What A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Taught Me About Early 20th Century New York City

As someone who gets her history from the novels she reads, I was paying close attention while reading Betty Smith’s wonderful A Tree Grows in Brooklyn so that I could pick up some juicy historical tidbits. (OK, that’s an exaggeration; I read history books too, just not nearly as many as novels. History just makes more sense to me when it’s in story form! Me and most other people in the country, I guess, which explains why Devil in the White City, a non-fiction book that reads like a novel, is so popular.)

1) People in Olden Times Had Sex

I know this shouldn’t be shocking, considering the continued presence of man on earth, but there is a tendency in the popular narrative to view earlier times as much more innocent, where there was no crime and everyone frolicked naked in the garden without shame. Literature from earlier eras often bears out this view, essentially cutting to the fireplace in lieu of the good stuff, leaving blank empty space in its wake which, nine months later, is filled by a delightful and clean infant.

Banned by Bitch

I just read over on E. Lockhart’s blog about an upset that has taken place in the online YA community. Bitch magazine apparently posted a list of 100 feminist YA books, and then removed three because they were deemed inappropriate. (So really a more accurate title for this post would have been “Deleted by Bitch” or “Pulled From the List by Bitch,” but neither has that snappy alliterative flavor of the current, possibly misleading, certainly inflammatory post title.) Well whenever I see anything deemed inappropriate for any reason, it piques my interest (I imagine most people are the same. So I immediately added the books in question to my library queue.