Family reunions often bring me into the middle of Wisconsin, and I like to check out the public library in the nearby towns. Often they're Carnegie buildings.
The one in Mauston (about 20 miles northwest of Wisconsin Dells) is not a Carnegie. It opened in 2000, and from the looks and location of the building, I would say it's on or near the site of the town's former passenger rail station. It's a beautiful building that's being well maintained.
While I was checking out the Young Adult collection to see which Pete Hautman books they had, I noticed a whole row of books by an author I had never heard of: G.A. Henty.
G.A. Henty? Clearly, they're older books from the look of the faded printing and the design, and historical fiction from the titles. Probably an English author. I read the descriptions on the back of a few and got a sense that the stories follow a teen character at some pivotal historic point (a battle or key change in royal or colonial history).
There was also one book about American history... guess whose point of view it chose:
That was enough to tip me off that this was not a writer like Rosemary Sutcliff we were talking about. Henty's Wikipedia page filled me in.
He lived from about 1830 to 1900, and wrote scads of historical adventure novels for boys. One source on Wikipedia says he was the most popular boys' author of the time.
Beyond being a supporter of the British empire, he was extremely anti-Black (as shown by extensive evidence in his quotes on his Wikipedia page). It's also seen in his choice to cover the American Civil War by writing about Robert E. Lee's greatness.
Check out the depiction of the Black man on the cover:
And at the book's end, the main character's family's former enslaved people return and continue working for their former owners! This is a quote: they discovered "freedom so suddenly given was a curse rather than a blessing to them."
The book was originally published in 1890, just after the Dunning School of Civil War "Lost Cause" revisionism had taken hold.
I checked the St. Paul Public Libraries' online catalog and they don't hold any of Henty's books — possibly because of their content, or possibly because no one checked them out and the librarians deaccessioned the books based on lack of use, as they do many other (better!) books.
The scary thing about these out-of-date, racist books is that they are popular withh and overtly promoted to Christian home-schoolers (parents).
From what I could see around Mauston, there are probably a lot of evangelical Christians. So the presence of the books in the library is most likely not a coincidence.
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