The Reading History Project: "Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History" by Helen Zoe Veit

Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History by food historian Helen Zoe Veit doesn’t fit into my 2026 reading plan as far as reading history books advocating for the “our” in our shared history is concerned. Unless someone wants to argue that we’re all supposed to eat a particular way and, therefore, yes, I’ll make a stand for the picky eaters. I am, after all, dealing with a second generation of them, myself. Even without a personal connection, Picky is my favorite type of history book in that it deals with the impact of events on individuals and how we came to be the way we are. Veit does a fine job with this, though I think she stopped a little short.

According to Veit, documents such as letters and journals indicate that children in mid-nineteenth century America most definitely were not picky eaters. They ate an array of foods we don’t associate with children, or maybe even with adults these days. They ate, in fact, what their parents ate. There was no special food for children. What this may mean is that the people who recalled their eating as children in letters and journals ate the same things their parents ate. There may be another population of people who did eat differently as children, but no documentation exists. But that doesn’t change the fact that, historically, picky eating was not a universal childhood experience. Veit explains why childrearing, in terms of feeding, was different then than it is now.

Child mortality was high in the nineteenth century, though. By the end of the nineteenth century, some health/food activists (they did have them back then) suggested diet could be a cause. Veit says the general public didn’t show much interest in that, but it does lead into what would start happening during the Progressive Era.

Veit mentions the Progressive Era by name a few times. For those of us who missed it in history class, it was the period from around 1890 to 1920 (the exact dates vary depending on the source), when reforms were enacted. On state levels you might see improved funding for education. The Sherman Antitrust Act was passed early in the period. The 18^th and 19^th Amendments, prohibiting the sale of alcohol and legalizing women voting were passed toward the end of it. (The eugenics movement in this country was also considered a Progressive reform, to be honest here. I have a hard time not including that with my thinking about early twentieth century progressives.)

This era coincided with a move toward specialization in the professions. You start seeing different types of medical specialties, for instance. Home economics and nutrition become fields, possibly because of women were entering higher education. Home economics and nutrition were considered “women’s interests,” but at this point they were also considered scientific and important. 

So you’ve got a period when people are interested in reform and you’ve got professional fields that are interested in food. Voila! Kids should eat different foods!  Oh and you’ve got an adult population that’s becoming more and more educated, so parents become aware of food studies and recommendations for children through magazines and government publications, as well as whatever their doctors were telling them.

At this point, drinking milk is now considered important for children. This didn’t happen in earlier periods, because without refrigeration (or knowledge of the germ theory of disease), milk wasn’t considered safe for humans to drink. Because it wasn’t. Bringing milk, and a lot of it, into children’s diets was significant, because milk is filling. There had also been little eating between meals in the nineteenth century, which begins to become more common. Filling children up on milk and snacks left them less hungry to eat whatever was put in front of them at meal time. 

By the 1930s you start seeing kids doing less. They’re not working on farms as often, because families are moving to urban areas. They’re not walking as far to schools. They have less opportunity to work up appetites. Another reason why kids are less hungry when they come to the table at mealtime than they used to be.

You start seeing talk of picky eating among children now. It’s definitely a thing by mid-century. Then psychologists get involved. Then post-World War II, you get all kinds of unhealthy prepared food appearing as well as marketing to sell it. Marketing to both adults and children.

Veit makes a very good argument that American culture created the picky eating phenomena. To me it seems as if no other result could be expected given how we were living.

In her Epilogue, Veit offers a list of suggestions for combating picky eating. “Mass childhood pickiness resulted from a series of concrete changes, and parents who understand those changes can directly combat the causes of pickiness today.” This struck me as odd for two reasons.

First, I can’t recall historical works offering information on how to deal with or reverse the issue of the book. This may be a result of my not having read enough history.

Second, Veit doesn’t address a few historical/cultural changes that would impact parents’ ability to follow her suggestions. It's as if she stopped short in documenting the chain of events that got us to the state of child pickiness we're now dealing with, leaving a gap that could have a big impact on parents' ability to "combat the causes of pickiness today."

1. While Veit shows us that pickiness goes back at least to the mid-twentieth century, she never considers what happens to all the picky child eaters who existed over the last seventy years. Did they outgrow pickiness? Or did they become picky adults who will be limited in their ability to model healthy eating for their children and make the changes Veit recommends?
2. Veit only mentions “overscheduling” children in passing. However, kids, and their parents, being tied up with after school and evening activities, prime dinner prep and eating time, goes back at least until the 1980s if not longer. We now have three generations for whom that lifestyle is a norm. That means adults have limited time to prepare the kinds of meals Veit describes and families have limited opportunities to eat them together.
3. Veit never addresses the increase in ADHD and autism. Both those conditions can be accompanied with sensory issues that make eating difficult. Neurodivergent children's (and adults') eating situations are not cultural and would require different kinds of interventions with different kinds of results that can be expected.

Picky: How American Children Became the Fussiest Eaters in History is a terrific book in which the author does an excellent job of explaining how we came to be as we are. It just doesn’t do as good a job of convincing us there’s something we can do about it. But I don’t know that that’s history’s job.

 

 

 

The Reading History Project: History and Politics

In Writing the Trump Years Into History in The New Yorker (May 12), historian Jill Lepore writes about writing history. After calling upon Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men (which I read as a teenager and now want to read again) and her experience writing These Truths: A History of the United States, she discusses the impact she's witnessed of recent executive orders and state laws on what history is taught in classrooms.

Unless you have a New Yorker subscription, you won't be able to read her article. So I'll give you a few high points. Lepore says:

"Make America Great Again" is a four-word argument about American history, and one of the movement's aims has always been to press the teaching and writing of American history into the service of that argument." Trump wishes "...to make American history great again by removing all evidence of anything that ever happened that wasn't so great..."

"In the Trump era, government censorship of American history has been used against not only classroom teachers but also against writers and publishers and librarians and booksellers..."

