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Newbery Books of the 1950s
Feb. 4th, 2023 03:29 pmSlowly but surely progressing through the Newbery books of the 1950s. Different Newbery decades often have different themes: the 1920s go in for surrealism, the 2010s for racial diversity - while the 1950s, you’ll be not at all surprised to hear, are big on freedom and America.
Genevieve Foster’s Birthdays of Freedom is a two-volume set, and I ended up reading both volumes even though only From Early Egypt to the Fall of Rome got a Newbery Honor. (The second book stretches From the Fall of Rome to July 4, 1776, and in case any reader is slow to understand the teleological significance of this endpoint, the title page adds, “America’s Heritage from the Ancient World.”) Lavishly illustrated. I wish I had taken the trouble to get a paper copy, as the books take a lot of trouble with the formatting, including a fascinating timeline that wraps around the sides of the page which is difficult to read in ebook format.
The subtitle of the first book is clearly misleading, as the first Birthday of Freedom is the day that “early man somehow learned to make and use Fire,” and the book includes a number of other prehistoric events, like the invention of agriculture. One presumes the marketing department though Early Egypt to the Fall of Rome sounded more marketable.
Mary & Conrad Buff’s The Apple and the Arrow is a retelling of the story of William Tell, the thrilling tale of a man who is forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head in punishment for defying a tyrant. (Important How to Be a Better Dictator lesson: don’t punish your opponents in ways that highlight their badass archery skills in front of the entire populace.)
Elizabeth Baity’s Americans Before Columbus is what it says on the tin: a history of the peoples of the American continents pre-Columbus, a companion piece if you will to Hendrik van Loon’s History of Mankind and Elizabeth Seeger’s Pageant of Chinese History.
In the last chapter, however, Baity attempts an intervention in the triumphalist 1776-as-the-pinnacle-of-history interpretation of Birthdays of Freedom and 1950s Newbery books more generally: “Tribes were driven on death marches from their lands to distant areas that were little better than concentration camps. Every effort was made to destroy the Indians’ social and religious patterns. This is a story every American should know, for the sake of our national conscience, and it is a story that few of our history books tell.”
A lot of the 1950s Newbery books are concerned with American identity. (Actually, one could argue more broadly that the Newbery Award, across time, is concerned with American identity, and that’s one reason why the award has remained so true to histories and historical fiction for so many decades. Will have to consider this at greater length.)
Many of the 1950s books fit into the general image of the 1950s as a rah-rah-AMERICA decade, so it’s interesting to find this one voice insisting that American Indians are an integral part of that story, no matter how many books ignore or belittle them. “These truly American people who were the real discoverers of America are not only a part of our country’s past but will also play a significant role in the drama of its future.”
Genevieve Foster’s Birthdays of Freedom is a two-volume set, and I ended up reading both volumes even though only From Early Egypt to the Fall of Rome got a Newbery Honor. (The second book stretches From the Fall of Rome to July 4, 1776, and in case any reader is slow to understand the teleological significance of this endpoint, the title page adds, “America’s Heritage from the Ancient World.”) Lavishly illustrated. I wish I had taken the trouble to get a paper copy, as the books take a lot of trouble with the formatting, including a fascinating timeline that wraps around the sides of the page which is difficult to read in ebook format.
The subtitle of the first book is clearly misleading, as the first Birthday of Freedom is the day that “early man somehow learned to make and use Fire,” and the book includes a number of other prehistoric events, like the invention of agriculture. One presumes the marketing department though Early Egypt to the Fall of Rome sounded more marketable.
Mary & Conrad Buff’s The Apple and the Arrow is a retelling of the story of William Tell, the thrilling tale of a man who is forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head in punishment for defying a tyrant. (Important How to Be a Better Dictator lesson: don’t punish your opponents in ways that highlight their badass archery skills in front of the entire populace.)
Elizabeth Baity’s Americans Before Columbus is what it says on the tin: a history of the peoples of the American continents pre-Columbus, a companion piece if you will to Hendrik van Loon’s History of Mankind and Elizabeth Seeger’s Pageant of Chinese History.
In the last chapter, however, Baity attempts an intervention in the triumphalist 1776-as-the-pinnacle-of-history interpretation of Birthdays of Freedom and 1950s Newbery books more generally: “Tribes were driven on death marches from their lands to distant areas that were little better than concentration camps. Every effort was made to destroy the Indians’ social and religious patterns. This is a story every American should know, for the sake of our national conscience, and it is a story that few of our history books tell.”
A lot of the 1950s Newbery books are concerned with American identity. (Actually, one could argue more broadly that the Newbery Award, across time, is concerned with American identity, and that’s one reason why the award has remained so true to histories and historical fiction for so many decades. Will have to consider this at greater length.)
Many of the 1950s books fit into the general image of the 1950s as a rah-rah-AMERICA decade, so it’s interesting to find this one voice insisting that American Indians are an integral part of that story, no matter how many books ignore or belittle them. “These truly American people who were the real discoverers of America are not only a part of our country’s past but will also play a significant role in the drama of its future.”
