A new National Park Service website explores the children’s book Lyddie as part of the Books to Parks series that connects children’s books to park service sites. Sara Schwebel, the director of the Center for Children’s Books at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences, worked with the National Park Service to develop the content for the Lyddie site and the other Books to Parks websites.
Lyddie tells the story of a young woman working in the textile mills in 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts. The Lyddie Books to Parks website is connected to the Lowell National Historical Park. Schwebel, along with her graduate students, also worked with the park service to write the content for the Islands of the Blue Dolphin site for the Channel Islands National Park and The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963 site for the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.
Schwebel’s collaboration with the park service came about through her research examining widely taught works of children’s historical fiction used in K-12 schools and the role they play in shaping children’s ideas about U.S. history. She is the author of Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms.
“Children across the country read many of the same books — a grade school canon. I wanted to think carefully about what interpretation of American history they were receiving,” she said.
While studying the classroom use of the book Island of the Blue Dolphins, based on the true story of an Indigenous woman living in isolation on one of the Channel Islands, Schwebel contacted the education director at Channel Islands National Park. She learned the park service was working on a concept for Books to Parks to bring children and teachers to the park, share its resources and create educational opportunities. The park service invited her to collaborate.
The criteria for the books selected for the Books to Parks initiative are that the books are widely used in schools nationwide and that they have a connection to a park service site.
“The idea is to help bring people to the parks. They are supposed to be for all Americans, but not every person can get to a national park. With a school internet connection, however, every school child can visit a park virtually,” Schwebel said.
The goals of the Books to Parks initiative are to provide high-quality content to help teachers and students engage critically with literature and works of historical interpretation. The sites provide primary and secondary sources connected to both specific details and larger themes presented in the book, enabling students to “do history” themselves, she said. Schwebel and her graduate students look for primary sources that are particular to the novels and can bring the story alive. Often these are sources that are more difficult to access, such as those found in archives.
The websites include fact checks that discuss what parts of the books are fact or fiction, and Voices from the Field, which are essays that explore the themes of the books, written by experts in age-appropriate language for children. It takes years of research, writing, identifying primary sources and coordinating with scholars for Schwebel and her graduate students to develop the sites, Schwebel said.
The Lyddie book and the resources on the website examine themes of child labor and working conditions during the Industrial Revolution; literacy and changing norms around education; and what freedom meant to various people in the 19th century.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963 tells about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young Black girls. The website looks at the Civil Rights Movement, the effect of racism on everyday lives in the North as well as the South, and children’s role in the struggle to eradicate it. It launched in conjunction with events commemorating the 60th anniversary of the bombing.
Because the park service is respected and trusted and the parks are popular, the Books to Parks sites are a way to reach many students and teachers, Schwebel said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she heard from teachers from as far as Europe who were using the sites.
She is talking about potential projects with two other parks. She said the Books to Parks initiative is a way for information sciences graduate students to share their research, writing and interpretation skills to benefit the public.
“It’s an incredible learning experience for them, and an opportunity to share their education and expertise for the common good,” Schwebel said. “For me, collaborating with students to build these sites is some of the most gratifying teaching I’ve ever done.”