I think to make history come alive for young people, to engage them I think first of all we have to give them material that does not talk down to them. I believe that, well see the thing is when I approach non-fiction, I approach it the way I think people approach poetry and fiction. I mean Toni Morrison said we only have 26 letters of the alphabet you know, I don’t have sound, I don’t have color, I must use the language to make the color and make the sound, to move people.
So you know lyricism, metaphor, simile, that belongs to non-fiction so I think that if you write non-fiction like fiction you engage. The other thing I do is when I work with children I tell them that they are part of history, that they are making history, that they will make history. And one exercise I do with them I ask do any of you have a copy of a newspaper that came out on the day that you were born. And they’ll be like what?
I’ll say when were you born, most of them were born in like you know 2003 or, and I say get a copy of any newspaper in your city, your national … and see what was going on in the world in your city and your town on the day that you were born. That’s your context. And I find that children respond to that. I say have your adult, some adult in your life, buy it on eBay. Because I have a copy of an 1863 New York Times that reported on the, I have a book Maritcha: A Nineteenth Century American Girl.
And during the New York City draft riots, her home was attacked. And that’s mentioned in the Times. So when I do programs on Maritcha, I take that newspaper with me and I had it around to the kids and I say this newspaper is 150 years old, you know, and it’s in plastic and it was rag paper so it’s not brittle. And what I, what amazes me is that time and again the children handle that history with care and respect.
Be careful with that, that’s over 150 years old, let me see that. And I say how much did it cost, three cents. How much does the New York Times cost today? So I think one of the things we need to do is put history into the hands of children. It could be a postcard from the 1920s which you can get for $3. A magazine, when I was writing, presenting on my book on W.E.B. Dubois, I had a copy of, want to see it?
Like the crisis, the magazine that he started and this one is from February 1930 and I pass this around to children and they’re like wow. What’s inside it? So I think one thing is we need to not talk down to children. We need to always stretch them, I always say that if you only give them what they know, they will not grow. So when it comes to language, often editors rightly ask will children know this word?
And I say some of them will. And the way I learned vocabulary was from context. You know you see it, hear it, but I think we need, we want to make them puzzled. We want to give them a reason to ask a librarian, a parent, a teacher, a question. We want to kindle curiosity, not just impart information.
Another example, in my book FDR’s Alphabet Soup about the New Deal I end it, and I’ve been doing this more and more, I call it kicking it back to the reader.
So that I just don’t want to say okay if you’ve learned this history. But I say in the New Deal I said people debate today whether or not the New Deal was a good deal, a bad deal, a raw deal. And I said the answer to the question will come out of what kind of government do you want? Because I’m hoping that adults will help children see that a lot of the political debate is about the New Deal and the Great Society.
So it, history is present in all that we do. And they can understand, Social Security, Medicare, entitlements, and all of that that they can see oh this is moving history.