Newspaper readers with young children take note: it is never too early to share your passion for those printed pages with them. America as it Happened (What on Earth Books, £25, 8+), a collaboration between What on Earth Books and the Washington Post, celebrates the idea of newspapers as the premium primary source.
In an innovative format, the book presents a 250-year timeline of American history, from colonial times to the contemporary moment, via a series of daily digests from significant moments in its timeline. Want to know what was happening in the courtrooms of Salem in 1692, or how people felt about the death of Blackbeard in 1718? Fancy battleside reports from Little Bighorn or picket line updates from the Black Lives Matter movement? Read all about it, as the newspaper boys used to say.
Like all good newspapers, America as it Happened offers eyewitness accounts of moments of cultural, political, sporting and social change, as well as obituaries of key players from the time, and there are QR codes that link readers with real-life reporters, explaining how they put their stories together and the significance of various moments in history. Like all newspapers, this is a collective endeavour, with no single author credited, although kudos to Christopher Lloyd, who has been pioneering innovative nonfiction formats for young readers for more than a decade. The short format articles collected here are a great starting point for dinner table discussions, as well as an opportunity for children to pick up their notebooks and tuck a pencil behind their ears and find stories of their own to report.
Pets Tell Tales of Ancient Rome by Rick Worth and Jordan Collver (Hachette, 6+, £8.99) takes a different, no less innovative, approach to excavating history. This black-and-white graphic novel features a canine guide, who roams the streets of ancient Rome on our behalf. If a domesticated dog seems anachronistic, the authors are aware and our hound hero soon gives way to a dominant wolf, who shares the lupine connections of ancient Rome’s founders, as well as the cunning, savage, ruthlessness of the culture that went on to dominate the ancient world. The story is then ceded to a chicken who explains sacrifice and superstition, and a rat who recounts attitudes to hygiene and poo. Amusing and accessible, Pets Tell Tales of Ancient Rome also takes history seriously, ensuring readers realise the connections between the Ancient World and their own. “They say history is written by the winners,” barks our guide, “and the winners win a lot.”
Katy Hessel in New York. Photograph: Hiriko Masuike/The New York Times
Katy Hessel puts her own spin on the partiality of history in The Story of Art without Men (Penguin, £20, 8+), adapted for a young readership from her award-winning study of the same name. With the help of detailed illustrations from Ping Zhu, Hessel highlights dozens of important female artists, whose work has been passed over in the grand narrative sweep of history in favour of more famous men, from impressionists such as painter Berthe Morisot to sculptors of the Harlem Renaissance, like Augusta Savage, with Hessel’s notes providing an introduction to the social and cultural change from which these artists developed their aesthetic too. Where the book excels, however, is in its engagement with artistic techniques, using examples of work by female artists to illustrate concepts such as scale, vanishing point, and prisms, an aspect that budding artists of any gender will appreciate.
Very young travellers will appreciate the Our World series of boardbooks from Barefoot Books, which bring 0-4-year-olds on a journey around the world, introducing them to different cultures and languages across continents, from Canada to Iceland to Vietnam. Always sensitive to cultural issues, Barefoot commissions local authors and illustrators to collaborate on the series, and they have just released their paperback edition of Ireland (Barefoot Books, €8.99, all ages). Written by Muireann Ní Chíobháin, traditional and modern elements of Irish culture find expression, with stone walls and dolmens, tin whistles and hurls, illustrated by Fuchsia MacAree in bold shapes and colours, while fun phrases and words are accompanied by phonetic guides to make speaking cúpla focal accessible to all.
In Home Away from Home (Barefoot Books, €8.99, 3+), meanwhile, featuring lively crayon illustrations by Rashin Kheiriyeh, Nazneen Akbari uses a fictional story of intercultural migration to examine ideas of home and belonging, with its richly evoked Oman setting providing a glimpse of life in the Middle East. Nuha is off to spend summer with her Jadda. When she leaves her beloved doll in the car on the way to the airport, her holiday is ruined before it has even started, but she is eventually won over when her grandmother brings her to the local souk to find a new doll. Arabic words are interspersed in the narrative, along with Muslim rituals and customs. These help to make Nuha feel at home, while helping readers with little experience of Muslim culture feel like they understand her loneliness and eventual excitement too.
