Laurie Halse Anderson: Rebellion 1776, Celebrating Historical Fiction, and Protecting Our Freedom to Read

Celebrate Library Week and the freedom to read with acclaimed author Laurie Halse Anderson. On this episode, we celebrate Laurie's latest release, Rebellion 1776, an adventure that began as Laurie recovered from COVID-19. Inspired by Abigail Adams' smallpox inoculation, this tale unravels the lives of working-class youth in Boston during the American Revolution. Elspeth Culpepper might just change how you perceive history.

We explore the vibrant world of historical fiction for young readers with the author who gave us Fever 1793, Chains, Forge, and Ashes. Discover how focusing on the everyday experiences of children from the past, rather than just the prominent figures, brings history alive in much the same way fantasy novels do. We explore the meticulous research required to craft these narratives and the role of digitized primary sources. We also discuss the impact of reframing historical fiction as adventure novels, transforming them into captivating portals for young readers to explore different worlds.

We also tackle free speech and the freedom to read, examining increasing efforts to ban books featuring diverse characters and themes. We reflect on the societal implications of this censorship and its impact on educators, libraries, readers, and emerging authors, particularly those from diverse backgrounds. We emphasize the importance of maintaining diverse narratives in children's literature, advocating for empathy and understanding to foster a more inclusive literary landscape.

Chapters:

01:30 Rebellion 1776

11:42: Teaching History Honestly

13:10: Framing Historical Fiction as Adventure Novels

15:39: Historical World Building Through Extensive Research

21:26: The Importance of Free Speech and Freedom To Read

30:31: Library Heroes, Freedom to Read, and Common Sense

34:05: Lessons from Young Readers

Links:

• Purchase Rebellion 1776
• Laurie Halse Anderson's website
  • Educator's Guides for Laurie's Books
  • Censorship Resources
    • PEN America
    • EveryLibrary
    • American Library Association
    • Authors Against Book Bans

Transcript

Transcript

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
00:02
So welcome to today's Adventures in Learning podcast. This episode officially makes me the most popular mom on the planet, at least with my two daughters, miranda and Ella, they grew up obsessed with our next guest, absolutely adored Laurie Halse Anderson's books. They were huge fans of Speak and Chains and Forge and Ashes and I will confess that when I got my advanced reader copy of Rebellion 1776, I might have shared it with them as well and they both said to tell Lori that she is the most amazing author in the world and they're so happy she's on the show. So you all are in for a treat, lori. Welcome to the show, oh gosh. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
00:46
Now can we end right now, because that's just kind of mind blowing all of that. But thank you, I appreciate the kind words, hi, how you doing. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
00:55
So glad you're with us so you have a brand new book coming out. Can you tell us a little bit about what prompted Rebellion 1776? 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
01:03
Oh my gosh, I have so much to tell you. So I you know I'd written a lot about the American Revolution and I had never really looked at Boston because I figured well, we had Johnny Tremaine, so you know, moved on to other things. But then I got COVID very early during the pandemic, in the first few weeks of it, and I was pretty sick but thankfully came out of it okay but was just flattened the way so many people were and spent several weeks on the couch and I vaguely remembered that Abigail Adams had. This is when we were all hoping for a vaccination Right, vaccination for COVID. And I vaguely remembered the scene in the John Adams HBO series in which Abigail Adams had herself and her children inoculated against smallpox and I just all things Abigail Adams, right, she's just one of my big sheroes. 

01:57
So I but I remember vaguely again I'm still like sick and kind of smelly, and you know, just pondering things I knew that historians were unhappy with the way that that inoculation was shown on the screen, so I wondered well, what the heck happened. And because there's so many incredible primary sources have been digitized in the past couple of years, I was able to find all of Abigail Adams letters that she ever wrote that we ever have amazing, those that she wrote in the summer of 1776, when indeed she and her children and all of her relatives were inoculated against smallpox. And that happened. They happened actually in Boston, not out on their farm, and the details of that process made me go, oh my gosh. There were the most incredible things in the world happening in Boston in 1776. 

02:54
And I was wrong about Johnny Tremaine. Johnny Tremaine ends just at the beginning of the revolution, the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. So I thought, okay, nobody's talked about this space. Here I go and Abigail took me down the rabbit hole and my main character, elspeth Culpepper, pulled me off the other side. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
03:17
Well, and tell us a little bit about Elspeth, because I thought she was charming and interesting and I love the fact that she's not perfect. She's flawed, just like everybody else is. Tell us a little bit about your inspiration for Elspeth. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
03:32
Oh, yeah, well you know, I've written several times about the lives of children held in slavery during the American Revolution. 

