Two children provided the inspiration for Phil's books about children in history. Phil's daughter, Hanna, supplied the idea for his first book, It's Our World Too! Stories of Young People Making a Difference. And Sarah Rosen, a girl he interviewed for It's Our World Too!, inspired Phil's second book, We Were There Too! Young People in U.S. History.

At the beginning was Hanna's idea: she and her kindergarten classmates could raise money for their neighborhood homeless shelter, the Prevel Street Resource Center, by selling their artwork. Since kids produce a ton of work every year, she thought, why not put it all up in a blind auction? And she did it with the help of her friends. They raised $430, which they trucked over to Prevel Street.

While he was still brimming over with pride, Phil began to think that there must be countless examples of young people who are doing similar things for their communities—most of it going unnoticed. "And so I thought it would be wonderful to collect those stories," Phil says, "not only to present a series of role models along a spectrum of activities, but also to talk to young activists about the tools they were using and what worked and what didn't work. I wanted a practical guide for young people to help them create good change."

Phil set about interviewing young people who were doing all sorts of things around the world. This work became It's Our World Too! Stories of Young People Making a Difference, whose title was inspired by Paul Gravelle. It's Our World Too! is half inspirational stories of real young people making positive social change and half instructional guide and handbook for doing it yourself. While Phil was interviewing young people for It's Our World Too!, he came across the child who would inspire his to write We Were There Too! Young People in American History. He describes the inspiration this way:

I was especially interested in finding a girl who had done something to take a stand as a female, and I spoke to a women's history center out of Redwood, California. They told me the story about a girl who had taken such a stand-Sarah Rosen. Sarah was thirteen at the time and from South Bend, Indiana. She had gone to a school that replicated the Constitutional Convention of 1787 every year with a school-wide skit. The principal had said no girls were allowed to participate because there had been no female delegates at the original Constitutional Convention. And Sarah just thought that sucked! She got really mad but held her tongue and organized her classmates. On the day of the skit, the halls were flooded with kids carrying protest posters. Sarah had called the South Bend Tribune. They sent reporters to document the counter-convention. It was a beautifully timed press conference. It made it up to Ms. and so forth.

As soon as he heard her story, Phil knew she belonged in the book. He had several fascinating conversations with Sarah. At one point, Sarah stopped him mid-sentence and said, "You know, it isn't just girls. It's all kids. Kids aren't in history. There is not a kid in my history book. There's no one my own age in my history book." When Phil said that that couldn't be true, Sarah replied: "Just go check it out. Go find a junior high history book." This is exactly what Phil did. He went to Lincoln Middle School in his town of Portland, Maine, and found the history book. "It was huge, like a dinosaur," he says: "It must've weighed about 50 pounds. It was a single book. It had a million pages. The pages were all stuck together. I went through the whole thing and there were only two kids mentioned—Pocahontas and Sacagawea. Both were Native American girls in their mid-teens who had helped whites and thus had become known."

When Phil called Sarah, he asked her how that omission made her feel. "Offended. It makes me feel like I'm not even real," she said. "Like you're not even real in history until you're about 20 years old."

Phil Publishes We Were There, Too!
With these inspirations, Phil set out to write a U.S. History book of and for young people. He says, "I wanted to write a history book that starts with Columbus, involves as many girls as boys, includes all the major ethnic groups that make up the national tapestry, and above all, and includes good, vivid, compelling stories that would cause a young reader to turn pages."

As he began to do research for the book, Phil found that, "if you scratch any major event in U.S. History, young people are everywhere! Often they're right in the middle of the action." Finally, in 2001, after five and a half years of researching and writing, We Were There Too! Young People in American History was published.

We Were There, Too! is for and about Children
We Were There, Too! contains stories of real young people who were a part of US history between 1492 and 2001. It includes the childhood diaries of Anna Green Winslow and Carrie Berry and stories that Frederick Douglass and Chuka wrote as adults about their youth. It also includes the well-known stories of Pocahontas, as described in the journals of John Smith. And you'll also find contemporary stories, from Phil's interviews with living historical characters.

In his introduction to We Were There Too, Phil tells his young readers, "All the people you'll meet here deserve your attention not simply because they are 'real people' close to your age. They are important because through their sweat, bravery, luck, talent, imagination, and sacrifice—sometimes of their lives—they helped shape our nation." (Hoose, 2001, vii)

Written for 10-12-year-olds, this book is a compelling read for any age, including adults. Each profile tells a story about the history maker's feelings, family, friends, neighborhood, and school-all things that young readers identify with. In addition, the stories introduce the concepts of historical and cultural perspective.

There are always other perspectives worth understanding. The American Revolution means one thing if you see it through the eyes of white men in powdered wigs with the weight of a new nation on their shoulders. But it's something different when you can imagine yourself as a girl in a sunny sewing room, racing your cousin to see who can turn out more homespun cloth for liberty. Or as an apprentice, itching to fight the redcoats, convinced that freedom from Britain will also mean independence from your master. Or as a Haitian slave boy in Georgia fighting alongside French and Continental soldiers to win somebody else's freedom. (Hoose, 2001, vii)

Select We Were There, Too! Profiles (in Adobe PDF)

"Kid Blink and the Newsies: Bringing Down Goliaths, New York City, 1899" from Part Seven. "Shifting Gears in a New Century"
pages 1 and 2
William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were two of the richest and most powerful men in America in 1899. Each owned a giant newspaper in New York City, and both competed to grab readers with sensational headlines and extra editions. They depended on a large network of city children and teenagers to get papers to readers. When the two millionaires tried to gouge the "newsies" for a few pennies more, it was nearly their downfall.....

"Arn Chorn: Starting All Over, Cambodia and New Hampshire, 1970s" from Part Nine: "Times That Kept a-Changin'"
page 1 | page 2 | page 3
"The Vietnamese War destroyed the homes and shattered the families of many in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and other nations of Southeast Asia. Hundreds of thousands of refugees found their way to the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Like immigrants before them, they struggled to learn English and adjust to a confusing new life." This profile chronicles, in Arn Chorn's own words, his experiences in the military, his difficult journey to America, and the new life he established with his adopted family in New Hampshire. We Were There, Too! also contains stories of young U.S. Civil War soldiers for comparison.

We Were There, Too! | Story of the Story Teller | Classroom Activities | Selected Resources