The Lincolns have a nontraditional approach. The book is laid out like a scrapbook. While I’m doing all that research for all those great little nuggets and stories, I’m also gathering photographs. All of those are laid out with an accompanying entry.
I’d been thinking about the way we present history to young readers and about my own sons who loved facts and loved history, but weren’t particularly thrilled about reading 200 pages of text to pull out some interesting facts and information.
I’m a kind of a firm believer in Eliza Drezang’s theory of radical change which, that her idea behind this theory is that we’ve created a new generation of readers. That the internet really has produced readers that are capable of taking in a lot of information on one page. They’re used to reading information on a computer screen. They’re used to getting their information.
Even if you watch CNN, you have a person talking. Behind them is the stock market and then you have information crawling along the bottom. They’re used to seeing a lot of information on one page. They’re comfortable with this — maybe more comfortable than 200 pages of straight text.
It’s not a bad thing; it’s just a different thing and so that we should try to provide reading experiences like that, as well. I loved that theory and it fits in with my own thinking about American history or about history in general, is that if you give kids the historical evidence
and this is what The Lincolns does.
When you have photographs and you have entries underneath, the reader can approach the book, they can read it from beginning to end and it does have a narrative arc. It does have a story — history is story, but each individual piece also is a story with a narrative arc beginning and end.
My hope is that readers will open that book. They can open it to page 20 if they want or page 50 and they’re alerted by a great picture of, say, the Lincolns’ dog Fido — there’s a great picture of Fido in there — or a picture of boot measurements that Lincoln actually did of his own feet in 1864 — some unusual photographs — that they’ll be lured in by that photo and that they’ll read the entry underneath. Having read that entry, they’ll have learned one or two interesting things about Abraham or Mary Lincoln or their family, and then they’ll be compelled to read something else.
Then they flip to chapter one and they read about Abraham Lincoln’s life in Indiana. Then they flip to perhaps chapter eight and they read about Mary Lincoln’s very sad death scene on her deathbed, and they flip to chapter four and they read about the Battle of Gettysburg.
Even though they’re not reading in order, what they are doing is building their own understanding. They’re taking all those individual pieces of history — evidence, if you will — and they’re putting them together themselves to form their own vision, their own picture of Abraham and Mary Lincoln.
As everyone knows, if you form your own picture based on what connects with you, then you own it. It’s more than just a fact; it becomes personal. It really does become part of you, part of that familiarity that I talked about with The Lincolns before. My hope is that they can work like historians themselves and build their own understanding.
