When I started the series I wanted each book to just be a standalone. This will be the book on the American Revolution, this will be the book on the Monitor and the Merrimack in the Civil War, this will be the book on the Donner Party. And my very wise editor said, “No, no, no, no, we need a through-line. How about a narrator that pops up in each book?” And I was like “Ehhh, I don’t want a Ms. Frizzle situation. You know Magic School Bus or Talking Eagle, or something.” That’s actually what we landed on was a talking eagle, you know a little golden eagle on top of the flag. We chose that because the eagle on the flag has probably seen a lot of things in history, so it was going to fly from page to page, and talk about each thing.
And I’d even drawn up some picture of this eagle, it was called Susan B. Eagle-Bee [chuckles], I’m embarrassed by that. But, one day we were talking about the cover because it had to have a series title, the book title, and then my name. And I thought, we’re out of space for illustrations. As an illustrator I wanted to have the best possible cover. So I said, “Can we just cut my name from the cover?” And she’s like, “No, that’s ridiculous.”
And I said, “How about if we make my name part of the series titles so it just cancels that extra line of text out?” And she’s like, “Why would your name be in the series title?” And on the phone I was just like, “You know there was this Revolutionary War spy with my same name, Nathan Hale, and maybe he’s telling the stories to stop his execution?” And my editor was like “Hang-up right now, write this all down, immediately. This sounds a lot better than that eagle.” I wrote it all down.
And suddenly we had this kind of little Greek chorus, our hangman, provost, and Nathan Hale. Between the three of them, Nathan Hale tells the stories, he just lays out the facts. The British provost is very cynical, he doesn’t buy it, he doesn’t believe it. And he wants to know specifics, and the hangman just wants to make jokes. He wants to know where people go to the bathroom. He wants to know what they were eating and he loves fluffy animals, and cute nonsense.
So he’s constantly disrupting things with his demands. And between the three of them, we’re able to kind of bounce these history stories around in a slightly different way than maybe kids have read them before.