awesome.
Major output: My daughter wrote a historical fiction screenplay from the perspective of a Chippewa girl.
—K.F.*
THROUGH PRIMARY SOURCES
“History books make it seem like western expansion is some kind of inevitable achievement, but if you go back to the writings of the time, there were a lot more questions than answers. We wanted our history to focus on how people made sense of pioneer life while it was happening.”
What we used: Lots and lots of diaries — especially diaries kept by women pioneers. Our college has a fantastic archive, so we actually got to request access to some actual pioneer diaries, and we attended a lecture series put together by a local historian.
Other resources: Reading all of these primary sources really made us see historical fiction like My Antonia and Little House on the Prairie in a new light.
Major output: My son wrote a research paper about how what women cooked reflected the increasing civilization of Iowa, using primary sources.
—K.T.*
WITH GAMING
“My kids have been playing Dungeons & Dragons since they could roll a die, so when I told them about the Oregon Trail computer game we used to play when I was in school, they came up with the idea of doing an Oregon Trail-themed roleplaying game for their history project, I knew we were going to have a lot of fun.”
What we used: We read a lot of nonfiction about the Oregon Trail (If You Were a Kid on the Oregon Trail, Voices from the Oregon Trail, If You Traveled West in a Covered Wagon). We also found a tabletop version of the Oregon Trail game that we played together.
Beyond the game: I’d never realized how little Native Americans get talked about in pioneer history, and this unit inspired us to spend next year studying Native American history.
Major output: Our Oregon Trail game has become a fun part of our regular family game night rotation.
—K.E.
* We use initials for online publication to respect the privacy of the nice people who help us with our stories!
(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.) This article was originally published in the summer 2019 issue of HSL.
Little Unit Study: Learn More About Libraries
Homeschoolers and libraries go together like Junior Mints and popcorn. That’s why a little library unit study makes the perfect homeschool project.
Homeschoolers and libraries go together like Junior Mints and popcorn. That’s why a little library unit study makes the perfect homeschool project.
Since you’re practically funding it with all those fines (please tell me it’s not just me!) and you could legitimately refer to it as your family’s “vacation house,” doesn’t it just make sense to learn a little more about the library?
READ THIS
The Library: An Illustrated History by Stuart A.P. Murphy is a comprehensive introduction to library history. Older kids might like it as a readaloud, but it’s also a resource for parents looking for those little tidbits (before the invention of the printing press, librarians would chain books to their shelves to prevent theft) that make history come alive.
For a quick, succinct look at library history, check out Survivor: The History of the Library, a History magazine article focused on how libraries survived for centuries against the odds.
TRY THIS
Make a card catalog of your schoolbooks, including cards for author, title, and subject for easier reference. Sure, card catalogs are computerized now, but the old-fashioned art of book organization can help you keep school shelves under control.
Bring a notebook on your next library trip, and let your kids map the children’s section. Then you can check the map to see where to look for the books on next week’s list. If your kids are older or more ambitious, they can map the entire library.
Put together a library scavenger hunt, where seekers hunt for things like a book with knitting patterns, a collection of fairy tales, a book about how to take care of cats, or a black-and- white movie.
Learning the Dewey Decimal System is a rite of passage for young library patrons. Middle Tennessee State University's Let’s Do Dewey guide is designed to help college-student librarians return books to their rightful homes, so it's full of helpful tips and practical advice.
KNOW THIS
Kids may be surprised to learn that some of their favorite authors—including Lewis Carroll, Madeleine L’Engle, and Joanna Cole were librarians. Parents will appreciate the fact that Casanova worked as a librarian. (No wonder he got all the girls.)
Flavorwire’s roundup of strange looking libraries around the world includes the bizarrely modern Aberdeen University Library and the rhombicuboctahedron-shaped National Library of Belarus.
(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)
Women in History: Dolley Madison
Pretty much all our ideas about what the First Lady of the United States should be come from James Madison’s lovely and vivacious wife.
Pretty much all our ideas about what the First Lady of the United States should be come from James Madison’s lovely and vivacious wife. Celebrate the 250th anniversary of Dolley Madison’s birth this year by learning more about the woman who did a lot more than rescue George Washington’s portrait from the White House.
Plucky Mrs. Madison had already served as the White House hostess for widower Thomas Jefferson before her husband became the fourth President of the United States in 1809. She threw great parties, but she really captured the spirit of the young United States during the War of 1812 when she refused to evacuate the newly built White House during a British attack until the Redcoats were on their way to the city — and even then, Mrs. Madison kept her head, rescuing George Washington’s portrait and a copy of the Declaration of Independence on her way to safety. No one is certain whether the historical anecdote about President Zachary Taylor using “the First Lady” for the first time to describe Madison at her 1849 funeral is true, but the phrase began to enter the popular vocabulary after her death, suggesting that Madison certainly contributed to the ideas of what a U.S. leader’s wife should be like.
WATCH THIS
American Experience: Dolley Madison
Dolley definitely gets heroine treatment in this standard American Experience documentary, but it also touches on more complicated issues, including problematic treatment of slaves. It’s a fascinating look at the early days of Washington. D.C., when the nation’s capital was a ramshackle city in the process of being built, and at the woman who created the idea of the First Lady.
READ THIS
Women Who Broke the Rules: Dolley Madison by Kathleen Krull
The tagline of this book — “Parties can be patriotic!” — makes it clear that this biography’s focus is on Madison’s role in early Washington politics. Her networking dinners at the White House may have changed form, but there’s no question they’ve remained an essential part of U.S. political life. (Elementary)
A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation by Catherine Allgor
This biography offers a fascinating look at why the “women’s work” Dolley Madison did had such profound political implications, demonstrating how frivolous activities like shopping and throwing parties actually helped shape the develop- ing U.S. political system. (Allgor’s follow-up biography Dolley Madison: The Problem of National Unity, which focuses on the Madisons’ joint efforts to promote civil bipartisanship, is also worth a read.) (High school)
The Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison edited by David B. Mattern
This book lets Dolley tell her own stories, from her life with her first husband in Philadelphia to her later difficult widowhood in 1840s Washington, D.C. (Money was such an issue that the former First Lady sold many of her late husband’s papers to cover expenses.) Madison’s distinctive personality shines through these letters, which help to illuminate her role in the nation’s political structures and standards. (High school)
First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role by Jeanne E. Abrams
Dolley Madison couldn’t vote for her husband when he ran for President, but like Martha Washington and Abigail Adams before her, Madison contributed much to the notion of what the U.S. President’s role should be. This book is a fascinating look at the women who helped shape U.S. politics through their relationship with it, and it’s even more interesting to note that the debate about what a First Lady should and shouldn’t do and be is one that continues 200-plus years later. (High school)
Dolley by Rita Mae Brown
This historical fiction book about Madison’s life is thoroughly researched and full of historical details. Brown sees Madison as an intelligent and devoted wife who is perceptive, witty, and as charming as history would have us believe. You’ll enjoy this most after you have some basic familiarity with the people and events that influenced this slice of history, but there is an annotated character list if you start to get your politicians mixed up. (High school)
(We’re Amazon affiliates, so if you purchase something through an Amazon link, we may receive a small percentage of the sale. Obviously this doesn’t influence what we recommend, and we link to places other than Amazon.)
Celebrate the birthday of the renowned physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian on January 4 with an Isaac Newton homeschool unit study.