Gift shops at national parks and National Historic Sites are now supposed to review what they offer for sale for conforming to the "President's preferred account of American history."

Not so great things have happened in America. And everywhere else. Does pretending they didn't happen make it so? Will pretending these things didn't happen make life better now or in the future? 

History vs Politics

I've just started reading Lepore's The Story of America: Essays on Origins. In the Introduction (I read introductions these days) she says she wrote these essays "because I wanted to try to explain how history works, and how it's different from politics." They are both interested in stories about the past, but

"Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationships between the past and the present."

"Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence."

But more on The Story of America after I've read beyond the Introduction. 

In the meantime, in Lepore's article Writing the Trump Years Into History she writes about how difficult it is to write historically about the very recent past, because you can't get much perspective on it. And writing a history of our recent past is complicated by what you might call the legal restrictions being placed on history. She brings up the issue of books purchased by Florida public schools, libraries, and universities requiring stickers that indicate the federal name for "Gulf of Mexico" is "Gulf of America," though the term "Gulf of Mexico" first appears in documents from the sixteenth century. 

Does the whole "Gulf of America" thing mean that governments today can change history? Yes, it's only a name, but it's a name that's been in use for four hundred years. 

"...sometimes," Lepore says, "the only thing to do is to fight. And the only way I know how to fight is to write."

Is Reading History a Political Act?

I am going to argue that those of us who don't write can also fight the political takeover of history. We can do it by reading.

No, don't just say "Those executive orders about history are ... " whatever outrageous term comes to mind. Don't just complain. Don't just make jokes about the President sleeping through history class. Jokes aren't doing anything these days.

You know what does do something? Educating ourselves.

Read history. Any history. Any group's history. Just by reading it, you're helping to preserve it. Support the historians you read by buying their work or by asking libraries for it or by reviewing it on-line. Spread your new-found knowledge any way you can.

My somewhat shallow knowledge of history suggests to me that someday we will come out the other side of what's happening now. Groups don't stay in power forever, and the kinds of groups in power now have not held on for long periods in the past. 

We are not powerless. We can retain historical knowledge for the future. Perhaps that is a political act.

The Reading History Project: "The Westerners: Myth-Making and Belonging on the American Frontier" by Megan Kate Nelson

The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier by Megan Kate Nelson will be published March 31. I read a digital ARC provided by NetGalley.

This is a book that definitely addresses the "our" in "our shared history," my reading subject for this year.

Nelson begins in her prologue with an account of Frederick Jackson Turner's reading of The Significance of the Frontier in American History at a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893. Turner argued that "...American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West." Nelson says that before Turner, most historians believed that Europe had the greatest impact on what America became. Turner's contention that America became America because of the "colonization of the Great West" by white people from the East was a shift in thinking for professional historians.

To give you some idea of how big a deal Turner and his theory of the American frontier became, I recall hearing at least something about it in high school. I've had a copy of The Significance of the Frontier in American History floating around my office for a year now. 

While it was new thinking in 1893 as far as professional history was concerned, Nelson says popular perception of the "Great West" supported Turner. Novels featured Indian fighters saving white families, painters romanticized Western landscapes, and government policies encouraged people in the East to go West. Turner was preaching to a choir that already believed a mythic frontier story involving white Americans moving West and bringing civilization with them.    

Some of Nelson's content moves on to the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is primarily laid out chronologically from the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to that American Historical Association meeting in 1893 at which Frederick Jackson Turner read his paper. Along that timeline are what might be called a collection of microhistories, in this case the stories of people who lived in the West, people who didn't reflect the frontier myth. (Except for the one person who actually promoted it.) All these people are what we would consider today as minor historical figures, the most recognizable being Sacajawea. But they are also people who had some significance at the time they lived or were even well known then. Others wrote about them, or they left writing themselves. In her epilogue, Nelson describes what happened to them after death, a sad afterlife for people who didn't fit the Western myth narrative but were part of the West, nonetheless. 

My first thought while reading The Westerners was that I was ignorant of a great deal that happened in the western part of this country in the nineteenth century. That was probably Nelson's intention, and, if so, she was very successful in educating this reader. I was going to give some examples of the depth of what I didn't know but decided I didn't want to get into that.

My second thought was how different regional history must be for elementary school students in different parts of the country from what I was exposed to growing up in rural New England. At least, it should be different. 

In the very readable The Westerners Megan Kate Nelson replaces the myth of the Great West with a reality that is just as empowering, because it includes so many more people. It's a reality based on our shared history.

You can hear her speaking about the frontier myth at her publisher's website.

The Reading History Project: "Pedal Pusher" by Mary Boone. Watch Out for Women on Bikes!

Pedal Pusher: How One Woman's Bicycle Adventure Helped Change the World  by Mary Boone with illustrations by Lisa Anchin is a great subject for Women's History Month. For a couple of reasons.

Women on Bikes Were a Big Deal in the Late Nineteenth Century

First off, Pedal Pusher is described as a picture book biography, though it only deals with one period in Annie Cohen Kopchovsky's life. Kopchovsky was the first women to ride a bicycle around the world in 1894-95. Nowadays, this seems like a kind of meaningless stunt. And it may have been a stunt then, too. But bicycling was part of a cultural change for women, giving them more ability to get around and leading to changes in how they dressed, which was far more than just fashion. Kopchovsky represents all that.

I wonder, too, if she represents nineteenth century public relations and self-promotion. Kopchovsky seems to have been very adept at raising money for the trip by signing pictures and giving lectures as she traveled. Boone raises the question of whether or not Kopchovsky was one hundred percent accurate/truthful in her talks. Was she creating an Annie Cohen Kopchovsky for public consumption/sale?  

Which leads me to wonder about another aspect of the Annie Cohen Kopchovsky story. She was a Latvian Jewish immigrant at a time "when prejudice against Jewish people was widespread," as Boone tells readers. Soon after she began her trip, she temporarily changed her name to Londonderry in exchange for a donation from the Londonderry Spring Water Company. She appears as Annie Londonderry in the newspaper quotes Boone provides at the end of the book.

