A Dog’s Eye Of History

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102 – November/December, 2023

By Sarah Montague

Dog Time 

Name some significant moments in history–go on, you know: The Trojan War, The French Revolution; the American Revolution, World War I, World War II.

And do you remember how you first learned about them? Probably really boring text books, and sometimes, regrettably, really boring teachers…

Or, they were relatively recent–9/11, Hurricane Katrina–so are remembered as headlines and news stories.

But, there’s a better way. We know, it’s a no brainer that almost every significant moment in history is likely to have been witnessed by a dog.

Some dogs–real and literary–have themselves become history–Greyfriars Bobby; Rin Tin Tin, Balto, Toto–but what if we could learn about many defining moments in history through the dogs who were there?

Well, we can. I don’t know how old you are, but I’m old enough to have come by most of my history through the usual channels, so I was astonished to discover, in a random Google search, that there was a huge segment of the young adult book market devoted to dog-centric views of history.

Most great ideas are a combination of strategy and accident, and this may be an example of just that union. The idea of children as significant members of a self-identified family, with their own unique personalities, was a 19th-century development. And it followed that there would be books published especially for children. But the fanciful musings of Beatrix Potter or E.B. White have little in common with the vast sub-genre of children’s literature today, carefully designated by age, genre, and character.

Books of Wonder: Where the Dogs Are

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102 – November/December, 2023

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