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It looks like some one remember and resurrected the series "childhood of famous American series"

I wonder if that woman was even slightly prepared for the hammering turn that interview took. She made my eyebrows raise with this:

As I mentioned previously, so few changes need to be made in the books, on average, that no one has ever objected.

Of course I want to know who did object, making her need the "on average."

The Virginia Dare one confused me completely -- because it was presented as"true" ( because it explained why some indians had blue eyes), but there was no way to prove it ---all just guess work.

I remember this one-- it was like a fable "And that's how Indians got blue eyes"!

Wow, I never ran across that series.

Getting to exactly 200 pages is actually pretty easy -- there are all sorts of tricks you can play with typography and layout, not to mention the wholesale cutting of chapters and illustrations. Writer friends of mine were dismayed to find that the work-for-hire children's book they'd written had 60 pages cut out by the editor because the covers, pre-printed as the MS was being turned in, had an accidentally narrowed spine, which meant it could only fit X number of pages.

Less than 3 hours to the weekend.

I can make it there. Barely. I think.

My main familiarity of Pocohantas comes from the Neil Young song.

Hang in there, Shir.

I was addicted to the "We Were There" books (We Were There at the Pony Express, We Were There at the Alamo, etc.). They put random children into historic events.

I don't remember that series in particular.

I do get regular questions here about the Pocohantas Exception in VA law (that allowed VFF to claim that they were descended from a Native American [always an "Indian Princess"] and still be white).

In Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria writes:

Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians. All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother's side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear."

It doesn't take much insight into racial attitudes to understand the real meaning of the Indian grandmother complex that plagues certain whites. A male ancestor has too much of the aura of the savage warrior, the unknown primitive, the instinctive animal, to make him a respectable member of the family tree. But a young Indian princess? Ah, there was royalty for the taking. Somehow the white was linked with a noble house of gentility and culture if his grandmother was an Indian princess who ran away with an intrepid pioneer. And royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant."

The early colonists, accustomed to life under benevolent despots, projected their understanding of the European political structure onto the Indian tribe in trying to explain its political and social structure. European royal houses were closed to ex-convicts and indentured servants, so the colonists made all Indian maidens princesses, then proceeded to climb a social ladder of their own creation. Within the next generation, if the trend continues, a large portion of the American population will eventually be related to Powhattan.

Also, I love the internet, which kept me from having to go find my copy of Custer Died for Your Sins and then type something.

We are taking Noah kayaking tomorrow. This will either be entirely too much stress, great fun, or completely dangerous (or perhaps all three!)

Oh! Let me know how it goes, because I am craving a kayak trip myself.