Would public interest have been as great in Kopchovsky if she had used her own name?

Pedal Pusher is a great introduction to its subject. But I want more! I want a movie! I want a Netflix limited series! 

Oh, But There is More

I bought a copy of Pedal Pusher, because I'm interested in the era involved and still have young people around who might read it. But what brought the book to my attention last October was an opinion piece author Mary Boone wrote for The Seattle Times. (I may have stumbled upon it on BlueSky.)

In it, Boone describes how during last year's Women's History Month, the Tacoma Children's Museum invited her to lead two story times about Pedal Pusher. She ran the first program at its downtown location, but the second was going to be held at the museum's site on Joint Base Lewis-McChord. A Federal site. And that one was cancelled four days before the event.

Boone was told "it violated the administration's executive order restricting so-called "radical" Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs across federal institutions." 

Hmm. Could that be Executive Order 14253 Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History she's talking about, since that specifically includes federal sites? The one covered here at Original Content back at the beginning of February? 

I have questions.

• If the story hour was cancelled because of Executive Order 14253 Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, is there a claim here that the book isn't true? Annie Cohen Kopchovsky wasn't the first woman to ride a bicycle around the world? I'm not touching the sanity issue. I don't even know what it means in the context of the executive order.
• Otherwise, what was "radical" about the book? It was about a woman? It was about a Jew? It was about a Jewish woman who did something successfully? 
• Or I could phrase that a different way: It wasn't about a man? It wasn't about a Christian? It wasn't about a Christian man who did something successfully?

The Power of One Voice

I have a long history of obsessing on the wrong point in a story, and I am probably about to do that right now. In her article about the cancellation of her appearance Boone writes, "Someone complained when they saw my story time being promoted."  "... museum staff later suggested the event might have gone forward if it hadn't been advertised." 

This program was cancelled because one person heard about it and complained? Now, on the one hand, that's a very positive thing, isn't it? It suggests that any one of us can complain and have an impact. We can get the ball rolling to take attention away from books we object to.

But doesn't it also suggest that any one of us can have an impact by speaking out in support of and bringing attention to books we appreciate? Which is what I'm trying to do here.

One voice can make a difference. Imagine the kind of difference many voices could make.

Pardon me while I leave to spread the word about Pedal Pusher on Facebook, BlueSky, and Goodreads. 

The Reading History Project: "Destiny of the Republic" by Candice Millard

 I am writing today about Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard even though I haven't read it. What I did do was watch Death by Lightening the Netflix limited series based upon it. The series is marvelous.

Both book and series deal with the assassination of President James Garfield, who is just a name to most of us, because he was shot a few months after his inauguration, lingering on for a while thereafter. In Death by Lightening Garfield is portrayed as an incredibly decent man. Charles Guiteau, his killer, is tragically unbalanced. Chester A. Arthur turns up, which was a surprise because I didn't know he was Garfield's vice-president. Here he is shown as realizing he's a pretty lousy character, but a lousy character with a shred of human decency.

Death by Lightening was well-reviewed when it was released.  I don't know how well it did as far as attracting viewers is concerned. The fact that we know how the story ends could have discouraged some people. I must admit I've never seen Titanic, because, well, everyone knows the ship sinks.

This story, as good as it is, might be just that, a good historical story. But the TV series does link its ending to something bigger than a tragic tale. Garfield has an interest in dealing with the patronage system used in his day but dies long before he can do so. After Chester A. Arthur becomes president, he does do something about it. 

Destiny of the Republic is also very well-reviewed. I've read it may cover more about Chester A. Arthur, with whom I am now a bit obsessed, and it may include more of the political repercussions of Garfield's death.

I suspect reading it is somewhere in my future.

The Reading History Project: "Thinking About History" by Sarah Maza

I wanted to start my reading history project with some reading about history, which is exactly what Thinking About History by Sarah Maza is. In my history journal (something I will write about here at some point) I describe the book as being about how historians do history, how it has been done in the past, and how the doing of history has changed. (What can we expect from a journal entry?) Maza also covers different types of historians, something that is a relatively recent development. 

I think I may be referring to this book off-and-on this year in relation to other books I read, but for now I'll touch on some of what Maza says about the "history of history," because I think it could help make sense of some of the present-day controversy over how we view history and what we consider to be appropriate history.

Saying Good-bye to the Good Old Days of Nineteenth Century History

I like the nineteenth century, myself. I see it as a period when a great deal was happening in various fields and a period when knowledge was appreciated. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was a period when the world was getting ready to transition into the twentieth century. Things were going to change!

Or maybe not.

According to Maza, in the nineteenth century practitioners of many fields of study were interested in professionalizing, and history was no different. Historians wanted their work to be considered scientific like the other academic fields. Maza says, "...scholars assumed that a scientifically examined source could yield only one meaning..."  That kind of uniformity is easy to understand because from the end of the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century history departments "were extremely homogeneous workplaces peopled by white male Protestant scholars from upper-class backgrounds." They tended to value the same kind of history--political and military, for instance, and focused on great men who, coincidently, were frequently white, Protestant males like them.  

But in the second half of the twentieth century, the academic world opened up as women entered colleges in greater numbers and the GI Bill brought nearly 8 million men from different backgrounds to campuses in its first twelve years. Some of these new people became historians who were interested in a broader range of topics: labor history, women's history, gay and lesbian history, and environmental history, for instance. You name the subject, it has a past that can be studied. 

In this period, "the history of things" also became important. Food ... clothing ... the natural environment... I am particularly interested in "things," and will direct your attention to Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser, which I liked. (Social history. That's another whole subject Maza addresses.) 

As long as we're on the subject of the history of things, I'll also mention The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers by Tom Standage. 

These two examples illustrate that we are no longer talking "the history of leaders, political elites, and state-related activities," which is how Maza says nineteenth and even early twentieth century historians thought of their field. 

