Perpetuating Grant’s Legacy: A Snapshot of Children’s Biographies of U.S. Grant

 

 Many stakeholders have a hand in the publication, distribution, and teaching of texts about the life and legacy of Ulysses S. Grant. Considering the interplay of publishing, editorial criteria, education, and other contexts and trends generally, provides a useful starting point to mapping the landscape of educational materials about the Civil War general and 18th president.

The dominant intellectual thrust in history and the social sciences in recent decades has been to emphasize the broader contexts of the past more than the individual. The academy has moved away from the traditional, so-called “Great Man” approach to history that placed such figures front and center.

A Washington, Napoleon, Lincoln, Grant, or Roosevelt may be important to a degree, but were deemed to be far less important than social forces, ideologies, economics, class, and other factors. Given these trends, one might ask: why teach with biographies if history is not really about great figures? Another response has been to shift emphasis to those who have traditionally received less attention, including women and minorities.

Enriched with more context and diversity in subject matter, biographies can still play a highly educational role. They are an attractive way to draw a wider range of students into deeper study of literature, history, sociology, political science, and many other fields. Biographies also help educators broaden their own knowledge and enhance their lessons and interactions with students.

Erin Bishop, Education Programs Administrator of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, says that recounting historic figures’ problems, struggles, and human stories reveal them as recognizable and compelling people who otherwise would seem remote to many youngsters. Historian and Grant scholar and author Joan Waugh, Associate Professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles, says the Grant story is relevant at the higher levels. She says attributes like Grant’s leadership can illuminate such complex topics as the mobilization of citizen soldiers during the Civil War, Civil Rights, Reconstruction, and the role of national memory.

 

Publishers
Educational and economic potential converge to create a steady stream of biographies for young readers. School and public libraries continue to buy the books, and publishers churn out publications to meet the demand (see accompanying articles featuring Elizabeth Hearne and Marie Kelsey).

There have been at least 29 new children’s biographies of Grant published in the past 15 years. This does not count reprints of older texts and other related publications (see accompanying bibliography). To place that in context, a cursory look shows at least 25 kids’ books about Robert E. Lee since the 1980s. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, has been the subject of about 60 such books in just five years.

Children’s book publishers express what they are seeking in various ways. Scholastic “is currently emphasizing…unusual approaches to commonly dry subjects,” including biographies and histories for kids. Lerner says its goal “is to publish children’s books that educate, stimulate, and stretch the imagination, foster global awareness, encourage critical thinking and inform, inspire, and entertain.

” Atheneum, a Simon & Schuster imprint, says it seeks lasting themes, not fads, in its children’s book topics. Enslow Publishers, meanwhile, seeks “good research skills by writers who can think like young people.”

 

Documentation
Many are also calling for biographies for children that are documented and indexed fully, use primary sources, contain balanced and vivid writing, and have high-quality illustrations. In essence, they call for everything expected in biographies for adults, and discourage older strategies in kids’ biographies such as emphasizing virtues and moral lessons, or injecting a fictional boy or girl into a historic incident.

 

Other Criteria
Many educators and publishers, along with consumers of children’s books, push for specific attributes in educational texts for youngsters. The Children’s Book Council, a publisher’s trade association, and the National Council for the Social Studies, an educator’s advocacy group, are two examples. In selecting their joint annual award for notable social studies books for young readers, the groups call, in part, for writing that “promotes civic competence,” helps “young people make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society,” emphasizes “human relations,” and presents “a fresh slant on a traditional topic.”

The Association for Library Services to Children, a subgroup of the American Library Association, has telling criteria for its industry-prestigious Robert F. Sibert Book Award for excellence in children’s non-fiction. The award recognizes “high quality in writing and illustration,” documentation, stimulating writing, and the best possible match between a book’s presentation and the age of the readers.

Publishers themselves seek various attributes for children’s non-fiction. In fact, publishers churning out such books adroitly produce guides to help parents and educators find the best books for kids along various lines, including, of course, literary merit, as well as religious values and character-building.

Recent Grant books for kids run the gamut. Mason Crest Publishers stresses its historical expertise when describing its tome by Bethanne Kelly Patrick, Ulysses S. Grant, in its Childhoods of the Presidents series (2002). For a different style, one can choose The Story Of Ulysses S. Grant (2005) by Patricia Pingry, Tamara Smith, and Stephanie Britt, which is adorned with a kid-friendly, comic book art cover, this children’s book was published in 2005 by Candy Cane Press Ideals Publications, Inc.
The company is a division of Guideposts, the spirituality publication founded by clergyman and “The Power of Positive Thinking,” author Norman Vincent Peale.

Of course, topics and slants of children’s books about Grant also reflect the time in which they were published. There are many reasons for today’s increased critical emphasis on documentation and sourcing reflects. One may be more rigorous and specialized educational and literary standards and expectations accompanying the professionalism of the historical profession. Another contemporary trend, that of using more refined and complex graphic elements, probably reflects the increased visual expectations of a culture inundated by television, computers, and video games. Print has to acknowledge what has been described as a “post-literary” popular culture to grab young readers’ attention. Other examples that mention Grant speak to different motivations.

Russell Roberts’s Presidents and Scandals (Lucent Books, 2001), for example, includes a section on the scandals during the Grant administration. The book may have been spurred by parents’ appeals for help in how to describe scandals during the Clinton administration to their children.

 

Libraries
School and public library collections teem with older and newer biographies for young readers. Here, school and library board budgeters, local taxpayers, library administrators and buyers, library journal reviewers, and regional historical interest enter the funnel with the other stakeholders. The quantity and quality of their collections come out the other end.

In addition, libraries affiliated with historic figures are also focal points for education. Both the newly opened Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, and the Jessie Ball duPont Memorial Library at the birthplace of Robert E. Lee in Stratford, Virginia provide various educational programs about the figures, serve as educational resource clearing houses, and arrange student tours of their facilities. Grant has no presidential library, but various Grant sites throughout the United States offer educational tours, welcome students, and provide interpretative programs.

 

Other Forms of Presentation
Bishop of the Lincoln Library says librarians and curators there work with students in various ways. They emphasize critical readings of such primary sources as letters and documents. Newspaper articles, reproduction artifacts, and even programs of reenactors playing Lincoln and others help bring topics to life for youngsters, says Bishop. Grade-schoolers also enjoy museum cutouts of the Lincoln family, as well as personal accounts of Lincoln as a father, and as a stepchild. Youngsters also show great interest in Lincoln’s children. Curators find that creating programs that kids find exciting eventually leads to more young people to careers in teaching, and the museum and library fields, Bishop adds.

 

Conclusions

Stakeholders in academia, publishing, and other fields as well as parents bring their expertise and concerns to their interpretations of Grant for kids. They produce a diverse, evolving collection of interpretations, competing with, contradicting, or complementing others. At work simultaneously is what young people make individually of the messages they encounter. Thus, stakeholders make impressions that are hard to measure, and that reveal themselves individually as well as collectively over time. What is clear, however, is the importance of children in perpetuating the legacy of Ulysses S. Grant.