Historically Speaking

Who can imagine what life must have been like for a kid living twenty thousand years ago? Lois Huey can! Travel back in time with author and archeologist, Lois Miner Huey , with her latest book, Children of the Past:Archeology and the Lives of Kids . Thanks, Lois, for talking with us today about this fascinating book. What inspired you to write about kids who lived thousands of years ago? Based on archaeological evidence, I was wondering what it was really like to be a kid years ago. My latest book Children of the Past Archaeology and the Lives of Kids (Lerner 2017) begins thousands of years ago with cave kids and goes through time to the 1790s. Finding evidence of children from various times in soil layers is exciting for archaeologists. I wanted to share that excitement and what that evidence of their lives meant in different time periods. In previous books like Forgotten Bones Uncovering a Slave Cemetery and Ick! Yuck! Eew! Our Gross American History, I've included ki...

Yuck! Ick! Eew! by Lois Huey is disgusting!  And that’s what makes it a wonderful read for middle school kids interested in how people really lived in history. As a reader who loves to read historical fiction and imagine myself in those flowing gowns riding inside carriages and walking through heather-filled fields, Lois Huey’s book shatters that dream by shining a very bright light on the reality of those days.  Lois has done an amazing job on her research and so much of this information will be new to readers. This is a great book for classes studying Colonial America.   I’ll leave my dreams inside those romantic book pages and be thankful I can put on a gown for Halloween and still live in 2014 America!  Lois, can you tell us more about how you conducted your research for this book? In addition to information from excavations, I consulted original sources, that is, accounts from the time period. The people who lived then had little to say; they w...