Packaged History

"Imagine yourself alive and at your present age in 1805; what would you be thinking about and hearing from everyone round you? Ten to one it would be the fear that England would be invaded by 'that devil in human form,' Napoleon."

Imagining one's self at great events such as the Battle of Trafalgar has always been a way to make history memorable--but imaginations often need more help than ordinary textbooks provide. So a clever Britisher has turned from books to kits: his Jackdaw No. I, dealing with Trafalgar, makes a child feel as if the Admiralty had bequeathed him Lord Nelson's personal files.

Jackdaw No. I comes in an envelope the size of a legal pad. It has words: eight close-printed pages describing everything from Nelson's birth in a Norfolk parsonage to his burial in St. Paul's. And to go with the words are eleven graphic exhibits--a map, a battle plan, paintings and a detailed cutaway drawing of Nelson's flagship Victory, plus facsimiles of a crucial Nelson memorandum of the London Times of Nov. 7, 1805, and of ten signal flags by which Nelson told his fleet in code, ENGLAND EXPECTS EVERY MAN TO DO HIS DUTY.

Trafalgar is the first of three kits just put out by London Publisher Jonathan Cape for schoolchildren aged nine to 16. The other Jackdaws (named after the mimic bird) are equally graphic dossiers on Columbus' discovery of America and London's 17th century plague and fire. Soon to be published: more kits on the Magna Carta, the Armada, the Gunpowder Plot and the boy Shakespeare (timed to coincide with the bard's 400th anniversary).

The kits, which cost $1.35 each, are remarkably close to what U.S. curriculum reformers have been crying for: "postholing" case studies that dig deep into key historical events and by suggestion and inference tell the contextual history. Author of the new series is John Langdon-Davies, a sometime history scholar, novelist and war correspondent, who reckons that he knows something about engaging young minds. At 67, he has seven children, ranging downward in age from 44 to three.

With warm response from schoolmasters all over Britain, Langdon-Davies aims to visualize and dramatize "living history with its news sheets and battle plans, its surprises and disasters, presented in authentic detail." With his first kits a sellout, he plans new ones (possibly to be published in the U.S.) on everything from the Battle of Agincourt to the Boston Tea Party, from the Irish famine to the Battle of Britain.

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