Guest Post: Jane Sutcliffe on The White House is Burning & Bridging a Two-Century Gap

By Jane Sutcliffe
for Cynthia Leitich Smith's Cynsations

The seed of The White House is Burning: August 24, 1814 (Charlesbridge, 2014) was planted on 9/11.

Sometime during that day, as we all tried to get a handle on what had happened, a TV reporter compared the terrorist attacks with other national tragedies like Pearl Harbor.

The burning of Washington was on the list, too, and right away I was intrigued.

I remembered from some long-ago history class that the British had burned Washington, but th...