You Can't Go Back to the Past, Folks

But "the history of leaders, political elites, and state-related activities" may be how some people in the present do want to think of history. Over the last couple of years, we've been hearing talk of manifest destiny and the Monroe Doctrine, concepts from the nineteenth century. There's also been talk of the present administration turning to eighteenth and nineteenth century laws to support its actions. Last year's Executive Order 14253 Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History raised the question of just what truth and sanity American history should be restored to. Should we be turning to the nineteenth century for that, also, and looking, again, for the history of leaders, political elites, and state-related activities?

Oh, please, no.

While there are concerns right now about groups who had been lost to history being lost again if  present-day lawmakers are able to impose restrictions on public historical sites and schools, I think there's a limit to how far they'll be able to get with that. The reason? History without those groups is boring.

That's right, "the history of leaders, political elites, and state-related activities" is boring. All the time I was studying history in college, I was hearing about how boring it was from people who didn't care for it. "Memorizing dates" was how it was viewed. To some extent the boring argument is true. What makes it boring is not the dates but that there's a limit to how much interest anyone can maintain in the leaders and political elites who had little to do with our ancestors' lives. We only care about the history of royal figures if there's sex and weird stuff involved. Would anyone care about Queen Victoria if she wasn't portrayed as having a love interest with whom she had a great many children? I think not.

Over the last half century, the past has become far more about how everyone lived than what a few people did. There's a circular aspect to history now, in my humble opinion. We see history now as the impact of individuals on events and the impact of events on individuals. All individuals. Many of these individuals are unknown to most of us because of their ethnicity, employment, gender, religion, and more, and thus they are very, very not boring.

History is a pandora's box and the lid has been opened. It's going to be very difficult for anyone to shut it again. Especially if we all keep reading.

  

The Reading History Project: What I'll Be Reading in 2026

Reading history is an interest of mine. It probably got started before I was reading much, when I was watching TV Westerns with my father and then gladiator movies that played late in the afternoon on one of the three TV stations we had access to in rural Vermont. Actual reading history started as a teenager, when I read my fair share of historical romance but also these enormous tomes on royal figures from centuries back and family stories that covered generations. 

A pivotal moment in reading history for me came in my freshman year of college when my History of Western Civilization professor told us why his license plate said "Bodo."  All his students were expected to know this. Bodo was a ninth century peasant living in St.-Germain-des-Prés. (That is all I know about St.-Germain-des-Prés. Bodo lived there.) He gets an entire chapter in Medieval People by Eileen Power, which I still own.

Gauthiers: Like Bodo but different

Bodo is all I remember from that class. What I got from the professor's license plate story was that history is not just about the great and mighty of this world. It is also about people who might have been my ancestors. People who were not at all great or mighty. Not even close.  

America's 250th Anniversary and Executive Order 14253

The United States is approaching its 250th anniversary, a good reason to focus on reading history this year. But another good reason might be the little historical brouhaha that came up last year after President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14253 Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History. Please read it yourself, but some highlights:

"It is the policy of my Administration to restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing."

That paragraph ends with "Museums in our Nation's capital should be places where individuals go to learn—not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history."  

"Ideological indoctrination" is a very loaded expression, and after reading the whole executive order, one might wonder who is trying to ideologically indoctrinate whom and with what ideology. Also, who is the "our" in "our shared history?"

Last year there were concerns about the present administration whitewashing history or reshaping it. The concerns continue, though they now have to compete with all the other concerns that have turned up since last March when Trump signed 14253.

Keep in mind that whatever is going on historically as far as the U.S. government is concerned, this particular order 14253 deals only with Federal sites. (History in schools is impacted by another, earlier executive order.) For now, at least, publishers, booksellers, and private museums are not touched.

That puts those of us who read history in a position, maybe not of power, but of advocacy. We can still read any work of history that we want to. We can support any type of historian we want to support, either by buying their books or spreading word of them. 

By reading as much history as we can, we create the possibility that we, and other history readers like us, will retain it no matter what else happens to it. By educating ourselves, we act. 

The Reading History Project

My reading history this year:

• Will be somewhat random. I want to enjoy this, and I have a lot of different histories on my TBR iPad.
• Will probably lean toward the nineteenth century, since that's a favorite period for me right now. Sorry Revolutionary Era!
• Will probably lean toward groups who were not in positions of great power. Remember my Bodo story. I have what is known as a cognitive bias. I tend to read things that play to my interests. I don't believe I've read a great dead white man bio since Fawn M. Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, originally published in 1974. It was controversial at the time, because it was the first popular biography of Jefferson to address his relationship with Sally Hemings, a woman he owned. DNA would later prove Brodie right. 

Some upcoming books:

Thinking About History by Sarah Maza. I'm nearly done with this. An unusual book in that it is exactly what I was looking for.

Speaking of whitewashing, as we were recently, I've just started reading Black AF History: The Un-whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot. 

The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier by Megan Kate Nelson will be published in April. I have a galley from NetGalley,  will be reading it this spring, and writing about it closer to publication.

That's the plan, folks. And don't I love a plan!

 

My First 2026 Encounter with History

Today is the birthday of Ethan Allen, the most profane and hardest drinking noise to come out of pre-Revolutionary Connecticut. A legend in his own time, but not in ours.

Yet sometime in the 1990s while researching a book, I went into the late Briggs Carriage Bookstore in Brandon, Vermont, when it was in its first, smaller location, and said, "Do you have The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen?"  Jeezum Crow! They did! The bookseller went right to the shelf and put his hand on it as if he sold copies of it every day.

This past Saturday I was in Dakin Farm in Ferrisburg, Vermont, a store known primarily for ham, cheese, and pancake mixes, not books. What do I see in its little Vermont book area? You guessed it! The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen! Since I already have a copy, I didn't buy it, though I did get a book there on the nineteenth century prohibition era in Vermont. As well as a bottle of my favorite Vermont wine. 

