Sonoma man bringing history to life

Sonoman launches ambitious website, “This Week in California History”|

Two more questions for Jim Silverman

Do you have a favorite time in CA history?

1846 is fascinating year because of everything going on... the Bear Flag Republic, Mexican-American War and the Donner's heading west.

What are your top 10 favorite children's books of all time?

I'm a huge Maurice Sendak fan; had the pleasure of visiting him a few times and have a proof sheet from “The Juniper Tree” as a souvenir. I consider “Pierre” a perfect book and spent a lot of time on “Higglety, Pigglety, Pop!” I also adore George McDonald's fairy tales. Randall Jarrell's “Bat Poet” changed my life. And, of course, I bow down to Lewis Carroll, the one-and-only. I weep for Edward Leer and my wife (Vicki Whiting) and I recited “The Owl and the Pussycat” to each other during our courtship. “The Bee Man of Orn” comes to mind as the story of my life.

Ever since convincing Grinell College to issue the country’s first bachelor of arts degree in children’s literature, Jim Silverman has been fascinated by how kids experience history – and troubled by the fact that “history is seen and told almost entirely through an adult lens.”

“Too much of the California history that’s currently taught to children focuses on the acts of violence of dead white men,” said Silverman. “Why should history be such an adult experience?” he asked.

“I have always been interested in deconstructing how we present history and experimenting with ways to creatively involve kids in the process of learning from the past.”

More than 200,000 words and close to a thousand images later, Silverman this month launched a student-centric website and newsletter that is thought to be the first ever of its kind – “This Week in California History” (thisweekincaliforniahistory.com).

Backing up a few decades, after college, Silverman returned to his home state of Louisiana for graduate school in library science, and became fascinated by the insight that children’s books provide into current events in the era in which they were written – even compiling a detailed list of children’s books published in the South before the Civil War.

After moving to Sonoma in 1980, he was hired by Solano County as a children’s book librarian and spent 17 years happy in that role, particularly pleased by the access it provided him to lesser-known and out of print books. “When a found a stack of early children’s books published in California, I felt like I had stumbled across a treasure trove of material,” he said.

“These books got me thinking about how children develop a sense of history,” he said. “I became very interested in a child-centric approach to California history and I realized that I wanted to start a children’s history movement among educators here.” He decided that the time was right to launch an ambitious new project that would bring history alive to the young. And so for the past two years, Silverman has dedicated his life to creating what he describes as a digital playground for California history and geography.

The “This Week in California History” site is fun, not just for students and teachers, but for anyone who is curious about California’s past. Each Friday it posts what happened in California over the past 500 years during a seven-day period: traditional history, plus business, sports, music, crime and recent events.

In addition to thousands of history entries and images, the site contains suggestions for games that develop skills of historians and geographers. There are 3D maps for classrooms and short stories, and Silverman is expanding the section of virtual field trips and videos (see “How to Build a California Mission in Two Hours”). An instructional video explains how to make an edible state map with sheetcake and icing. 

“The site includes a lot of information about events that actually happened in these students’ lifetimes – the history of video games or the invention of the skateboard,” he said. By including more recent events in “This Week” – something that history textbooks cannot do – he hopes to give students a playful “tree ring approach” to history – and by that he means the opportunity to connect the dots of events happening in different time frames, including the more recent past.

His goal for the free, independent, non-commercial site is for it to be introduced to the 30,000 fourth grade classrooms studying California history every year. “There are very few creative resources for those teachers. I would love for them to play around with it and then to report back to me on how they use the content. Eventually, I hope to be curating a living, breathing crowd-sourced site.”

He would like to institutionalize the site so that it evolves from a digital playground to a digital museum. Thinking even bigger, he would love to host a weekly television show on California history that features a student submitted “mission model of the week” and other “best practices” classroom projects.

Bringing history and current events alive for today’s school children is now Silverman’s life’s work.

“History is the thread that connects the past, present and future,” he said. “By actively delving into history, we can help students to better understand both their identity and a context for current events.”

Contact Lorna at lorna.sheridan@sonomanews.com.

Two more questions for Jim Silverman

Do you have a favorite time in CA history?

1846 is fascinating year because of everything going on... the Bear Flag Republic, Mexican-American War and the Donner's heading west.

What are your top 10 favorite children's books of all time?

I'm a huge Maurice Sendak fan; had the pleasure of visiting him a few times and have a proof sheet from “The Juniper Tree” as a souvenir. I consider “Pierre” a perfect book and spent a lot of time on “Higglety, Pigglety, Pop!” I also adore George McDonald's fairy tales. Randall Jarrell's “Bat Poet” changed my life. And, of course, I bow down to Lewis Carroll, the one-and-only. I weep for Edward Leer and my wife (Vicki Whiting) and I recited “The Owl and the Pussycat” to each other during our courtship. “The Bee Man of Orn” comes to mind as the story of my life.

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