Judith St. George, a children’s writer who gave generations of youngsters a sense of the past with dozens of books about American history from the country’s founding to recent times, died June 10 at a hospital in Farmington, Conn. She was 84.

The cause was complications from dementia, said her husband, David St. George.

School libraries and bedroom bookshelves are full of volumes that introduce young readers to the world they see around them. Daily rituals from brushing teeth to counting sheep, the animal kingdom from alligators to zebras, ordinary and extraordinary discoveries in the odyssey called growing up – all of these are found in picture books and chapter books.

St. George enlarged another genre of children’s literature, the one that reveals to young people the lives that came before theirs, and that perhaps even their parents and grandparents do not know. Many of her books, some 40 in all, were works of history or historical fiction.

“All I know,” she once remarked, “is that I want my readers to care as much about the outcome of historical events as if they were reading today’s headlines.”

Her first book, inspired in part by her experience living among the Revolutionary War sites of New England, was “Turncoat Winter, Rebel Spring” (1970), the story of a teenage patriot who must decide whether to turn in a friend as a British spy.

Her early female protagonists included Josie, a 14-year-old girl in 1848 who corrects a male in his arithmetic and winds up at the landmark women’s rights convention held that year in Seneca Falls, New York.

The book, “The Girl with Spunk,” was published in 1975, by which time many of St. George’s more precocious readers might have overheard names such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

Copy the Story Link