As someone who’s written about history for a number of years now, I’ve tried with each of my books to approach history in a different way. I’ve become very interested in historical literacy and what that means. How we study history and how we can help children study history.
In my new book, Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek, I’ve really taken that to a different level, I think. The story is about an incident in Abe Lincoln’s childhood when a boy named Austin Gollaher saved him from drowning.
There are many instances about Lincoln’s childhood that are obviously made up. But this one, we sense that there is some basis in fact, and there was a relationship between these two men. What I do in the story is really have kids become historians themselves and think about the story.
What do we know about it? Could it have happened this way? Could it have happened a different way? And how do we know that? One of the things that the book says [is] if you weren’t there, you can’t know for sure. That’s the fun part about being interested in history and learning about history is that we are discoverers and we are explorers in history trying to piece together.
One of the things that’s been interesting to me in the last year is to talk with the children in schools who are very much in this election season that we’ve just gone through here in fall 2008 — get a sense of history themselves, what it means to be part of a big, historical moment.
Many times, I think those of us who are older and have these memories of things that happened to us in history — the assassination of John F. Kennedy — we remember that. I think that the young people growing up today in this year will have that sense of history. A book like Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek is a way for them to look at the different aspects of history and start to be historians themselves.
One more thing I might add on this is, historians, when they talk to each other, they argue with each other and they fight, and they have different points of view. But many times, our history textbooks for kids have what someone’s called a corporate author. This is the way history was. These are the names. These are the facts.
But knowing more history is not knowing more facts. Knowing more history is knowing how to read, and I think in Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek, it’s a way to start that process with the youngest readers.
