I had 60 books by my desk for years, and I had so much that I decided to also try to do non-fiction for the first time. Shutting Out the Sky: Life in the Tenements of New York was that book. It follows the immigrant experience from 1880 to 1924 of when people came over from Eastern Europe and Italy. Then it talks about what life was like on the Lower East Side.
It’s been very interesting for me to use that book in classrooms with children and also to have them look critically at the photographs. That’s one of the things that I’ve been doing with kids a lot is have them get a sense of history by looking at the photographs and seeing what they might be able to tell.
I was recently in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I was born and grew up, and my second non-fiction longer book is called Up Before Daybreak: Cotton and People in America. There, you can actually see in the Lowell Historical National Park what a mill was like.
Those books tie together in a way of looking at aspects of our history that were very much important to children. Children were involved in the fields as enslaved workers, as sharecropping kids after the Civil War, and mill workers. I think that’s a way into history for kids is to see what their lives might be like if they lived in a different time.