The world of World Book
I don’t know if they are still in vogue, but when I was in elementary school, state reports were an essential part of the social studies curriculum. In second grade, I did one on Oklahoma; third was Idaho; fourth was Alabama; fifth was Alaska. The requirements didn’t change much from year to year. Draw a picture of the flag. Name the capital. Crops. Manufactured goods. Date of statehood.
In general, state reports were not a labor of love. Accordingly, I remember little about the process or product of any of them. Except Alaska.
I remember working on it at the dining room table and my mother coming in to assess progress. It was probably due the next day, and I admit that in those salad days I wanted a bit of watching. Alaska became a state in January of 1959, when my mother was 10. As I sat with the A volume of World Book (remember encyclopedias?) open in front of me, I considered the possibility that she, in 1959, had probably completed state reports. But there would have been no entry for “Alaska” in the encyclopedias she had used.
“So, you couldn’t find ‘Alaska’ in the encyclopedia back then?” I asked, knowing the answer, but somehow needing to ask anyway. She laughed.
“No, it wasn’t a state yet. People weren’t trying to look it up. You know, Grammie’s encyclopedias don’t even have the Kennedy assassination in them. It hadn’t happened yet.”
In the pages of my family’s encyclopedias, history was evolving–truth was evolving–as individuals played out their lives and as the universe of human knowledge became wider and deeper. The world is never still, everyone has history in living memory, and no one knows exactly what kind of encyclopedic articles we will need in the future.
17 years later, this revelation still impresses me. Once in a while, I go back to the World Book shelf, take out volume U-V, and and turn to the entry about the U.S.S.R.