Allen's book is what is known as a captivity narrative, which were popular in his time. They usually involved Europeans being held captive by Native Americans. The Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen is about an "American" of European decent being held captive by Europeans. (He was a prisoner of war for around two years during the Revolution.) It's supposed to have been a bestseller when it was published in 1779.

Published in 1779 and still on shelves. Well done, Colonel Allen.

My The Hero of Ticonderoga was originally called The Narrative of Therese LeClerc, but the marketing people at G. P. Putnam's Sons thought that sounded like a nun's diary. Middle grade readers don't like nuns' diaries?

I plan to focus on reading history this year, so I'm delighted to have had this encounter with a historical narrative without even trying. 

The Heritage Month Project: "Monster, She Wrote" by Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson

At last, I am writing about Women's History Month reading! I am beginning with Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction by Lisa Kroger and Melanie R. Anderson. This is another book from my To Be Read stash on my Kindle app. I'm not much of a fan of horror and only dabble in speculative fiction. However, the women's history aspect grabbed me on this one.

Monster, She Wrote is what might be described as a popular history. There's a section for each author covered, and within that section is an overview/critique, a list of the author's best works, and a list of similar authors. That last section I particularly liked.

The authors begin with women writers of Gothic novels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since, they say, "There's a strong argument that horror as it exists in the twenty-first century evolved from the Gothic novel..." They cover six women in this section, the two best known (because I've heard of them) being Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Ann Radcliffe. Now six is not a statistically significant number. But I was still surprised there were that many, in part because conventional wisdom tells us that women in the past just could not and did not work. 

Later sections of the book tie time periods to subjects such as ghost stories, the occult, pulps, and paperback horror. I was particularly interested in women writing in various fields in the twentieth century. These writers moved around with work, some writing for television as well as paperbacks. Or, like Shirley Jackson, writing horror as well as domestic stories for women's magazines. I like the idea of not allowing yourself to be tied to one thing. 

The last section, The Future of Horror and Speculative Fiction, included interesting people whose work I'm now interested in reading. In fact, I've already read a short story by Helen Oyeyemi.

The Housewife Writer

For some time, I've been interested in women who self-identify as housewife writers. There aren't a lot of them, but I am trying to focus my Women's History Month reading on that. I'm not talking about homemaking as women's God-given role, what they are born to do. I am talking about homemaking as life maintenance, eating and putting clothes on backs and who does that for themselves and others? Why is that not considered as significant as roping a steer or running a store? I have a theory. 

In their section of Monster, She Wrote called Haunting the Home Kroger and Anderson say, "Historically, women have been consigned to the domestic realm, running the household and caring for children." "Many of the women profiled in this book struggled with that dichotomy: the pressure to care for home and family, and the need to tend their writing career. Haunted house fictions play upon the complex fears and concerns about domestic issues that woman have long grappled with."

They include Shirley Jackson in that section. I consider her to be the ultimate housewife writer. More on that before the end of the month.

 

Some Annotated Reading December 7

This week's annotated reading is all short form.

Pool of Souls by Madeline Graham at Redivider   One of my favorite things about flash fiction is that it can pack an intense emotional wallop that longer works can't. Pool of Souls definitely packs a wallop.

Flash fiction sometimes gets a little mystical, which I'm not as fond of as I am intensity. We Don't Want Kids by Catherine Roberts at Flash Frog has enough intensity to offset whatever mystical thing might be going on, so I found it satisfying.

Facebook friend Sherrida Woodley just published Me and Amelia Earhart at Halfway Down the Stairs. This is not flash, but a memoirish piece and some very elegant writing. Check out the first paragraph, if nothing else. 

What Happened When the U.S. Failed to Prosecute an Insurrentionist Ex-President by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker. (I have a digital subscription this year.) I read this because I love Jill Lepore. I own two of her books, one being a big history of the United States that I carry in the car to take into any place where I might have to wait. I read it when it's someone else's turn to drive. Lepore is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, so I have a lot of reading to do. I have to admit that I got lost in all the people involved in whether or not Jefferson Davis would be prosecuted, but there was still a lot of terrific material here. I'm the kind of nonfiction reader who takes what she can take and doesn't grieve the rest.

The Young Readers Edition Of A "Scary but True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark"

Years ago, The Horn Book did a special issue on history books for children, describing how in days of old, such books were often children's versions of adult books while these days original historical
research and writing is being done for the children's audience. I can find neither my blog post on the subject nor links to The Horn Book articles I recall. Hey, but it happened.

My recollection of that Horn Book material lead me to pick up The Radium Girls: Young Readers' Edition, The Scary But True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark by Kate Moore. It's the 'young readers' edition of her book, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women. Both books might be described as horror history about the horrendous illnesses and early deaths among women painting clock faces with radium so their numbers would glow in the dark. They died or lived, some of them, seriously compromised lives so people could read a clock without turning on a light.

This is an important story not just because of the misery endured, but because of the impact these women's experience had on labor law. And because many of these women were, indeed, adolescent girls when they began working in the factory that's practices killed them, you can definitely see why this story would be of interest to younger readers.

I read the YA version and skimmed sections of the adult version, trying to determine how the two books are different. 

• I had trouble keeping the different women covered in this work apart. The things that happened to them were terrible, but they tended to be a blur of terribleness for this reader. In skimming the adult version, I think there was more detail, something that would have helped with my reading problem.
• Some of these women had children over the course of the period covered. A couple of times I did briefly wonder when that happened or how, given their illnesses. While skimming the adult version I came upon a woman suffering severe gynecological problems. It came up in another area, as well. I don't believe any of that made it into the young readers' version. So could we say sex was cut for the young?
• In the adult version, a major player's wake and funeral are covered quite extensively, including a painful scene involving her young children. That doesn't appear in the young readers' version. Death certainly isn't left out of this book, as one woman after another dies. But what might be described as the survivors' experience of death was.
• The young readers' version had photographs. I didn't see any in the adult version. 
• The title change is interesting. The adult book is called  The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women, suggesting the women involved will be the focus of the story. The young readers' version is called The Radium Girls: Young Readers' Edition, The Scary But True Story of the Poison that Made People Glow in the Dark, suggesting the radium will be the focus of the story. I didn't notice the subtitle until after I read the book. I definitely didn't feel it had been about radium, and my skimming of the adult book suggests that the major difference between the two is material that was dropped, not a shift in subject matter. What was the purpose of the title switch? To try to make the book less threatening by trying to put the burden of the story on the radium rather than the women whose lives it destroyed?

