History is an exciting story about the real adventures of heroes, villains and people who are a little bit of both. But most children never find that out.
Children often complain that history is nothing but a bunch of boring facts, which they learn, write down on a test and then forget as soon as the test is over. "What's the point?" they ask.
Now, I can't see anything wrong with learning that Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama and "discovered" the Pacific Ocean. But it's true that these facts are not especially interesting, or memorable, unless you know some of the story behind them - for instance, that Balboa and his men slogged through the steamy jungles of Panama and found another ocean where Europeans had no idea there was one. (They thought they'd already crossed the ocean separating Europe and China.)
History is an exciting story -- and often not a pleasant one -- about the real-life adventures of heroes, villains and people who are a little bit of both. Unfortunately, most children would never know that because the history textbooks they read are not written by story tellers, and the texts are so crammed with details that it's hard to follow what's going on -- or to care about it in the least.
Joy Hakim, a former teacher and journalist, understands these problems, and she's written a new ten-volume history of the U.S. called The History of Us, for children ages 8 to 13. Hakim's history is wonderfully vivid and engaging, but it is more. Kids who read these books will get a grounding in U.S. history and the often difficult process by which we became a nation. They will also find out a lot about how to think about and understand the past.
Hakim's first volume, The First Americans, which is the only one published thus far, begins with the appearance of the original settlers -- the ones who crossed the Bering Straits while woolly mammoths still roamed what would become the U.S. (We were all, Hakim remarks, once immigrants.) After talking about the peoples who inhabited this country before the Europeans appeared, she goes on to tell the grim but fascinating story of how the Europeans conquered the Americans.
Hakim is terrific at making a historical situation present to the imagination. Here's how she describes Cortez's wonder and admiration for the Aztec capital -- which he was soon to destroy:
As he nears the city he rubs his eyes. He can hardly believe what he sees. Tenochtitlan is more beautiful than any city on earth, he says. It is an island, five miles square, surrounded by a glistening lake [that] .... shines turquoise in the morning sun. Houses and public buildings are chalk-white or earth-red. Some are gilded, as if made of the gold the Spaniards covet.
Hakim does not flinch from presenting some of the most troubling things about our early history -- like the brutal fact that the conquerors of the Americans enslaved the people they found living here, and , when these people died off or wouldn't work, imported African slaves to take their place. In the past, historians --especially those writing for children -- would have glossed over all this. These days, some people say that this troubling record shows the rottenness of our whole civilization -- from the beginning. Hakim is neither squeamish nor politically correct. She presents historical facts as something for readers to think and talk about -- and learn from:
Slavery was common everywhere then, and it didn't seem wrong to many people: not to the Portuguese or the Arabs or the Dutch or the Spaniards or the Africans -- who were all involved in selling human beings as slaves
....In America the Aztec Indians practiced blood sacrifices; the Iroquois tortured their captives; the Mound Builders kept slaves. They didn't think that was wrong either.
How could people behave that way? Were they different from us? Not really. Slavery, torture, and religious intolerance have been around for a long time. It is always easy to do and think as everybody else does.
Many good or partly good people, as Hakim points out, have done terrible things to others -- usually in the belief that they were doing good. Does this absolve them from the results of their acts? Hakim does not say it does, but she does tell her readers that one of the uses of history is to enable the present to learn from the mistakes of the past.