Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2017 i Cobblestone American History and Current Events for Kids and Children

James Fenimore Cooper was only 13 months old when his family moved from New Jersey to Otsego Lake in 1790. Located in central New York, the lake is the source of the Susquehanna River, one of the largest rivers in the northeastern United States. The Coopers’ new home was surrounded by a wilderness that had formerly been controlled by the powerful Iroquois Nation. The head of the Cooper family, William, cleared a tract of land. He became prosperous and served as a local judge. A town developed on the spot and took the name Cooperstown. William often entertained influential men at home. James, the second youngest of 12 children, listened in on their conversations. The visitors discussed land claims and business and trade issues with cities to the east. They…

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey lived the first two decades of his life as an enslaved person, but he dreamed of being free. After he was born around 1818, he was separated from his mother and sent to live with his grandmother on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He rarely saw his mother, and he never knew his father. When he was about eight years old, Frederick was sent to live and work in Baltimore. The city was a major U.S. port for shipping and trade in the early 1800s. Frederick labored for a ship builder, Hugh Auld. Auld’s wife, Sophia, taught Frederick how to read until her husband put a stop to it because it was against the law to educate slaves. Frederick understood that learning to read provided him with the…

Louisa May Alcott used her actual family to create the fictional story of the March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy. After she introduced them in Little Women, the book became an instant bestseller and made Louisa famous. It was a long road to success for Louisa, however. She was born on November 29, 1832. The Alcott girls—Anna Bronson, Louisa May, Elizabeth Sewall, and Abigail May (called May)—were educated at home by their father, Amos Bronson Alcott. The family moved a lot, but they found a sense of community in Concord, Massachusetts. Their neighbors included other 19th-century thinkers and writers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne Bronson spent most of his time trying to get support for his ideas on social reform and progressive education. He…

All the 19th-century authors in this issue handwrote their material with pen and ink. Although the typewriter was invented in 1867, it wasn’t popular until the early 1900s. Mark Twain was the first author known to submit a typewritten manuscript to his publisher in the late 1800s. To 21st-century computer writers like us, both handwriting and typewriting seem labor intensive. But perhaps it gives us a greater appreciation for the creative process of earlier novelists as they labored over their famous works. Don’t you wonder how they did it without a spell check option?…

The Mystery Writers of America have a major award named after this month’s mystery hero, so you know he must have left a lasting impact. Indeed, none other than Stephen King—among the most famous living American suspense/mystery authors—stated, “He wasn’t just a mystery/suspense writer. He was the first.” Our hero had a difficult life. Born January 19, 1809, he was orphaned at age two when his mother died of tuberculosis. His alcoholic father had already deserted the family. A wealthy Virginia tobacco merchant took in our hero but never adopted him. Fortunately, the merchant’s wife cared about the boy. Because his foster parents were rich, our hero received a good education. When the family traveled to Scotland and England, our six-year-old hero attended schools there. He was a good student…

A little mystery, a pinch of insanity, a dash of murder, and a bit of romance. Do those elements sound like the perfect ingredients for a best-selling novel? Americans at the turn of the 19th century thought so. Recognized as the first significant American novel, Wieland, or, The Transformation was a danger-filled, romantic suspense story. It was written in 1798 by Charles Brockden Brown. Brown was born in Philadelphia in 1771. His parents were Quakers, and they made sure that their son had a good education. At age 16, he began studying law, but he found it dull. Brown wanted to be a writer instead. A Philadelphia magazine first published a series of Brown’s articles in 1789. By the 1790s, he decided to try supporting himself only by his writing.…

Children often enjoy listening to tales of their ancestors’ brave adventures or principled actions. That was not the case for Nathaniel Hawthorne. He had no images of glorious war heroes or trailblazing explorers in his family history. His most famous relative was his Puritan great-great-grandfather, Justice John Hathorne. That man had left a legacy of injustice and death for his role in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Hawthorne’s Puritan ancestors haunted him and shaped his view of the human experience. He confronted the theme of puritanical judgments from an earlier time by writing about them in stories and novels. He may have even added a “w” to his last name to distance himself from Hathorne. Born on July 4, 1804, Hawthorne grew up in Salem, Massachusetts. His sea captain…

Sharing deep religious convictions and strong activist beliefs, the Beecher family produced some of the most prominent ministers, educators, and abolitionists of the 19th century. Among them, Harriet Beecher Stowe stands out as a writer on a mission. Harriet was born in 1811, the sixth of eight children to Lyman Beecher and his first wife, Roxana, in the town of Litchfield, Connecticut. In 1816, when Harriet was five years old, her mother died. A deep sorrow fell over the home until a year later, when Lyman remarried and a warm-hearted stepmother took charge of the household. Lyman believed that girls should receive a formal education and be encouraged to use their talents. That was unusual for the time, when most girls were only taught the skills to help them be…

