Previously in this series: Introduction. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
This is a much shorter section, to be covered in only two weeks.
- Seton, Chapter 8, "Colonial Expansion"
- Foster, The World of William Penn
- Daugherty, Daniel Boone
- Gridley, Pontiac
Genevieve Foster's book is not only a portrait of a very interesting personage, it covers the whole time period from 1660-1718 in a nice broad survey. Marion Gridley's Pontiac is an easy-reader biography, very sympathetic to Pontiac, and well written for an easy reader, I thought. The illustrations are a little cartoonish but not objectionable.
James Daugherty's Daniel Boone took me a while to decide on. It is wonderfully written and beautifully, provocatively illustrated. It was the first of all the books that I read, myself, cover to cover, for the sheer enjoyment of the riveting story. But... it was hard for me to choose it, nonetheless. It contains frank treatment of the violence between frontier settlers and native Americans -- the murder of settler families, retaliation by settlers against local tribes, etc. (Read Wikipedia's article on Daniel Boone for some background). This is, shall we say, an uncomfortable topic. Am I a skilled enough presenter to cover this topic without giving my kids an Indians-are-bad-guys attitude? Many of the illustrations are quite violent, depicting armed, scary-looking Shawnee.
At first I thought, "No way -- the kids are going to remember these 'scary Indian' pictures more than anything else." But I kept picking up the book and flipping through it again. Even though the illustrations were very violent, I noticed that they were pretty balanced. The colonists and European armies are depicted with their weapons too -- my own bias, I think, led me to think of these "familiar" warriors as less menacing than the depictions of the Shawnee. Furthermore, the more I looked at them, the more I saw that Daugherty had given all the people in his illustrations a tremendous dignity. Whereas a lot of children's illustrators of that era depicted native people as childlike and primitive, Daugherty's Shawnee were... fearsome. Powerful. Worthy adversaries. And if you look closely at the pictures, which are sort of whirling montages of images, you see that through his illustrations Daugherty has also tried to tell both sides of the story. You see the settler with his rifle, pointing, giving instructions to his terrified wife through the crack of the cabin door as she's barricading herself and the children inside. But another illustration shows the Shawnee warrior standing in resistance, over an image of a Shawnee woman crouched, face turned away, over the body of a child. They're really quite amazing illustrations.
In any case, too, Daniel Boone's story is really a very fascinating one -- it's hard to believe that one man could have so many different experiences -- and his story, which takes place in Kentucky and Tennessee at a time when it's easy to forget that anything was happening outside the 13 colonies, is really worth telling.
So... I recommend it. There are still caveats to be made about the language -- read it aloud, because you might choose to substitute for certain charged terms used to describe the native people.
Next up: we return to the 13 colonies for "Life In Colonial America."
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