Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms by Sara L. Schwebel (review)

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter left quite an impression on young Sara Schwebel. She and her friends reenacted bits and pieces of the dramatic pioneer story after their third-grade teacher read the story aloud to them. Certainly, Schwebel, now the author of Child-Sized History, is not alone in remembering the impact and connection of these books on a child’s impression of history. Schwebel’s carefully researched, meticulous book documents the pedagogical problems of historical fiction for children, and also presents solutions to encourage historical thinking and analysis.

Child-Sized History skillfully traces the threads of historiography, pedagogy, and education policy in the late twentieth century, focusing on the decades since 1980. Trade books became “safe” pedagogical choices in the 1980s, due to the possibility of multiple interpretations and conservative values. In addition, they seemed to fulfill the necessity of promoting multiculturalism within schools, a requirement for federal funding. Praised for their ability to help students identify with characters and causes in the past, these books were also singled out by librarians as containing reliable historical information. Unfortunately, teachers consequently neglected the fact that the “historical narrative [in these stories] has been constructed by a particular person at a particular moment in time,” often for a particular reason (p. 12).

Since historical fiction fills a niche in multiculturalism education, Schwebel focuses on three topics frequently associated with those pedagogical goals: Native Americans, war (specifically the American Revolution), and African Americans (especially slavery). Portrayals of Native Americans abound in children’s literature, yet Schwebel notes that authors tend to rely on stereotypical tropes and use Native Americans more as a way to comment on the present rather than as a way to focus on their culture in its own right. For example, Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest (1953) fits squarely in with Cold War attitudes emphasizing Native Americans and the West as antidotes to prevailing fears about communism. In the 1980s, John Reynolds Gardiner’s Stone Fox (1980) reflects white fears of politically engaged tribes and loss of property just as it tells the story of a boy who competes in a dogsled race. Stories of slavery and African Americans face similar issues with stereotyping. In addition, Schwebel notes that even books describing racism as a societal problem locate the solution within white agency and action, minimizing African American self-determination.

It is difficult to find points of contention with Schwebel’s work, although a longer look at the themes in children’s literature and historical fiction complicates her post–World War II picture. Schwebel found three thematic periods with the American Revolution books: The first, during the 1940s and 1950s, stressed war as patriotic and moral and pressed for “American egalitarianism.” In the second, following the Vietnam War, authors stressed the misguided nature of war entirely, while the third, seemingly following postmodern theory, criticized the nature of war as well as the “deviousness of leaders promulgating them” (p. 84). But anti-war messages in children’s literature certainly do not begin with the 1970s. The Newbery awards have been given since 1922, and authors presented anti-war messages in several books in the wake of World War I and the raging isolationism of the 1920s. Schwebel, of course, clearly has not written a book claiming to examine exhaustively the trends in all award-winning children’s literature or historical fiction, yet a longer look gives her findings a clearer context.

In addition, although Schwebel focuses on race as a category of analysis in two chapters, she omits probably the most thorny and contentious issue in children’s books—that of gender. Nowhere is the conservatism of historical fiction and award-winning literature more visible than in issues of gender. Teaching historical fiction that depicts times when women’s oppression was “normal” without some level of gender analysis can certainly reinforce stereotypical views of both...