The writing style isn't difficult, so if I were a teacher, I'd recommend teenagers just go ahead and read the adult book. I don't know at what point even younger readers start reading material like this, though I saw a couple of reviews at Amazon that said children as young as 8 and 9 have read the young readers' version.

While reading The Radium Girls, I began to wonder if it was history or a journalistic treatment of an event that occurred in the past. Sadly, I am not knowledgeable enough to answer the question.

A History Of Horse And Human

Last night I attended a virtual launch for the middle grade book Horse Power: How Horses Changed the World by Jennifer Thermes, which was sponsored by R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut. This was very much a history talk, perhaps the first author presentation I've attended, virtual or in person, that dealt with that subject. I loved it. The engineer playing a game on a computer next to the one I was watching Jennifer on liked what he heard. I must find more of these types of author talks to attend.

Jennifer Thermes is an illustrator as well as a writer, and she has a very unique style that might be described as both retro and contemporary. (That's my artistically ignorant opinion.) She is a map illustrator who works maps into some of her historical work, which is visually riveting. You may have heard of her earlier book Manhattan: Mapping the Story of an Island.

Jennifer didn't do a reading last night. Instead, she went through Horse Power and gave a quick rundown on the  history she covers in it. Early on she said  the book was about human history as well as horse history, because horses became that much a part of human life. 

At her website, Jennifer says that she is "fascinated by the big picture of history and how it connects to our lives today." The past's impact on the present is a big factor in my own interest in history. Everything has a past that somehow made it possible for humans to get where we are today. Horse Power describes a case in point.

What I Didn't Know About 20th Century Russian History Filled A Book

My faithful followers may have been wondering if I am ever going to read another book, or at least write about one here. Put your minds at rest. I recently finished Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad by M. T. Anderson. This is a historical work, not historical fiction. I am going to be upfront here and say:

• I think it should have been called Dmitri Shostakovich and An Introduction to Communist Russia, since the actual siege doesn't come until well into the book.
• Also, I found this a little long, probably because there was such a long wait for the siege I'd been promised in the title.
• And then there's the issue that I am an old fart who will never give up wanting footnotes sprinkled through a historical text that I'm reading so that I can be assured that there is documentation for this point or that point, and I don't have to go hunting through the end notes to see if it exists. Yeah, I'm never going to see that again.

I'm also going to be upfront and tell you that Symphony for the City of the Dead was on the longlist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2015. (The winner that year was Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman.)

Thoughts

• Anderson uses Shostakovich as an entry point to discuss the period he lived in. That's not unusual. In fact, most works on historical figures need to include information on the world that formed them.
• I am truly embarrassed that I knew so little about the Siege of Leningrad before reading this book. I was aware that the Soviet Union suffered huge losses during World War II, but I didn't know anything specifically about Leningrad. I had heard and read plenty about London during the Blitz. Why has Leningrad's suffering and survival not been more prominent? My high school history courses often didn't get all the way to World War II. I wasn't that interested in twentieth century history when I was in college. So this could be on me. And, yet, as I said, I know about the Blitz.
• Am I the only person who thinks M.T. Anderson and Dmitri Shostakovich look alike? Come on.
• I spent a lot of time bitching about Joseph Stalin while I was reading this.
• Yes, I've been listening to a little Shostakovich recently.
  

Symphony for the City of the Dead is one of three nonfiction books I can think of off the top of my head that I didn't totally embrace while reading but that shifted, or at least enhanced, my world view.

Hey, It's Still Women's History Month

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore is a fantastic Women's History Month read, even if, like myself, you were not a Wonder Woman fan until Gal Gadot started carrying her shield. (I read most of my DC comics at a friend's house whose older brother purchased them. He must not have been a WW fan.) Wonder Woman is the most popular female superhero character and the third most popular superhero character overall, coming in only behind Superman and Batman.

The Secret History of Wonder Woman isn't really about Wonder Woman, though. It appears to be about William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator. He's one fascinating guy, even though, according to Lepore, he was not nearly as successful as he appears on paper. Instead, he went from one academic job to another, usually in a downward spiral. He went from one project to another, Wonder Woman being one of them. Then there was his unconventional lifestyle. He lived with his wife,  Elizabeth Holloway Marston, a highly-educated woman who wanted both a career and a family. Even in the early part of the twentieth century, how women could do this was an issue under discussion. Elizabeth Holloway Marston managed this by accepting her husband's lover, Olive Byrne, into their home to raise her children with Marston...as well as Byrne and Marston's children...while she worked.

Yeah, that is fascinating.

But what is also fascinating is the way Lepore pulls together the little aspects of Marston's life that turn up in the Wonder Woman story. He was in on the creation of the lie detector, for instance. Wonder Woman carries a lariat that forces people to tell the truth. There are photos of his companion, Olive Byrne, wearing bracelets similar to the ones Wonder Woman wears.

But what is the most fascinating is the way Marston was a sort of magnet for all sorts of pre-WWII feminism. His wife was an early working woman, for instance. His girlfriend was Margaret Sanger's niece.

All these Marton factors, both from his personal life and the feminism he supported, turn up in Wonder Woman in the mid-twentieth century.

Lepore says, "The suffrage campaign, from 1848 to 1920, is often thought of as the "first wave" of the women's movement, and women's liberation, in the 1960s and 1970s, as the "second wave." In between, this thinking goes, the waters were still. But there was plenty of feminist agitation in the 1940s in the pages of Wonder Woman."

