NAME — Amanda Stevens
AGE — 2008
GRADE —
NAME — Anne Coffey
AGE — 28
From Sea to Shining Sea Compiler: Amy L. Cohn. Publisher: Scholastic. Pages: 400. Cost: $29.95.
When some kids think about history, they see dark dusty events that happened long ago to people they don't know.
When other kids think about history, they see an opportunity to learn about the mistakes of the past so they won't make them in the future.
Amy Cohn, compiler of a new book for kids, thinks history is important for another reason.
"If you don't know about the past, you just don't know where you fit in. It gives you a sense of where you've come from and where you've been.
"I wanted people to feel that the past is worth remembering and worth exploring," she explained in a recent phone interview from her office in New York.
Cohn is an editor for Morrow books and has been active in the children's book field for 15 years. Her book, From Sea to Shining Sea, contains 400 pages of songs, art and folk tales that tell the story of America's past.
Experiencing America
Since Cohn was a girl growing up in Queens, she was interested in historical novels and biographies. She majored in history in college.
She tries to share her enthusiasm for the subject in her first book.
"If I were thinking about the purpose of this book, I'd say it is to introduce a broad range of American folklore to children living today in the context of American history and American culture.
"I wanted readers to feel that they were part of a great adventure and part of a really wonderful experience by being American and being a part of a pageant that is this country."
With 200-plus years of our history to cover, how did Cohn find all this material, and how did she decide what deserved to be included?
She started her search in already published books, magazine articles and by listening to storytellers and traveling to folk festivals. After five years of research, her original manuscript was over 3 feet high and weighed close to 80 pounds.
"It was a nightmare," she said. "One of the things that happened as this began to take shape is that I just discovered all this material and I loved it."
Working evenings for a year with her editor from Scholastic, together they whittled the stack down to 400 pages.
Discovering folklore
Cohn educated herself during her research. She discovered "academic folklorists," including Richard Dorson, who headed the Folklore Institute at Indiana University in Bloomington before his death in 1981.
"You can go to college and learn about folklore, and go on to graduate school and become an expert in it. . . . I never really knew that much about folklore and I really loved learning about the structure of the discipline.
"And then . . . (the challenge was) taking those big ideas and then figuring how they would work in a book for children."
From Sea to Shining Sea has 15 chapters, each highlighting a period of America's past. Each chapter is illustrated by a single artist.
Eleven Caldecott Medal and four Caldecott Honor artists created more than 800 original illustrations to accompany the 140 folktales, folk songs, poems and essays. Cohn believes the art brings the stories to life.
While loving the challenge, Cohn admits the work was difficult at times.
"The hardest chapter to research was the Native American section that begins the book," she said.
"When I was looking at different Native American stories which are often retold by people from the white culture, I had to figure out whether or not these stories were told authentically, and which was the one that reflected the thoughts and the ideas and the beliefs of the people the best."
What Cohn did was to read everything she could about the tribe - the kind of clothing they wore, their family structure, the way they built their houses. Once she knew those things, she was able to decide which stories best reflected the tribe's views and culture.
Diversity of cultures
The easiest chapter to assemble was the chapter on baseball, because she's a real baseball fan.
Although Cohn spent five years on this book, the richness of the American culture still surprises her.
"When I read it and look at it . . . I'm just amazed and overwhelmed and thrilled by the diversity that is this country," she said.
"That everybody no matter what their background has a story to tell and a song to sing. That's part of the American experience.
"And I really hope that the thing people take away from this book is that everybody's story is valid and everybody counts. And that everybody, no matter what age, or sex or color, is just as American as the next person."
Unlike other history texts, her book doesn't contain many statistics, Cohn said. She believes songs and stories reveal the hearts of Americans more than facts and figures.
"You can learn an awful lot about the gold rush by looking at the facts, but you can also learn a lot when you sing the gold rush lyrics to Oh Susanna," Cohn said.
"You get a sense of the hope and the exhilaration of that time in history, as well as the different articles of clothing or apparatus and tools that were need to go to the diggings."
When Cohn was working on the book, she thought her audience would be mostly fourth- and fifth-grade students because they are "old enough and experienced enough to be able to understand this notion of the past and things that have come before them.
"And also, they're old enough and experienced enough to have a feel for the future and things that might be ahead and understand where the present sits squarely in the middle of things."
Cohn also thinks this would be a good book for families to share.
"I think a parent would probably use it more for entertainment, for sharing the stories and reading them aloud. . . . Not really focusing so much on the historical aspect of things but just enjoying the pleasure of the experience."
Suitable for the classroom
Teachers, according to Cohn, might use it along with a regular textbook to tie the facts and figures of a period with the voices of the people at the time.
"I thought a lot about schools (when I was writing it). I was hoping that teachers and students would find it really fun and exciting to look at in schools.
"And I was hoping that librarians would find it valuable for research and information about American culture and history. I was hoping that storytellers would find a lot of material in it to tell stories."
And while her hope is that readers learn about about our country's diverse history, for Cohn this was not just a compiling effort.
"I am happy, proud and satisfied. It also makes me feel sort of tired and a little sad because so many years of my life went into doing the book. It became very important to me."