In the 1800s, the future of slavery in the expanding nation divided Americans and led to the four-year Civil War (1861–1865). Frederick Douglass was the most famous former enslaved person to share his experiences, but other escaped slaves also wrote down their stories. A few of those publications became famous at that time. Others have only recently been discovered. Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter by William Wells Brown (c. 1814–1884) became the first known novel written by an African American. It was published in 1853, while Brown was living in England. It is the fictional story of a slave family related to President Thomas Jefferson. It focuses on the hardships faced by Jefferson’s two mixed-race children after he dies. Brown, who had escaped from slavery in 1834, also published a…

Perhaps what makes Mark Twain stand out in American literature is that he made no apologies for his writing. In the preface to one of his books, he tells the reader that he has written “honestly, whether wisely or not.” Almost all his life, he wrote about things he knew and with which he was familiar. People all over the world loved his combination of humor and realism. Twain was born in 1835 and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. He worked as a riverboat pilot and as a miner and a reporter out west. He traveled abroad. He developed a fascination with scientific inventions. He eventually wove all these experiences into his books and stories. In The Innocents Abroad (1869), Twain applied his unique brand of…

If you visit Concord, Massachusetts, you can visit the homes of four famous authors, as well as some of the places they visited. The gang and I visited Orchard House, Louisa May Alcott’s family home and where she wrote Little Women. We also stopped to see the Wayside (ABOVE) and the Old Manse, where Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson lived. The Colonel liked walking through the vegetable garden at the Old Manse, which was originally planted by Henry David Thoreau. I liked Emerson’s study, which is now across the street inside the Concord Museum. The squirrels were happiest on our walk to Walden Pond and the site of Thoreau’s cabin. (They were a little distracted by all the acorns!) If you go to Concord, check out www.concordmuseum.org/ self-guided-tours.php for…

The most famous fictional creature in 19th-century American literature is Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick is a white sperm whale that attacks and sinks a whaling ship in Herman Melville’s novel by the same name. But what about real sperm whales? They have wrinkled gray skin, and they almost never attack ships. A sperm whale’s large, boxy head holds the largest animal brain at more than 15 pounds and a fully toothed lower jaw. It can also be identified by its small flippers and a small hump instead of a dorsal fin on its back. An average male sperm whale grows to about 60 feet and weighs 63 tons. That’s a third bigger than a school bus! Sperm whales will dive to great depths to find and eat squid, but they eat fish…

Washington Irving was born in New York City in 1783, the same year that the treaty ending the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) was signed. His mother named him “Washington” in honor of the nation’s new hero, General George Washington. Irving was the youngest of 11 children, but he didn’t go to college as his older brothers did. He studied the law. He also wrote a series of humorous essays for a newspaper owned by his brother Peter. After passing the bar examination in 1806, he practiced law, but he found greater enjoyment and success in writing. His first major work was a satirical history of the Dutch settlement of his native New York. History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty was published…

In the 19th century, a life at sea was full of perils and adventure. Nations depended on navigating the oceans for trade, travel, and military might. The lure of the sea was strong. It pulled young Herman Melville to try his hand as a sailor and a whaleman. It turned out that he was better at spinning tales than sailing ships. He used the sea as the setting in seven of the 10 novels he wrote: Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), White-Jacket (1850), Moby-Dick (1851), and Billy Budd ( posthumously published in 1924). Melville was born in 1819 in New York City, where he was one of eight children. The family was well-off, but they lived beyond what Melville’s father could support with his imported dry goods…

“Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie” (1847), “The Song of Hiawatha” (1850), and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1863) are among the most famous 19th-century American poems. And the man who composed them, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882), was among the most famous 19th-century American poets. His work was so popular that he stopped teaching at Harvard College to write full time. His first collection of poems appeared in 1841. His poetry often was based on historical events that appealed to the citizens of the young and growing nation. Largely self-educated, John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) was a Quaker and an abolitionist. His first poem, “The Exile’s Departure,” was printed in 1826 by leading abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison encouraged young Whittier to continue writing. Before the Civil War (1861–1865), most of Whittier’s poems…

When Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803, the United States was a young nation searching for a distinct voice and identity. Emerson grew with the country. Instead of looking to Europe, he introduced a new way of thinking and writing for America. By the 1830s, Emerson had come to the conclusion that people were basically good and that each person should rely on himself or herself to decide right from wrong. He emerged as a leader of a new movement called transcendentalism. It was a belief that true spiritual understanding came through personal intuition. It was a radical concept at a time when formal, organized religion had an important role in people’s lives. Emerson settled in the rural village of Concord in 1835. His neighbors included Henry David Thoreau,…

Personal Experience At the age of 12, Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was forced to leave school to go to work in an English factory. His father had been sent to prison for not paying his debts, and the family needed money. Conditions in the factory were horrible, and the experience later influenced Dickens’s novel writing. In Oliver Twist, Dickens tells the story of a young orphan forced to work and care for himself in London. As an adult, Dickens worked in a legal office, where he saw how the law often protected the wealthy and punished the poor. Through his novels, middle-class readers during Britain’s Victorian Era (1837–1901) were made aware of many social injustices, from extreme poverty to government corruption. Realistic Fiction Russian writer Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) is best known…

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