03:40
The problem is is that we have so much of our primary source material, especially visual material, comes from families of profound wealth, and so I wanted to write about a kid who I could have been from a working class family with, you know, a stubborn child who could have been a little bit like me, could have been a little bit like me. 

04:08
But you know, I know a little bit about the limits that were placed on working class kids and also the concept of having to go to the almshouse if you are orphaned or your parents can't care for you, being bound out to complete strangers for your whole life if there's nobody around. So once I started to go down there and see, really children had a different kind of growing up. But regardless of whenever you live, regardless of what the rules are in any society, we still experience the emotions of adolescence, right, wanting becoming close to friends, getting frustrated frustrated with parents, having maybe a little bit of a short temper and having the biggest and best heart filled with dreams and hope, regardless of what's going on around us. So I, just I, you know, she, the characters just are magic. They come out of the ether. Um, I can point to a couple of different things I found in my research, but really she just arrived and took over the story and I think I was pretty happy writer that day. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
05:11
That's awesome, and I noticed there were a couple of little Easter eggs in there for fans of Chains and Forge and I certainly appreciated finding those. As a reader who has used those books before. Thank you for putting those in my pleasure. Was there something you know? Did you feel like there were things that were untold in the previous trilogy that it gave you joy to sort of sneak in a little reference here and there? 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
05:36
Yeah, you know, because we had in the trilogy you have the first and the third books are told from the same point of view of Isabel and we learn a little bit about Corazon, who's the male character, who's her buddy, who is from Boston, and you get little snippets of his childhood experience, but they're not really on screen on stage in Rebellion 1776, you hear about them. There is one notable character, who's only in the book a little bit, who was the father of the man who held Corzon in slavery. This is a house that Corzon would have been in and so it's almost like you know, the house holds its own stories and our main character, elspeth, you know, doesn't know really about him Because she came on the on the scene before, after he left, not before he left. So it's, and the other thing that I have to talk about is the character of Boston, right and just. 

06:47
It is so hard for us to imagine today how chaotic life was. The British had occupied Boston starting in the late 1760s and in 1774, they were really upset because all that tea was floating around the harbor. So the king and the parliament just brought the hammer down on the town of Boston and made life very difficult, to the point that communities as far away as South Carolina were sending donations of food and money and supplies to the people of Boston. It was intense. And then, once we have the kind of the spark that really lit the war, which was at Lexington and Concord in 1775, boston becomes a city under siege. Most of the civilians who lived there fled because they knew oh no, this is bad. Here comes a continental army and it's going to start shooting at the British. The British are going to shoot back and I don't want to be caught in the middle, but some people were caught in the middle. My main character is a kitchen maid in the house of a wealthy judge and she's living through this experience. And so you know there's struggles of immense things that the characters go through. 

08:03
But I think that once I saw how much the experience of Boston was reflecting our own experiences today, that's what really captured me, because I'd already had this character in my head and I went oh my goodness, because not everybody agreed that we should be independent and in Boston, because of the taxation problems, there had been longer conversations about being a British colony. Are we British? Are we what? And you had, in Boston and surrounding communities, families splitting apart because of politics, some really supporting the king, others maybe they're not ready for an independent country, but they were really angry at the king and this political divide just widened and widened, and widened. And then when you layer on to that, you know so you've got literally a war in your backyard. And then the British are kicked out for a little while and they head down to New York City and you had this town in ruins with strong political feelings. 

09:09
And just at that moment that's when the smallpox epidemic takes off. They had an early form of vaccination back then. Boston was the place that we believe it was first used in 1721. But now these town fathers agreed to have an inoculation period because you couldn't just inoculate if you wanted to back then, because you could spread the disease when you were inoculated with smallpox. You would get a mild version of the disease and there were people who didn't believe in inoculation and they thought that was scary or they didn't understand it. 