I don't know what I was expecting when I bought this book. But I was delighted to be exposed to so much early- to mid-twentieth century women's history.
 

 

Happy Anniversary, Johnny Tremain

This summer I started trying to tweet a link from the seventeen years of blog posts I have piled up. I try to go back exactly ten years, looking for something that has at least some links that still work and isn't terribly dated. Sometimes I have to hit another year or even another date. But today I found an interesting one on September 12, 2009--The Book That Keeps On Going And Going And Going. 

I was talking about Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. As luck would have it, this Newbery winner is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. Seriously, this book just does not stop.

And how bizarre is it that I would think about doing a Johnny Tremain blog post and then find out it is its anniversary year? My avid followers may recall that I'm always having woo-woo-type experiences with books. And speaking of woo-woo-type experiences: am I the only person struck by the fact that the Tremain anniversary edition has a forward written by someone named Nathan Hale? Come on.

My 2009 JT blog post was inspired by some posts at another blog, Boston 1775, a site on the American Revolution in Massachusetts maintained by J. L. Bell. (This is one of the rare situations in which I've actually met someone I'm talking about. In fact, I've met John a couple of times.) I was thinking about bringing John's 2009 Johnny Tremain posts to my readers' attention again, anyway. Once I realized the book was having a big, big anniversary, too, I went to work.

John did three posts in what I called, at the time, a Tremainathon. They were based upon his reading of  Son of Liberty: Johnny Tremain and the Art of Making American Patriots by Neil L. York, a history professor at Brigham Young University. I found the first and third posts particularly interesting.

The Path to Publication

What I Found Particularly Interesting About Post 1 In The Tremainathon: "I’ve long said that Johnny Tremain reflects the values of America during World War 2, and York confirms that was in fact Forbes’s vision. She called the book “my great war effort...” I don't think a lot of people realize that a lot of what they read when they read history reflects as much about the people who wrote it than it does about the historical events or figures they were writing about. That's what makes history more...mmm...fluid?...then we probably expect it to be. No, what happened in the past cannot change. What we know about it can change, if new information comes to light. And how we perceive it can change, depending on the attitudes of people writing about it.

This summer I finished reading Champlain's Dream by David Hackett Fischer. (Oh, my gosh! John mentions him in his third Tremain post!) Okay, I only skimmed the book, but I can tell you that Fischer includes a thirty-four page section listing writings about Champlain and describing how the authors from different periods perceived him. ("A rough-hewn man of the people." "Imperial.")

History, it appears, is never done.

Johnny Tremain's Deleted Scene

Check it out. It relates to both Post 1 and Post 3.

Three People Detained at the Castle

What I Found Particularly Interesting In Post 3 Of The Tremainathon: Forbes lucked out when she deleted the scene described in Post 2 from Johnny Tremain. Some historical information she used in that scene turned out to be inaccurate. Unfortunately, she had used it in her Pulitzer prize winning biography, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. What was the problem?

"When that letter, now in the John Lamb Papers at the New-York Historical Society, was printed in Elbridge Goss’s 1891 biography of Revere, there was one small error. Instead of saying “three persons,” Goss’s transcription said “these persons.”

While writing her biography of Revere, Forbes interpreted “these persons” to refer to the men who had signed the letter..."  And she concluded that all those people, instead of  "three persons", were somewhere they weren't.

I think we can all agree that this is a lesson we should all learn in not relying on secondary sources. The thought of hunting down every single primary source for a biography exhausts me. I am overwhelmed as I sit here.

Also, this is the kind of story that confirms my feeling about writing straight history. No, thanks. I already don't sleep well at night.

Johnny And Esther Deserve A Moment

I don't believe I've ever read Johnny Tremain. I may have seen a bit of the movie, but only if it turned up on TV. So I can't say I'm a fan. I do, however, have great respect for Esther Forbes' accomplishment. Within a two-year period she won a Pulitzer Prize and a Newbery Medal. That is one hell of a one-two punch. And, yes, having a book stay in print 75 years is mind-boggling. A very tiny number of writers see anything like that happen. Probably not even 1 percent of writers do this.

I wish Esther and Johnny were getting more attention this year. Maybe more will happen before December. In the meantime, scroll down this column from Shelf Awareness for an interview with Nathan Hale on his involvement with the Johnny Tremain anniversary edition.

A Throw Back Thursday Post For Black History Month

Back in 2015 I did a post on Vaunda Micheaux Nelson's Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshall, which was published in 2009. I'm republishing it below as a Black History Month observance.

Bass Reeves

I happened to recall this book recently because last week the television show Timeless featured Reeves in an episode. Timeless is a time travel story, a genre I'm not that fond of as a general rule. In this one, the main characters go to a different time every episode chasing a bad guy who's doing something I don't quite understand and there are some other bad guys I don't get at all. But here's what I do get about Timeless. It's a show for history geeks. It's a show for those of us who sit on our couches watching it and shout, "That's Judith Exner! Judith Exner! That's Kennedy's mistress!" "Oh, you know, there was a serial murderer at the Chicago World's Fair and look how cool Houdini is in this episode." "Bass Reeves? I know him."

Colman Domingo as Bass Reeves

The Bass Reeves' episode was actually called, The Assassination of Jesse James. But the character of Bass Reeves, and the actor who played him, left me thinking, Jesse Who?

Something happens when a genre show aimed at a general audience features lesser known historical figures like Reeves. The show places those figures into popular culture where lots more living people have a chance to hear about them. It takes them out of their niche--Black history, say, or western history--and places them into history with a capital H. It gives them their shot at being remembered for what they did.

We history geeks think that's a good thing, a very good thing.

Throw Back Thursday Post: "Bad News" Is Good News For Readers

I was so taken with Vaunda Micheaux Nelson's article Mind the Gaps in The Horn Book last winter that I went on to read her book Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal. Like Nelson, I grew up watching westerns, so I had noticed a review for this book when it was released in 2009.

