Today, we are talking about the Historical Lens.
The historical lens looks at the events that were taking place in history when the book was written and sees if those events influenced the book.
For example, we are going to use The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss. (To continue our theme of using children's books to illustrate lenses.)
Here is a link to the full book with pictures if you would like: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7jXFQxsH7wNMi1ZSHZ3MEkxcjg/edit
If you would rather, here's the summary. However, be warned; Dr. Seuss books in summary never sound nearly as interesting or as good as they actually are. I mean, what children's book does?
Yooks live on one side of the wall, and eat their bread with butter-side-up. Zooks live on the other side of the wall and eat their bread with butter-side-down. Because of this, they hate each other, and always have guards at the wall watching the other side. A Zook breaks a Yook's weapon, and they each go back and get bigger and bigger weapons. The book ends with them both standing on the wall threatening to drop a terrible bomb on the other side.
In order to analyze this book historically, we need to know when it was written: 1984.
We can see, then, that the Cold War and arms race was happening. Suddenly the book makes a lot more sense, right?
It basically shows everyone how silly it is to keep getting bigger weapons and threatening each other, especially over such a stupid thing. So, what is Dr. Seuss trying to say about the Cold War/arms race?
This is a fairly common example of the historical lens, and I remember hearing it somewhere. Obviously, people have thought of this before.
The Butter Battle Book is a really simple, straightforward example, but not all books are. You can look at how the history of the time period influenced the writing, setting, characters, etc. Some books you may have to really look for the historical influence to find it.
What books have you read that would be easy to analyze through the historical lens? What books would be hard?
Spruce Nogard
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