09:42
And so I was like, oh my gosh, here we are again. So I've tried very hard when I'm writing historical fictions to stay grounded in the primary sources and to not say or have characters do things that we would do today but they didn't do back then. But I will say it was in a way comforting for me to see that our country has been through these very challenging kinds of circumstances before Americans and that lets me know that today's kids, my readers, your readers they're that next generation who are going to do it better and smarter than we did. There is hope of coming through hard times and looking back at this historical time period. We wound up becoming a new nation out of it, so hopefully there can be something good and positive today too. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
10:46
Well, and I'm so glad you brought all of that up, because I definitely picked up on those themes when I was reading it. It struck me how similar we were in terms of the pandemic, in terms of the political divides, and I like the fact that you also are able to articulate a little hope, because sometimes it's hard to find hope in these days. So it's nice to be able to think about it that way. And, as you said, we've been here and it's what do we do with the time now 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
11:51
Oh, that's such a great question. I always have visuals. I think it's really important when you're especially when you're talking to a large group of kids in an auditorium or a gym, you know you have to, you have to communicate at many different levels to them. Try to shatter the preconceived notion that I think too often our children have about the founding time period of the United States, because I feel that kids look at pictures of the founding fathers who were wealthy white men, often holding people in slavery and people who would not we tell the kids, oh, these are our heroes and kids today are like, really, and we have to find a way to honor those fellows, that generation. But at the same time, let's be honest and that's something that's so important to me, because I've done a lot of reading and talked to a lot of historians and we you know the fact that when we can begin to talk honestly about our country, about our history, about what we did wrong, about what we did right, about what we hope to do better, then we can have some real progress. So my first job I'm starting to wander here, going to come back to the point my first job is to make kids be aware that there were kids then, and to take the focus off of the founders and, you know, make the world come alive. 

13:27
You know we do world building in historical fiction in the same way that fantasy writers do. 

13:32
Right, I can't compare the color orange of a dress or cloth to a basketball or a school bus. I have to only, you know, use the kind of language and the kind of world that my character is living in. So I want to give a lot of details about what the food tastes like, what the room smells like, what the poop on the road smells, like the sounds and the smells and the heat and the cold and the fires. And so by bringing that to life now generally, if you can describe that well, a child who's like between eight and 15, who's reading, is hooked because it's another world and their mind is really open to new experiences. So then I'm trying to weave a story where I have a character who is being affected, often in frightening ways, because the world is hard by outside influences. But we still see that they're like our kids today and they have their interior life, that they're trying to develop and grow. So I want to get the focus off of the leadership of the revolution and back on ordinary people. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
14:43
I like that and, honestly, that's a really good segue to where the kids are today, because so much of what's going on in our country is happening due to ordinary people who are standing up and speaking up, and so I think that by showing them what democracy looks like and how hard a struggle it is to uphold a democracy, you're doing a really powerful thing. I appreciate that, thank you, and you said something else that I'm really intrigued by, because I know as an educator, historical fiction could be a hard sell to kids at times, because I know as an educator, historical fiction could be a hard sell to kids at times. 

15:17
And good historical fiction does exactly what you said. It captures them in the same way fantasy does. Because you're creating this world and you've got limitations, because you've got to ground that world in a reality that existed at the time, correct. But I guess I kind of wonder as you're building the world, you find these interesting details. How do you do the research to be able to do that sort of world building? 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
15:42
Very slowly, which is why it takes there's a long time between my books. I spent almost five years researching this book. I was researching all the way through all the edits in the last draft because there's always more to know. Edits in the last draft because there's always more to know, especially now when we have there's been such incredible digitization work by the Massachusetts Historical Society, harvard, yale, new York Public Library, boston Public Library. So many places have digitized the primary sources. Sometimes they're transcribed, more often they're not. 

