Through her individual experiences, we learn much about the collective condition of people in that era of American history. While Wineburg (5) spoke of “the tension that underlies every encounter with the past: the tension with the familiar and the strange, between feelings of proximity and feelings of distance in relation to the people we seek to understand,” this book contained explicitly a notable mix of those tensions. Race, violence, segregation, historically and culturally influenced ideas are heavy and ever-present throughout the book and are juxtaposed with multiple familiar scenes and childhood feelings that students can more easily identify with. Faced with institutionalized racism, racist actions, and bigoted mindsets that are shockingly in conflict with our modern moral sense of fairness and justice, we are forced to engage in historical thinking and empathy in an attempt to contextualize each character's motivations and give a sense to a markedly different era. of ours