Works Designed for School Use

Non-fiction story books focusing on Connecticut and written especially for children have a long history. In 1829 Charles A. Goodrich--the brother of Samuel, "Peter Parley"--brought out Stories on the History of Connecticut; Designed for the Introduction and Amusement of Young Children. It is a tiny volume, hard to find and of interest primarily for what it tells about the dominant and often unconscious attitudes of its own era. At the bottom of each page are questions which the text is designed to answer. It was reprinted in 1833 under the title A History of Connecticut Designed for Schools. (See also Hollister's work listed with "Serious Histories] above.)

In 1887 Elias B. Sanford published A History of Connecticut (Hartford S. S. Scranton) "in order to tell the story of Connecticut in a way that would be interesting to young and old. We trust it will meet with the approval of the teachers in our public schools, who have felt the need of a history of the State suitable for use in the classroom." (p. v) The book is marked by extreme philiopietism, state and national chauvinism, and the optimism typical of the Gilded Age in which it was written. "One hundred years ago," writes Sanford,

New Haven, Hartford, and Norwich were scarcely more than over grown villages: and many of the most beautiful cities and towns of our Commonwealth have reached their present position of importance within the lifetime of men now living. The future is to tell how large shall be the measure of blessing that will attend this prosperity. The fathers and founders of the State endured hardship, but found peace and happiness in a good conscience, and the development of a character marked by morality, and devotion to noble aims. Only in this path of integrity and righteousness can be found the way of life and enduring blessing. Will the children of this latter generation walk therein? (p.295) Researchers and teachers will not find much reward for their effort in seeking this book.

The most durable textbook covering the whole sweep of Connecticut history and geography was Lewis Sprague Mills' The Story of Connecticut. Mills was Supervising Agent for the Connecticut State Board of Education from 1908 to 1939 and editor of The Lure of the Litchfield Hills. The Story of Connecticut went through five editions (Scribner's, 1932, 1935, 1943; Exposition Press, 1953), the last being that of R. R. Smith (West Ringe, N.H., 1958). The volume contains a few suggestions for class discussion, exercises at the end of each chapter, and a bibliography. It is bland but clear; illustrated with somewhat dated pictures and photographs; and pre-World War II in format and literary style. Nevertheless, it remains a serviceable work for teachers who can use a full-course treatment of the subject. Its principal problem is that, though conceptually it aims at junior-high-school students, the reading level is too difficult for most inner-city eighth graders. It is rare, of course, to find a textbook that students don't condemn as dull; Mills will be no exception.

In 1904 the State Board of Education published, as Connecticut School Document No. 6, Connecticut History Stories, by Jessie E. Guernsey. This is a fifteen-page list of major episodes in Connecticut history, with paragraphs of description and references to relevant sections of then-available Connecticut histories. The primary purpose was "to suggest the stories with which children ought to be familiar before they reach higher grades." Daniel Howard's Connecticut History Stories, a seventy-eight-page paperback, issued as a Connecticut School Bulletin in 1920, is no longer a necessary school tool.

Caroline Clifford Newton's Once Upon A Time in Connecticut (New York, 1916) was supervised by Charles M. Andrews, who also contributed an introduction. One must assume that it is sound. It deals only with the colonial period. The reading level is about junior high, it seems to us.

In 1933 the Tercentenary Commission of the State of Connecticut, Committee on Education in the Schools, published Material Suggested for Use in the Schools to Characterize the History of Connecticut (New Haven). This pamphlet includes a section on child life and society in the colonial period, the development of manufacturing in Connecticut, and other miscellany, together with classroom activities and bibliographies. It will probably be available in public and school libraries established before 1933, and ought to be consulted.

To undergird that pamphlet, the Committee on Education also published The Story of Connecticut to Help its School Teachers and Pupils Enliven Its History (New Haven, 1933). Copies of this fifty-page pamphlet were sent to all school administrators and librarians in the state, along with a letter explaining that since the "present Legislature has made Connecticut history a required school subject," the pamphlet was prepared in order "to avoid some of the strange anachronisms already observed in period projects relating to costumes, customs, architecture, and domestic utensils." (Robert C. Deming to Superintendents, etc., April 22, 1933) There is little of use in this pamphlet, but teachers of elementary grades will find the other one, Material Suggested, cited above, worth looking at.

The Commission also published An Index of Material Concerning Connecticut Prepared for Elementary and Junior High School Grades, by Alice B. Cushman (Hartford, 1935). Drawn from the collection at the Hartford Public Library, this thirty-one-page pamphlet is organized alphabetically by such topics as "Agriculture," "Charter Oak," "Houses," "Manners and Customs," "Plays," and "Poems," and refers readers to relevant sections of books on American history and life generally, as well as those focusing on Connecticut. Users of the present work will have no need to consult this older index, which refers to many out-dated books, some no longer widely available.

