Gertrude Van Duyn Southworth

One of the best memories of my childhood was being a sixth grader, the first pleasant memory of school — in fact, the only pleasant year among my twelve at that school. I remember it so well that I’m writing a book for my grandchildren, called “Cousin Nannie’s Sixth Grade: The Sun Never Set on British Soil.” For when I was a sixth grader, we studied world history for the first time, science for the first time, and world geography. Our teacher (we actually called her Cousin Nannie, but that’s another story) emphasized the countries in the British Empire. It was the year that Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten, and she gathered us all around the radio to listen to the wedding. She even shared with us the recipe for the 500-pound wedding cake, or at least that’s the way I remember it. “The sun never sets on British soil”: we heard that often. Except that, ironically, that was the very year (1947-48) that the sun was setting on British Soil: Pakistan and India became independent (and warring) nations; Burma became independent; Israel set itself up as an independent nation and defended itself against Palestinians. Geography was alive in our newspapers, on our radios, and in our sixth-grade classroom.

But the book that lodged itself in my memory (and reappeared a few years ago in a used bookstore) was our history book: America’s Old World Background by Gertrude and John Van Duyn Southworth (Iroquois, c1934). In those days, understandably, world history was important to youngsters because it led up to and culminated in — ta-da — “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Nothing in there about Africa or Asia or Eastern Europe or Latin America. Or Germany or Russia or Japan. Time would come for all that. The main parts of the book deal with Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages (especially emphasizing the Franks and the Vikings), and the Renaissance as a time for exploration.

Oh, but what I remember most, what won me over to the book and to a lifetime of fantastic reading was Part One: The Myths of Long Ago. We spent at least a week on the Greek Pantheon, and the stories of Prometheus and Pandora’s box. Then there were Hercules and Jason and Theseus and Pericles. There was the Trojan War (with Achilles’ heel) and the Odyssey (with those lotus-eaters, Polyphemus and the Cyclopes, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the lovely Calypso, and home at Ithaca with Penelope and Telemachus). We read the book, of course, but our teacher told the stories and I lived them. Now this, I thought to myself, is what school ought to be like every year. It never was again.

But this Old World Background was lodged in my mind for all time. Beginning with myths and legends, the book warned its young readers, “But they are not true! [italics for emphasis] Remember this, as you read them.” After about six weeks of these “untrue” stories, one classmate finally said, in desperation. “When are we gonna get to some real people? I thought history was supposed to be about real people!” Indeed, but history is also, and always, a story. The Southworths seemed to know this; my sixth-grade teacher knew this. By the end of the year, I knew I wanted to be a history teacher, and I didn’t change my mind — until I encountered my first history professors in college. It took them less than one accademic year to convert me to English (but that’s another story, too).

As I make my way through this old textbook now (I think my copy may be an older edition than the one we actually used), I am transported back to those days when, as a preadolescent in a wholly innocent age, I lived the heroics of story after story: Thor and Loki. Sigurd and Brunhild, the mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger (finally we did get to reality), the hanging gardens of Nebuchadnezzar, Hammurabi’s laws, Phoenicia as “a nation of sailors,” Demosthenes (who put pebbles in his mouth and taught himself to talk over the roar of the sea), Alexander the Great, Romulus and Remus (those legends do keep reasserting themselves, don’t they?), Hannibal and the siege of Carthage, the Gracchi (Cornelia’s “jewels”), the Caesars.

And that only brought us up to the Middle Ages. Stories — of the real and the unreal — captivated me. Heroes abounded. The real kept getting tinctured with the unreal: “Roland finally blows his horn.” How well I remember my naive fascination with the Crusades, even the unfortunate Children’s Crusade. I thought Richard the Lion-Hearted was a hero among heroes, and I suspect that my secret ambition was to become a Christian crusader. I hope, however, that I read this text — and believed in it, be it real or unreal:

“As the war went on, Richard and Saladin grew to respect each other very much. Each knew that the other was a great and worthy leader. At one time Richard was sick with fever. Saladin, although he was Richard’s enemy, sent him fresh fruits to help him gain strength, and snow from the mountains to cool his hot, dry lips.

“Such friendly acts were better than any amount of bloodshed, for they led in the end to a peaceful agreement between these two leaders. This treaty allowed Christian pilgrims to go to and from Jerusalem without danger.”

The book concludes with the “discovery” and exploration of the Americas, with special attention to the early adventurers, the Spanish, the French, and the English. One of the last illustrations in the book (I’m sorry I can’t remember the painter’s name, and it is not given) shows Walter Raleigh as a boy. The caption captures the thrill and the anticipation of the story:

“Even when he was a boy, Raleigh loved the sea and adventure. Here we see him, with his hands clasped about his knees, listening with one of his friends to the tales of a sailor who had crossed the ocean to far-off America. Perhaps, as he listens, young Raleigh is already dreaming of the colonies he will some day try to plant in the New World.”

I think, as a child, I identified with Raleigh’s friend, the young boy sitting cross-legged beside Raleigh in the painting, nameless but equally expectant, dreaming, if not of colonies to be planted, at least of ambitions to be realized, adventures to enlist in. History, to me, was like this old sailor’s stories. The long ago and faraway promised a future of excitement and achievement. For young readers, that’s what history should do. I’m still convinced of that. Who they will become is made up, in part at least, from who has been — the heroes about whom they hear and read. Hermes, Demosthenes, Joseph in his many-colored coat, Roland, Robin Hood, St. Augustine, Walter Raleigh — or the gang on the street. They choose.… (mer)