History Repeating Itself: The Republication of Children’s Historical Literature and the Christian Right by Gregory M. Pfitzer, and: Children’s Bibles in America: A Reception History of the Story of Noah’s Ark in US Children’s Bibles by Russell W. Dalton (review)

Beginning with the Puritans, who believed that all children should learn to read as a spiritual discipline, religion has had a long and complex relationship with American children’s literature. This relationship is one that has needed more careful scholarship; recently two books have done just that. Both books examine the role of religion in the shaping and production of nonfiction for children. Gregory M. Pfitzer explores historical books originally published in the nineteenth century but reprinted in the twentieth, and Russell W. Dalton focuses on the story of Noah as it is told and retold in collections of children’s Bible stories.

Pfitzer’s History Repeating Itself: The Republication of Children’s Historical Literature and the Christian Right is a detailed and thought-provoking book which focuses on one question: Is it intellectually honest for publishers to reprint nineteenth century children’s historical nonfiction, presenting it as ideologically sound educational material for children today? This question is answered by working through three things: tracing the history of the publication of this genre of books through the nineteenth century; introducing the contemporary publishers who reprint these books along with their rationales for doing so; and finally asking readers to consider whether these publishers are actually doing what they advertise.

As a history professor at Skidmore College in New York, Pfitzer’s primary research interest is popular historical writing. He has published widely on histories written by canonical literary figures such as Mark Twain and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as well as on topics such as Victorian-era illustrated history books. While he is an excellent historian, his unfamiliarity with childhood studies can be seen in the introduction, in which there is a section discussing the changing attitudes about children over time that relies heavily on Philippe Ariès. The rest of the introduction, however, is well researched, interesting, and informative.

The introduction, titled “The Past We Choose to Remember,” explains that several publishers constitute a cottage industry specializing in reprinting children’s history books from the nineteenth century. The fact that books published before 1923 are not protected by copyright laws may play a large role in the publisher’s choice of material, but copyright laws have little to do with the fact that homeschoolers are strongly attracted to these titles. According to Pfitzer, their interest is instead shaped by reactionary pedagogical and ideological concerns, and these very concerns are the primary reason many people choose to homeschool. He explains that a US federal decision made in the 1990s to develop national standards in education specifically regarding the teaching of history became the impetus for a sudden burgeoning of the homeschool movement. These homeschoolers found the new standards worrisome because they challenged what they perceived as traditional values, as well as the historical narrative they viewed as essential to American identity. Thus conservative parents whose own ideological stance is described in the text as “the Christian Right” took their children out of public schools and began to search actively for books that reinforced what they saw as true history.

Each of the next six chapters introduces one publisher who reprints these books, discusses the work of at least one nineteenth-century author whom this publisher claims embodies or exemplifies its specific ideological stance, and then raises concerns regarding differences in approach or beliefs between the publisher and the author. The chapters build a large body of evidence before the conclusion offers an answer to the question presented in the introduction. Thus the reader who is primarily interested in the answer promised in the beginning has a...