Revisiting an outdated children’s encyclopedia as an adult
Posted April 8, 2021 by Andrea Everett
After co-facilitating a class discussion about ready reference resources, I was inspired to revisit a text from my past: an A-Z children’s biography book from 2001.
The Kids’ Fun-Filled Biographies book contains 500 illustrated entries about famous people worldwide, from Billie Holiday to the Medici family to Rudolph Valentino. I read this book obsessively from the ages of five to eight. I impressed—or, more likely, scared—many adults with my ability to recall obscure celebrity trivia, especially birth and death dates. When Hank Aaron’s recent passing made the news, I recognized his name because he was the first entry in the biography book. (If there was any remaining mystery, I don’t know much about sports.)
This slim volume went out-of-date about five minutes after hitting bookstore shelves; now, twenty years later, it is an ancient artifact. However, my mother has forbidden me from getting rid of it, and my Student Snippets audience will rejoice to learn that I brought it with me when I moved for grad school. Over the weekend I sat down and reread it, just to see how it would hold up in 2021.
The first thing I noticed was my childhood solution to entries going out of date, especially deaths of people who had been alive at the time of publication. Flipping through, I noticed the death dates for Edmund Hilary, Rosa Parks, and Ronald Reagan scrawled in the empty space next to their birth years. Perhaps this would have been less morbid if seven-year-old Andrea had used something other than a Crayola marker. Old habits die hard, however: even as an adult, I stopped to note a few recent death dates.
To my credit, I resisted the urge to correct a mistake in Sidney Poitier’s entry: he was the star of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, not The Man Who Came to Dinner.
I was pleasantly surprised by the diversity of subjects: the book covers jazz and
blues musicians, labor organizers, and activists such as Margaret Sanger (more on her in a
second). Other unexpected entries included Betty Friedan, Henry Louis Gates, Vaslav
Nijinsky, and Jacob Riis.
Despite occasional progressivism, it was clear that the editors sought a “balanced” perspective when it came to polarizing figures. The Margaret Sanger entry notably avoids the word “abortion,” instead using the euphemism “birth control.” The entry also sidesteps controversial aspects of Sanger’s legacy, such as her support for eugenics.
As one might expect, these attempts at balance often backfired. The entries for Christopher Columbus and Robert E. Lee are practically glowing, and there is an unfortunate amount of Confederate flag imagery throughout the book. Also, given how recently the Cold War had ended, the entries about Lenin and Marx are predictably dubious.
The creators of The Kids’ Fun-Filled Biographies could not have predicted how our discussions of equity and objectivity would change over time. This discrepancy is the reason I’m so fascinated by old encyclopedias: they reveal much more about the creators than the subjects they cover. More than anything else, this book reflects what adults at the end of the 20th century believed their children should learn. As someone who learned a lot from this book as a child, it is exciting to keep learning from it as an adult—even if the lessons are different from what the creators intended.