16:16
So I'm paging through, for example, medical journals by the doctors who are working during that smallpox epidemic and learn getting the details from all of that. The more granular you can be with your details. I think that sets the tone for the whole book. I do have one word of suggestion or advice, if I may. Of course I share your sadness over the fact that some historical fiction leaves kids kind of yawning, and not every book is going to be for every reader. We know that and we have to respect you know what they like. But at least with my books, my historical fiction, please feel free to call them adventure novels. Oh, I like that Because that's what they are. They're in a different time period and I think for some readers, when they hear historical fiction they think, oh no, there's going to be a quiz at the end. Historical fiction they think, oh no, there's going to be a quiz at the end, you know, and it's going to be deathly boring because we could do a little bit better with teaching our history in this country. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
17:22
But I try to write adventure novels, and I like the notion of adventure novels or opening portals to other worlds, because whenever you pick up a good book, that's what it does for you, is it connects you in some way, whether it's to 1776 Boston, or to the world of the giver, or to the picture book that you happen to be reading about home. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
17:45
Right, right, Exactly. That's the magic of, of of story. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
17:49
Exactly so. I do want to move into more grownup topics in a few minutes, but before we do that, I do want to move into more grown-up topics in a few minutes, but before we do that, history how did you develop your love of history? Tell us a little bit about what got you going in this realm. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
18:04
There are two things that really come to mind. The first is that my father was an incredible storyteller and I grew up listening to him tell stories. A lot of his family came over during the Irish potato famine and he grew up as a young boy in Troy, New York, where all of his relatives worked in the factories. I know Troy. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
18:25
I have family from Troy as at night to listen to my dad telling stories. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
18:38
You know it. Just he was so so that always sparked my imagination. And then it took me a little while to learn how to read, a little bit longer than some of most of my friends. But when I finally managed to read a whole novel it was Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Prairie, which we know that is problematic content and there I really highly recommend that everybody read Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park, which is the same time period. But wow, it's elevated, it's amazing. 

19:09
But I can remember finishing that book and it was like the thickest book I'd ever finished at that point and I was so shocked because I read so many pages. I read the whole thing on my own and and I wouldn't, I was in that book. You know, every I hope every child has this moment when you are gone. You are so entranced in the story. You are, you are not there, you are in the story and it felt like I was swimming up to the surface of the ocean at the end of that book and just drawing in a deep breath. And I didn't become a writer in that moment, but I became somebody who was obsessed with history. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
19:54
I love that and it certainly carries through to what you do today, and your books are such a treat for us. I appreciate that. So let's turn to the grown-up stuff. We know that we're living in a time where we're facing greater book bans and challenges to books, and you've sort of been at the forefront in terms of defending the freedom to read. Can you talk a little bit about what that journey has been like for you and sort of some of the challenges and resources that we can cling to now? 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
20:25
First and foremost, everybody needs to be aware of the work of PEN America and PEN America. There are several different organizations that are trying to track what's being banned where, why. You know all the circumstances. This is a very large country. We don't have standardized reporting in education and that's one of the things that's challenging us the most. But PEN America if you're ever wanting to just brush up on where we're standing right now, they are issuing regular reports with the data about what books are being banned, who's driving the bus. You know, in some areas and the laws change from state to state One person I'm thinking of some areas in Florida one person can have 600 books removed from a school district. There are definitely coordinated movements going on. The group called Moms for Liberty is one of the ones that's behind this, but it's not the only one. 

21:26
I've been accused. The first time I was ever accused of being a pornographer was actually back in 2011. And boy, that was kind of a wake-up call. But in the old days meaning before 2021, when people wanted to censor my books, usually they didn't want their kids to read, speak and I could. I've tried to have conversations with the parents and I, you know, I think it's. It is a parent's job to keep an eye on what a kid is reading, but that kind of like old fashioned, pre 2021 censorship has nothing to do with what we're seeing today. What we're seeing today is not one family going. I don't think my kid's ready for that book. What we're seeing today is a very well-funded, dark money driven, extremist kind of culture wars aspect where a group of wealthy people who I can't even begin to understand are somehow so freaked out because kids have access to books that have black and brown characters in them or that have gay or non-straight or non-cisgendered characters or, heaven forfend, they might pick up a library book that explains the way their body works. My books, I'm censored because Speak and Shout have sex in them. Allegedly, I would call it. They have sexual violence in them, but that's considered quote a sex act. 

23:05
I was asked if I thought that it was right when people in Iowa were banning speak that you know. What did I think when they said that the rape you know was sexually provocative, and I said anybody who finds the rape of a 13 year old sexual provocative has larger problems and should seek professional help. That's a great answer, but but here's the thing that we have to remember because at some point we're going to have to start having conversations Right. The leadership of the extremists on the right are never going to come to the table, but there are, I suspect, millions of people that they've manipulated who at some point are going to go oh, I didn't understand that, or I didn't know that, or whatever. I'm here to tell you I have seven grandkids. 

