LAR'S LIBRARY: MY REVIEW OF ANN BAUSUM'S "UNRAVELING FREEDOM"

UNRAVELING FREEDOM: THE BATTLE FOR DEMOCRACY ON THE HOME FRONT DURING WORLD WAR I. By Ann Bausum. National Geographic Society, 2010. 96 pages.

All the ways the internet promotes superficial reading? Social studies textbooks have picked up on that. Sidebars, inserts, and yes, even links. All from multiple sources. I’m looking at a seventh grade textbook right now which credits seven contributing authors, who have been advised by eleven academic consultants, five reading consultants, and five teacher reviewers. It’s not surprising that its prose is dull.

Making a strong case for eliminating textbooks from the classroom on Edutopia’s site, Shelly Blake-Plock, a Maryland high school teacher, writes, "If textbooks were inspiring and everyone wanted to read them, they'd be at the top of the New York Times' bestseller list."

What kind of history books do draw readers? History buffs like me will tell you they are books by one author with one point of view who knows how to write a good story, people like David McCullough and Daniel Walker Howe. We aren’t interested in textbooks. Why should kids be, even if they are interested in history?

Three books aimed at middle schoolers about World War I have come out in the past year or so. I’ve read and reviewed Russell Freedman’s superb The War to End All Wars. It would be an excellent textbook-less way to begin a study of the Great War for kids hungry for the same kind of history writing their elders seek out.

I’ve yet to read Jim Murphy’s Truce: The Day the Soldiers Stopped Fighting, but I am anxious to, given the quality of his many other books.

Unraveling Freedom would be a wonderful follow-up to The War to End All Wars. In measured words, Ann Bausum skillfully traces the story of a nation that wanted to stay away from European conflict that quickly transformed itself into a patriotic fighting machine. Thoughtfully, she asks her readers to consider the price we are sometimes asked to pay to prove we are loyal and that we support our armed forces.

On the eve of America’s entry into the First World War, Bausum notes that "perhaps as many as a quarter of all Americans had either been born in Germany or had descended from Germans." As readers of Kirby Larson’s Hattie Big Sky (another good one I’d include in my middle school seminar) will remember, life for German-Americans suddenly became quite difficult. Teaching—or speaking—the German language was no longer acceptable. Sauerkraut was re-labeled as liberty cabbage, and hamburgers as liberty steaks. Vigilantes took the law into their own hands, sometimes executing German-Americans.

But beyond the persecution of this significant segment of the population, anti-German hysteria opened the door for government incursion on personal rights our Constitution guarantees. Thousands of Americans, Bausum writes, "found themselves silenced, harassed, or imprisoned because of the Espionage and Sedition Acts." In the war’s aftermath, a small-time bureaucrat in the Justice Department named J. Edgar Hoover used the Red Scare to spy on suspected subversives and to gain his own powerful foothold in the government.

These sorts of actions are not totally unfamiliar to modern Americans, and in a postscript "Guide to Wartime Presidents," Bausum surveys the threat that war can present to democratic institutions, from John Adams to Barack Obama.

Recommended for sixth graders on up