Another work published by the Tercentenary Commission is a curious seventy-four-page conglomeration by Elisabeth W. Morris and Alice Johnstone Walker, Episodes from Colonial Connecticut (1935). Thomas Hooker, the Pequot War, the Stamp Act Crisis, Yankee Peddlers, and other characters and episodes are dramatized and accompanied by music. No effort has been made to distinguish fact from fancy. Fortunately, the work is very hard to find, but if you really want it, there is a copy at the State Library.

Five works were published in the 1960s in an effort to make Connecticut's history intelligible to elementary-school youngsters. Frances T. Humphreville, for many years a teacher and supervisor of social studies in Bridgeport, teamed up with a colonial historian, Albert E. Van Dusen, to write This is Connecticut (Syracuse: L. W. Singer, 1963). The book is aimed at nine-to-twelve-year-olds. It has a good balance in that half the book is devoted to the period since the Civil War. There is a chapter on geography, one called "Interesting People of Connecticut," and another called "Connecticut's Growth and Future." There are no teaching aids, but the book is lavishly illustrated in color.

Children's Press has published The Enchantment of America series, heavily illustrated books covering each of the United States. Like the Humphreville and the Van Dusen, The Enchantment of Connecticut (Chicago, 1966), by John Alien Carpenter, is aimed at elementary grades and written at about fourth-grade reading level.

Bernadine Bailey's Picture Book of Connecticut (Chicago: Albert Whitman Co., 1966) has lovely drawings by Kurt Wiese. It is a tiny book that describes about a dozen episodes, places, or characters, selected with no apparent thematic focus. Perhaps it is a good book to read to second-or third-graders.

Johanna Johnston’s The Connecticut Colony (New York: Crowell-Collier, 1969) ends with the Declaration of Independence. It suffers from the fact that our school children no longer read as well as they used to: the concepts are fourth grade, the reading level junior high. It is a nice book for good fourth-grade readers.

Warren J. Halliburton  The People of Connecticut.  Norwalk: Connecticut Yankee Publications, 1984

Halliburton is a social studies curriculum specialist most of whose career  was spent in New York.  Intended for classroom use at about the sixth-grade level, the book "is a tribute to people whose longing for freedom had them persevere through local skirmishes, domestic battles and foreign wars" even as they "abused" women and blacks. (p. 6).  Too many errors of fact to recommend, though a knowledgeable teacher who could make corrections might find this book useful.

For slightly older children, Joseph B. Hoyt's The Connecticut Story (New Haven: Readers Press, 1961) is excellent. Hoyt is a geographer, and his chapters on landforms, climate, and transportation are especially good. Now unfortunately out of print and hard to find, it is nonetheless likely that many school and public libraries across the state will have copies. The State Library has about a dozen.

Also for older children is Arthur E. Soderlind's Connecticut in a thirteen volume series on the original states during their colonial period. It includes many illustrations and maps; a chronology, 1614-1788; a list of historic sites to visit; a brief bibliography; and an index. Written at the junior-high-school level, it was published by Thomas Nelson in 1976. The author and publisher hope it will appeal to the general reader, as well as to teenagers.

In 1975 the Center for Connecticut Studies at Eastern Connecticut State College and Pequot Press published five paperback volumes that provide a brief narrative of Connecticut history. These volumes, the editors write, do not seek to present a comprehensive or encyclopedic record of the state's development. However, it is the expectation . . . that these volumes by providing narrative accounts of the principal forces and events in each period of Connecticut history as well as selections of primary material will bring alive to the reader the rich heritage of Connecticut's past.

Louis C. Addazio, Professor of History at Central State College, and Arthur E. Soderlind, Social Studies Consultant in the State Department of Education, have prepared a Teachers Guide to the Series in Connecticut’s History (Chester, Conn: Pequot Press, 1975). They write that the series is intended to be used as complementary reading to a general United States history text. These volumes can also be used as a major component in an instructional unit devoted exclusively to Connecticut history. This Series intends to give an in-depth or a case study approach to the study of American history at the secondary level. (p. iv)

The Guide includes long lists of names and terms, "Questions and Activities" for each volume, and a time line that juxtaposes world, national, and Connecticut events.

Unquestionably, the series is the best thing available for high-school use when students do in fact read at a high-school level. It has been used with success by college undergraduates.  The volumes are now out of print.

Albert E. Van Dusen, Puritans Against the Wilderness (to 1763).

David M. Roth and Freeman Meyer, From Revolution to Constitution (1763-1818).