23:53
If anybody told me anybody that I trusted, said the kids, your grandkids, are being exposed to pornography in their school, I wouldn't believe it. But if this person says no, really really it's happening, who knows? Right, most kids see their first pornography on their phones I would start asking questions because that is such an outrageous, scary violation of the rights of children to do that to them. So so the manipulators on the far right they found the right tool and they know that if they keep people angry and if they keep people frightened, they can get money out of them and they can get their votes. 

24:34
I think that the rest of us, who live in sort of the middle of the political road, we were very slow to react because we didn't believe it and I think all of the work that has been done in the last 12 years, especially by groups like we Need Diverse Books about publishers who are finally opening up their doors, both in terms of hiring people who represent every single group in America and have all kinds of backgrounds and understandings that people who look like me don't have, as well as publishing and promoting the stories of people who don't come from the old, you know, that little tiny box of white people. And this is why our children's literature is so vibrant up until 2021. And the pushback had everything to do with the exact same pushback that we've experienced politically since President Obama was elected in 2008. There are a group of people in our country who somehow think that living in 1850 was better than living in 2025. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
25:40
And, as a historian, you could tell them that's not really the case. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
25:44
Not really Not at all. They're living a fantasy that somebody created for them. And I worry, I'm horrified for our kids, for all of them. I am equally horrified and heartbroken for all of our educators. It's never been easy to be an educator in this country and now I mean so many of them are just. They have to quit to save their lives, literally. But also I'm also very, very worried about this rising generation of children's book authors and illustrators, that wave that came in when the publishing industry finally listened to Walter Dean Myers and opened the doors, and to Walter Dean Myers and opened the doors. 

26:29
And you know I'm thinking about Nick Stone and Angie Thomas and Jason Reynolds and Giles Lamar, everybody. I'll just list them forever. There are no more school visits for people of color. Schools are shutting, are not putting school visits on. I barely have any school visits because my name is on the black list of Mothers for Liberty, and so what happens for this? I mean, I'm grown, my kids are grown, but if I was a young new author and I was walking into our world and all of a sudden, one of the most important income streams is shut down, we're losing stories, stories, we're losing important stories and the fact that that the books of this new generation of diverse creators have been taken off the shelves, have been robbed from the children and destroyed. That's criminal it is. It is absolutely. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
27:22
it's malpractice and it's so important. You know, I, I absolutely hear what you're saying. You know there's the extreme. There's the extreme moms for Liberty and other groups like that, and there's that need, as you were pointing out, to find some empathy for those who maybe were initially trying to do that thing. You were saying, you know, my kid's not ready at this moment, but have been taken in by a few people, and it's sort of how do we support teachers and families in making the choice that you need to make for your own kids, but not making a choice that impacts everybody else's children? And that's the difference, because what's good for my kids may not be good for yours. 

28:05
But I do know that we are so much stronger as a community when we lift up diverse voices, diverse books, when we embrace what Rudine Sims-Bishops talked about in terms of windows and mirrors. That's not just for children of color. White children need that too, maybe every bit as much, because if your perspective is limited, you're not going to know how to engage in a global world and so much of the world that they're facing. If we look at the world they're entering into, there are jobs that don't exist yet and they're going to have to connect and collaborate and create together to be able to do those jobs together. To be able to do those jobs. And one of the ways you set them up for success is by letting them get lost in these portals of adventure told by authors from every background and perspective, and they develop that empathy muscle as they're working through their reading. And it doesn't mean that every kid has to read every book at every moment, that's right. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
29:05
And that's why you have trained, certified professionals in your educational spaces. I think we can boil it down to a very simple phrase, and this is something that we're still struggling with at the national level. We have struggled with it ever since our founding, and it's understanding me versus we right the concept of whoa, america, freedom and independence and all that, but in truth, a culture does not survive unless people are watching out for each other. We have public education because since the very founding of the country and even before, communities recognized that public education of all children was a value to the growth and the safety and the future of the community. But part of that in our sphere today means that your trained professionals, your educators, your librarians, overseeing by their supervisors, will choose the books that are appropriate developmentally for the kids in the age bracket that they're serving, and every single family in that community deserves to have a broad choice of reading material for their kid, right. So? But here's how we solve this problem, so simple we tell the people who are censoring the books what a wonderful choice that you're making for your child, because you don't want your child to read those. Get your hands off the book that my child wants to take out of the library. Mind your own business, right? Just the concept that some person Rando in some corner of a county can can pull 600 books from a school district. Did I miss something? Was that one person crowned the chart and put in charge of curriculum development and library management? 

