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

To scholars of multi-ethnic literature, the value of basing the analysis of a book on context and subtext in addition to its text may seem obvious. The advantage of such practices has not, however, been widely recognized in K-12 education. That may change if Sara L. Schwebel’s Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms gains wide readership.

Schwebel documents three trends that have led to children’s historical fiction occupying privileged space in middle school education about US history: an increasingly institutionalized embrace of “authentic literature” in schools (alongside or in place of textbooks) for a variety of purposes; the development of multiculturalism in educational politics and practice as an outgrowth (or perhaps mutation) of struggles for social justice; and the rise of middle schools with their emphasis on interdisciplinary education. These trends, along with changes in the world of children’s trade books, have fostered what Schwebel refers to as a canon of historical novels for young people, published from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. Though generally seen as meeting high standards of literary quality and historical “accuracy,” these books may owe much of their longevity in middle school curricula to the fact that their perspectives on the American experience are acceptable across a wide swath of the political spectrum. This relatively small pool of books thus is positioned to make a large contribution to what children understand or misunderstand about their country’s history and what it means to be “American.”

The middle school historical fiction canon can hardly be called multi-ethnic or multicultural; its authors and protagonists are predominantly white. Nonetheless, these books present images of Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latina/os, members of religious minorities—images that advocates from these groups have frequently found to privilege white perspectives and perpetuate bias. As Schwebel indicates, problems have even been noted in books seen as essential reading about race relations (for example, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird [1960]).

For children, historical fiction can be an inviting window to a past populated with heroic Americans, both famous and everyday. Just how seductive such stories can be is apparent in Schwebel’s description of how she and grade school classmates reenacted the world created by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books (1932–43). Adults who grew up uncritically reading historical fiction are not well prepared to detect embedded bias and inaccuracy, let alone help children do so. Thus, the twenty-first-century child reader of canonical historical fiction is likely to receive a “celebratory” master narrative of US history (162) in which “[n]egative aspects of the past . . . are understood as deviations from national culture that have been corrected over time” (12) and which denies or ignores the contemporary legacy of such practices as Indian removal or Jim Crow. These are fictions in more than one sense of the word.

The introduction and first chapter of Child-Sized History describe the contemporary and historical contexts of Schwebel’s research. In subsequent chapters, she turns a critical lens on three topics familiar to readers of the middle school historical fiction canon: Native/white relations, the role of war in American history, and slavery and its aftermath. Analyzing frequently taught novels on those topics, she shows how their authors wrote in response to contemporaneous political and social conditions as well as to the time periods in which their novels were set. In Chapter Two, her analysis identifies the trope of Native American disappearance that enables a myth of white ownership of North America. The third chapter addresses a range of perspectives on the legacy of American warfare within novels about war written over a period of three generations, showing how particular authors expressed their own historically situated beliefs about war while writing about other time periods. In Chapter Four, Schwebel analyzes the recurrence of a subtextual ideal of...