Bad News for Outlaws is a fantastic book. It's marketed to grades 3 to 6, so expect more text than in a traditional picture book. It is fascinating text, well-constructed as Bass Reeves' life story. The Reeves' story is told within the context of his world, as well. Just what was the deal with the so-called Indian Territory, anyway? And what were the deputy marshals vs. any other kind of lawman out in the west? Additionally, Nelson uses some great stories about Reeves' activities as a marshal to illustrate what was so interesting about him. And she subtly throws in language from Reeves' era.

In addition to the great writing, this is a beautiful looking book, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie. The design of many of the pages calls to mind old books or maybe wanted posters. The back material is some of the best and most inviting I can recall seeing.

Because Bass Reeves was an African American, I imagine Bad News for Outlaws being displayed prominently in libraries during Black History Month. But this is a book that could be used for so much more. It could support history units because it is so good on the time period when Reeves' lived. It could be used to support a writing unit with the the stories Nelson uses about Reeves lives illustrating use of detail in writing. Oh, and the book also illustrates using an opening hook.

I learned from this book. I was left wondering about one thing, though. Was poor pretty Jennie Reeves left raising Bass's eleven children on her own while he was off taming the Wild West? But then I wonder about that with many books about men from the past.

______________________________

Historical photo of Bass Reeves from Timeless Wiki.

Photo of Colman Domingo as Bass Reeves from A.V. Club.

History In The Kitchen

After last Sunday's kitchen work, I didn't think I'd be doing any cooking this weekend. I was looking forward to cleaning my office desk, because I've been working in the sun room this past summer and have been using the desk as a dump spot. Also, there were a few personal things I was hoping to do, stretching out on the couch and reading being right at the top. But my sister and I are running a birthday brunch next Saturday for our elder, and I needed to get started on some baking for that. And, hard though it is to believe, I still needed to stock up on soup. Soup is a thing here.

Saturday's Soup Making Podcast (I Got Started Late In The Day)

On the Media: How The "Fake News" Gets Made This was a discussion with representatives of some of the cable humor news shows. (I'm a fan of Samantha Bee, myself. Kind of lovin' the rage.) I can't say I got a lot out of it, until some guy said that they couldn't just write jokes. That's how I feel about all humor. Yes, this probably has something to do with my 12th grade English teacher dissing Bob Hope for just standing on a stage telling jokes.

Sunday's Cake, Cupcake, Bread, and Cookie Baking Podcasts

Backstory: Untrammeled: Americans and the Wilderness. This was terrific. You could say that it's a history of American beliefs about wilderness. And there are some real eye openers here.

My Favorite Murder: Sidebar Nation.  I found My Favorite Murder on a list of humor podcasts. I chose it because of what someone had said on the On the Media podcast I listened to on Saturday. You can't just write jokes. I wanted to listen to humor about something. It ended up being one of those podcasts where the hosts laugh and laugh, so listeners think something really funny must be going on. It was an hour and sixteen minute podcast, and they didn't get to the first murder until around the 40 minute point. And then things weren't all that funny. The hosts sounded shocked, which seemed odd because they run a podcast on murders. Wouldn't they have heard a lot of this kind of thing before? If they just read newspapers and on-line news sites, they would have heard similar things.

You're probably thinking, Gail, why did you think a subject like murder had any potential for humor, anyway? Hey, I roomed with nursing students for a semester when I was in college. I raised my kids next door to a NICU nurse. My sister is a nurse who's been around. These are women deep into dark, dark humor. Now, those are some people who could have done a funny murder podcast.

So What Are You Going To Do Next Weekend, Gail?

Well, after spending Saturday celebrating three birthdays, I'm hoping that on Sunday I'll finally get to the couch with some reading. But if I'm cooking, I expect I'll be doing it with some history podcasts.

If I'm able to crash on the couch reading next Sunday, I hope to visit some of the participant blogs in Weekend Cooking at Beth Fish Reads.

You can check out my other weekend cooking and podcast posts at my Podcast in the Kitchen Pinterest board.

Hit Some Fine Podcasts While Cooking Today

When last we discussed the issue of my need to listen to something while cooking, things were not going well. The sci-fi and horror podcasts I'd found were not grabbing me. I definitely couldn't take any more writing process podcasts or writer interviews.

Well, today I needed to do some restocking in the kitchen after having been away from home for nearly three weeks. It got a little bingie, because I made two types of bread without a bread machine, since I lent mine to a family member before I went on vacation. And, by the way, I've still got what it takes to do 8 minutes of kneading...twice. Booyah!

On top of that, I hit the old motherlode with podcasts. These were actually from two podcast series I subscribe to. I just hadn't listened to them in a while.

The first two episodes came from Eric's Guide to Ancient Egypt. I was interested because I'm revising what I refer to as the mummy book. The material I listened to was terrific. 

• The Birth of Egyptology. I assumed this would deal with nineteenth Egyptology. It did, and more. A nineteenth century Egyptologist plays a part in my book.
• Women in Ancient Egypt. Yup. An ancient Egyptian woman figures into my book.

There are a number of other episodes I want to listen to because they relate to my book. I don't know how I missed them. I think I recently downloaded a bunch of new episodes, and the goodies were in there.

In addition to two batches of bread, you can see from the picture above that I also made a cake, some potato stuffing (meh), and began a batch of Amish chicken pot pie. That's in the white kettle, because Amish chicken pot pie has nothing to do with pie. All that took a while, so I went on to:

• Backstory. Contested Landscape-Confederate Symbols in America. In the early part of this podcast, a historian from the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia spoke. I was there last month. Monument Avenue in Richmond was also discussed. I was there, too. 

I'm feeling a lot better about podcasts right now. And I'm set for bread for a while.









I'm taking part in Weekend Cooking at Beth Fish Reads. You can also take a look at all my Podcasts in the Kitchen posts through my Pinterest board.