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  • "'It's Grisly!' 'It's Disgusting!'":Children's History through the Tourist Gaze
  • Ivy Linton Stabell (bio)

These days, children's history is not for the lily-livered. A quick perusal of the nonfiction in your local bookstore's children's section will likely reveal a number of history texts that advertise themselves as action adventure stories, with plots chock-full of shocking discoveries, tantalizing intrigue, and narrow escapes. The You Wouldn't Want to Be picture-book series exemplifies this approach to children's history, which operates under the assumption that young readers are captivated by the dangerous and the foul. The back cover description of one installment offers characteristic assurance that readers will not be bored: "You Wouldn't Want to Be an Egyptian Mummy! Get ready . . . as a wealthy ancient Egyptian, you are about to drop dead! To enter the afterlife, your body must go through extraordinary processes to become a mummy. It's Disgusting!" (Stewart). This series, marked by its appealing cartoon illustrations, zany font, and titles that practically dare the reader to explore their pages, pitches its nonfiction content as an astonishing participatory adventure not to be resisted. These books, and the other popular history series this article will explore, promise prospective readers exciting excursions into the past, where they will be mind-boggled, scared stiff, and grossed out, but above all, captivated.

Hazardous histories, as I term such texts, mark a powerful trend in contemporary children's literature: they promise historical engagement in the form of gruesomely true tales. In recent decades, books of this sort have grown in number and popularity in the American and British marketplaces. The series this article will examine have all deployed the hazardous history approach with great success, yielding awards, numerous installments and editions, positions on bestseller lists, and legions of young readers.1 To deliver the gut-wrenching thrills they promise, hazardous histories use a narrative technique designed to position the reader close to the action. Unlike history books that recount the past in a dispassionate voice, hazardous [End Page 302] histories must pull the reader closer to the past to evoke terror and amazement. Narrative time travel has thus become a common characteristic of the hazardous history type, and those series considered here invite their readers to see each installment as an expedition back in time. The You Wouldn't Want to Be picture-book histories suggest travel directly, conveying history by assigning the reader a specific undesirable role to play in each historical plot: an eighteenth-century Spanish merchant in Malam's You Wouldn't Want to Be a Pirate's Prisoner, a wealthy dead Egyptian in Stewart's You Wouldn't Want to Be an Egyptian Mummy. In Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales, a nonfiction series in graphic novel format, the famed Revolutionary War spy is granted knowledge of the nation's future when he is (briefly) eaten by a giant American history book, which allows him to relate the exciting bits of American history to his hangman in order to delay his own execution.2 Readers do not take part in Hale's stories, but many of the books, especially the early installments that set the narrative formula, open with Nathan Hale beginning a lengthy yarn, and the corresponding panels display each of the frame narrative's characters peering into a new panel-within-the-panel that depicts the historical moment about to be narrated. These images act as a visual cue to the reader that they, like the narrator and executioner, must consciously step out of their present and back into another time. In her author's notes, Lauren Tarshis, author of the beginning reader historical fiction series I Survived, likens reading history to a "trip back in time" (Tarshis Destruction "Back in Time"), and the highly visible and continuously repeated series tagline "Do you have what it takes to survive?" uses the engaging second person address to prompt the reader to envision themselves in the place of the child at the center of each story.

However, despite these series' interest in making history appear accessible, their use of time travel, a narrative technique meant to immerse young readers, acts more powerfully...

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