Annette Laing's Blog

Non-Boring History on Substack: Being Gene Bullard

Why did NBC invite their elevator operator to appear on The Today Show? Be prepared to be amazed, when you meet Gene Bullard. Enjoy this? Sign up for more Non-Boring History in your inbox!

Join Me at Non-Boring History

As should be pretty obvious, I haven't done a great job of keeping up this blog. There's a good reason: It's hard to keep writing into a void, fed only by few anonymous "likes". Mostly, my work is speaking to excited audiences, often about my writing, and the blog has felt like speaking to an empty room. I love writing, but professional writers should not be expected to write for some higher purpose.

And, as I used to tell my college students, if you slouch silently, you'll get the lecture...

What Have the Romans Done for Us? Classics Under Attack in Vermont

This morning, only a few hours after I watched the first episode of Mary Beard's BBC series Meet The Romans (and wished I had watched it years ago, for it is a master class in how to engage the public) I picked up my phone, and read of the threatened closure of the classics department at the University of Vermont.

The words of UVM classics chair John Franklin especially caught my attention: “If trained people are not there [teaching], then white supremacists will hold the field and they wi...

An F in Historical Thinking

I'm just agog at this story from Sun Prairie, WI. I have my head in my hands. As a historian who has worked with teachers for years, where to even start?

Oh, you're assuming I agree with the critics? Prepare for a shock.

Let's set aside, for a moment, that I am no fan of worksheets, canned teaching materials, or facile "what would YOU have done?" questions on history for kids as a way to teach how people of the past thought differently (honestly, just leave the question implicit, I say). 

Le...

On Cherry Trees, Donald Trump, and Not Boring Kids With Presidents

​When, in 2018, Scholastic issued a biography of Donald Trump (not the book pictured) aimed at 6 and 7 year olds,  there was inevitably an outcry from people affronted that it did not address his most controversial statements and policies.

Scholastic’s CEO defended the publishing house from its critics by slyly offloading responsibility, onto the “thousands” of “educators” (not necessarily all teachers)...

A Special Message from Dr. Annette Laing for Kids

Message from author and history professor Annette Laing specifically for kids in Grades 3-5 who have seen Annette's presentations in recent months.

Carrying the Gold Rush Into 2019

Mary McDougall Gordon, ed. Overland to California with the Pioneer Line: The Gold Rush Diary of Bernard J. Reid (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987) How do historians work?

Reading a Gold Rush diary this morning, I stumbled across this brief (but unusually full) description by the author, a young Irish-American named Bernard Reid, of a campsite in present-day Wyoming in July, 1849: “Growing city of wagons, tents, men, women and children, whites, Indians, negros, horses, oxen, and...

There Are Places I'll Remember: Class, Historical Thinking, and John Lennon's Childhood Home

"Mendips", the house in Liverpool where Beatle John Lennon grew up with his Aunt Mimi and Uncle George Smith. Now in the possession of the National Trust, it is open to the public, but only via ticketed National Trust minibus tour (along with Paul McCartney's childhood home on nearby Forthlin Road).  Details So I was thinking about John Lennon (as you do). He is often represented as a working-class hero. But, as Lennon himself pointed out, he was actually a middle-class boy from the Liv...

Changing Things Up: Making World War II Real to Kids

Two skeptical evacuees meet their cat lady foster mother in a church hall in Balesworth (the town in my Snipesville Chronicles series that's lightly modeled on Stevenage) Hertfordshire, England, in 1940. From Could You Be A World War II Kid? at J.T. Reddick Elementary, Tifton, Georgia, January 2019. I’ve been trotting out Could You Be A World War II Kid? in schools for a decade. It’s my most flexible and practiced program, with lots of different versions for different audiences and diff...

A Historian Writes Fiction

Recently, a simple question turned into a superb opportunity for me to think about how my novels model historical thinking.

I was taking questions about my novels before an audience of seventh graders who had read the first two books of The Snipesville Chronicles. A girl raised her hand. “In the second book, did you ever give a reason why the park was saved after [the main characters] time traveled?”

[Multiple Spoiler Alert]

That gave me pause. I couldn’t remember. I wrote A Different Day, A Dif...