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Chapter 4 Melancholic Development and Revolutionary War Fiction for Children In 2001, Newsweek writer Evan Thomas coined the phrase “Founders chic” to describe the surge of public interest at the beginning of the new millennium in the Founders and the events surrounding the American Revolution. Studies of the Founders have not only enjoyed massive sales and long-term spots on bestseller lists but also received prestigious awards. Books about the Revolutionary generation and its work in constructing a new nation won a National Book Award in 1997 (American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson) in addition to Pulitzer Prizes in 1993 (The Radicalism of the American Revolution), 1997 (Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution), 2001 (Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation), and 2002 (John Adams). This Founders chic phenomenon has led historian H. W. Brands to declare in the Atlantic Monthly that “our reverence for the Fathers has gotten out of hand” (101). Brands attributes the remarkable popularity of the United Sates’ founding moment to a widespread interest in returning to America’s roots at the beginning of a new century and to the heightened mistrust of politics and politicians that has been fermenting since at least the 1970s. These trends have prompted attention to a time that seems somehow purer, simpler, and more admirable. It is to be expected, then, that this Founders chic would also manifest itself in the domain of children’s culture. In 2002, PBS debuted an animated series for children entitled Liberty’s Kids. Accompanied by a set of picture books and a CDROM of games and activities, Liberty’s Kids follows the exploits of three young reporters whose work for Benjamin Franklin brings them into contact with many of the major figures and events of the American Revolution. The children’s publishing world has also taken note, continuing to churn out fiction for young people set in and around the birth of the United States. Both the “Dear America” series marketed to girls and the “My Name is America” companion series for x Melancholic Development and Revolutionary War Fiction for Children 78 boys have featured novels detailing the lives of children in Revolutionary times, and Ann Rinaldi, the popular writer of historical fiction for young people, has alone published no fewer than eight novels between 1991 and 2003 set during the American Revolution. Coinciding with the beginnings of this surge in interest was the fifty-year anniversary of the 1943 publication of Johnny Tremain, the classic of children’s literature written by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Esther Forbes. In its report on the anniversary, the Boston Globe described the book as “the enduringly popular novel for young adults that defined historic Boston in the popular imagination the way Gone with the Wind defined Atlanta, or Huckleberry Finn the Mississippi” (Canellos 17). Until recently visitors to Massachusetts could take a tour called Johnny Tremain’s Boston. Despite historian Christopher Collier’s scathing critique of Johnny Tremain, in which he accuses Forbes of representing an outdated and simplified view of the war, the novel is still widely read by and to children more than sixty years after being designated the Newbery Medal winner of 1944. Given both the Founders chic phenomenon of recent years and the ongoing readership of Forbes’s novel, Johnny Tremain is useful for thinking about not only the appeal of the founding moment in the United States, but also what can be learned from how the American Revolution is represented once it enters the sphere of children’s culture. As a historical novel about the American Revolution, readings of Johnny Tremain have changed as prevailing thought about the founding has changed. Collier’s reevaluation of Johnny Tremain in the year of the U.S. bicentennial details the changing views of the American Revolution from the mid-nineteenth century through the course of the twentieth in the scholarship of academic historians , and he considers how this affects reception of the novel. Collier, himself a professional historian and coauthor of My Brother Sam, distinguishes between the Whig, Imperialist, and Progressive schools of thought. The first, he writes, dominated thinking throughout the nineteenth century and presented a picture of the Revolution that was “moralistic and pedantic, depicting simple, freedom-loving farmers marching in a crusade to fulfill God’s plan for a rationally ordered society based on principles of liberty and equality” (133). Brands traces the emergence of this Founders myth to the Reconstruction Era, when both the North and the...

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