31:00
It is absurd, and and I really feel that that those of us who are trying to get back to common sense, trying to get back to, uh, libraries that are open and robust, um, we just have to boil down the message. It's tempting to go into all the different places. Just say you've always been able to tell the librarian you don't want your kids to take out books about x. Um, you've always been able to tell the librarian you don't want your kids to take out books about X. You've always been able to do that. You've always been able to ask for a different reading book for a kid in an English class. So get your fingers off my family's kids. Get your fingers off the books that my children want to read. Mind your own business. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
31:43
And wouldn't it be nice if we all did that and opened up a sphere where we could read and maybe start exchanging ideas again? 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
32:19
Well, yeah, I think a lot of the letters is heartbreaking. There were some people who never reconciled, but there were a lot of those husbands who left, eventually came back and they were very worried. They were very worried about how they would be received. They were older, you know, and I think that I'm trying to learn from what has happened before. Obviously, situations change generation to generation, but the concept of having communities torn apart by manufactured or not manufactured problems, that's only the first part. Wars are very easy to start. Culture wars and physical war very easy to start. The real challenge comes in the rebuilding afterwards it's important to think about. 

33:11
During the beginning of the American Revolution in 1776, when George Washington and his army was just a stone's throw away from where I'm sitting, trying to figure out how to kick the British out of Boston. They weren't thinking about starting a new country. Those thoughts, they were like no, we're dealing with this. And so I think the more we start thinking a couple of years ahead about what do we want the next? You know, america 2.0, 2.50, right, we're almost at our 250th birthday. Let's start planning for what that looks like now 50th birthday, let's start planning for what that looks like. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
33:46
Now it's the vision building phase, and when I think about education and I think about the way we learned history, you know we spend so much time on the civil war and then we always skipped over reconstruction, or you know you spent like a week on reconstruction and so there were so many stories that got lost. You know stories about what really happened in the South, about the contributions of African Americans, about the tragedies when prejudice reared its ugly head again and shut it all down. And those are lessons we need right now as we envision what America 2.5 would look like in terms of how do we build forward so that we truly are a country that is for all the people. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
34:27
And you know what that promise? The promise of the Declaration of Independence, which we haven't yet fulfilled. It's a great, lofty promise, but that promise is the sacred one that has brought the millions of brilliant, hardworking, courageous immigrants to our country. That saw the millions of families who were kidnapped, victims and had to live through generations of slavery still rise up, raising their kids and believing in this country, even as many, many people in the country were treating them so, so badly. So let's focus on that sacred dream a country that is for everybody. That's, you know, kind of a magnificent thing we could get right next time, and I think books are a way to help. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
35:21
Well, and you kind of have segued into my final question for today, which is what brings you hope. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
35:28
Oh, just spending time with kids. You know as grownups it can be. I think we feel the fear more deeply because we grew up in a time of relative peace, in a time of relative peace For the kids today. I mean, they all didn't go to school during COVID and they're ready for things that are hard. They've already grown up with them, but they're still kids, right, and they're joyful. 

36:03
And what I love most about kids and teens is that innate it's got to be in our DNA sense of fairness. If you need some hope, go talk to sixth graders about justice and what's right and what's wrong and how should our laws work. Capitalism makes it hard to hold on to that sometimes, because if you have to make really hard decisions to pay your bills and take out loans for education and pay for health insurance, wow, a lot gets lost in the mix. But maybe that's part of the reimagining. So hanging out with kids and having being humble and smart enough to listen to kids instead of telling them things, I think perhaps at this point in our culture we could learn more from children than they can learn from us. 

Dr Diane Jackson SchnoorHost
36:49
I 100% agree with that. Lori, thank you for joining me on the Adventures in Learning podcast this week. And folks go out and get your copy of Rebellion 1776. It is a read you are absolutely going to fall in love with and maybe that will help get you in that mind to help us plan for America 2.5. Laurie, thank you. 

Laurie Halse AndersonGuest
37:11
I appreciate all of your time. Thanks so much for the opportunity. 

Keywords

Laurie Halse Anderson, Rebellion 1776, Historical Fiction, American Revolution, Children's Literature, Free Speech, Book Censorship, Diverse Narratives, Inclusivity, Adventure Novels, Digitized Primary Resources