Janice Law Trecker, Preachers, Rebels, and Traders (1818-1865).

Ruth O. M. Anderson, From Yankee to American. (1865-1914).

Herbert F. Janick,Jr., A Diverse People. (1914-1975).

Hartford and New Haven have been the focus of several efforts to prepare curriculum materials. An older work, done in 1935 and worthy of attention by teachers in the Hartford area, is Howard Bradstreet's two units, "Early Indians of Connecticut and the Dutch," and "The English Settle the Connecticut Valley." Each unit includes a student workbook, many maps, charts, illustrations, and activities. There is a typescript copy in a spring binder at the State Library. Don't steal it; copyright law allows you to make one photocopy for instructional purposes. Genevieve Cross's The Little Heroes of Hartford (New York: Cross Publications, 1947) tells the story of Washington's meeting with Rochambeau in 1780. It is a fanciful telling, to be read to third-graders, we would guess. There are lovely illustrations and music to some patriotic tunes of the Revolutionary Era. Gloria Garilli and George Grisevich produced Hartford in History: A Text Workbook for elementary grades (Hartford: Board of Education, 1 967). Another recent publication is the big, slick, lavishly illustrated A Bicentennial Booklet for the Inner City by John E. Rogers (West Hartford: The University of Hartford 1975), which highlights black Connecticuters' contributions to the Revolutionary War, with a heavy Hartford focus. Rogers calls it a book of" biographic profiles" for use by teachers to incorporate into their curricula at all levels. The reading level is junior high though perhaps not in inner-city schools

Courageous teachers in southeastern Connecticut might look at Charles E. Bingham's Thomas Bingham Connecticut Pioneer: A Story of Very Early Colonial Times 1658-1730 (Chester: Pequot Press, 1968). This short book, based on Bingham family papers, "was written in the hope of making our early history more interesting to young people by interweaving the personal continuity of family life with national history." (p. viii) It is strong on family history, with fabricated conversations, and it features a simulated seduction of a young man by a "voluptuous" fifteen-year-old. High school, maybe?

In New Haven, the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute published a series of New Haven history units for high-school classes prepared by teachers under the supervision of Professor Howard Lamar, a nineteenth-century specialist. The work, edited by Lamar, is Remarkable City: Industrial New Havan and the Nation, 1800-1900 (New Haven, 1979). The Yale Teachers Institute on Connecticut History has published twenty-three curriculum units under the supervision of Christopher Collier, Changing Connecticut, 1634-1980 (1980), and the imaginatively titled Curriculum Units on Connecticut History (1981). These units, like those on New Haven, vary widely in their quality and usefulness, but most are worth surveying, since they deal with many aspects of Connecticut history. They are available at the Yale Teachers Institute on Connecticut History, 53 Wall Street, New Haven.

The government of Connecticut has been the focus of a small body of work prepared for classroom use. Lewis Sprague Mills updated in 1917 an earlier work by Charles Henry Douglas (Philadelphia: Eldredge and Brother, 1896), The Government of the People of the State of Connecticut, now obviously obsolete, as is Nancy Musselman Schoonmaker's The Actual Government of Connecticut (New York: The National Women's Suffrage Publishing Company, 1919). Still available and useful is William E. Buckley and Charles E. Ferry, Connecticut: The State and its Government (New York: Oxford Book Co., 1966). There are four editions of this small paperback (157 pages in the 1966 edition). The focus is very narrowly on Connecticut state and local government, without an attempt to discuss state-national relations. There are chapters on state, city, and town government, and much attention to conditions and events leading to and following Butterworth v Dempsey, Connecticut's "one-man/one-vote" decision, and the Constitution of 1965. Questions for review and discussion are provided at the end of each chapter. A sound, useful work, it is for high-school students. See also

Adams, Virginia. Connecticut: The Story of Your State Government. Chester: Pequot Press, 1973.

League of Women Voters. Connecticut in Focus. Hamden, 1974. Updated by a three-fold display chart, "Connecticut Government: The Constitution State" (1979).

Many teachers use novels to vivify and dramatize history. There are many score such works that focus on Connecticut or use it as setting, some written as social commentary on their own times, some written about earlier eras. A list of juvenile and young adult historical fiction with Connecticut settings is contained in Rheta Clark's 1961 edition of Connecticut Yesterday and Today: A Bibliography for Connecticut Schools. She was able to identify fifty-three such works, but many have been published since 1961 and unfortunately, no similar classification is included in the 1974 update of Clark's work. (See above under "Bibliographies.")

As a future project, the authors of this book hope to compile a critical bibliography of Connecticut-focused fiction and essay literature, and we now solicit titles and comment from teachers who have used fiction in their history classes.