The real-world subjects this novel study leans into — the depth behind every Knowledge Bank and reading passage.
PRIMARY LENS
📢 America in 1967–68 — Vietnam, Civil Rights & the Year That Broke Open
The history pressing in on Holling’s classroom — the draft and the nightly war reports from Vietnam, the civil rights movement and the assassinations of 1968, the protests and generational split that made this single school year a hinge in American life.
PRIMARY LENS
🎭 Shakespeare on the Page and the Stage
Why a seventh grader ends up reading the plays at all — who Shakespeare was and how the Elizabethan theater worked, what comedy and tragedy each ask of an audience, and how a four-hundred-year-old speech can still name exactly what a modern boy is feeling.
SUPPORTING
⚾ Baseball, Architecture & Growing Up Between a Father’s Plans and Your Own
The everyday worlds Holling is measured against — late-1960s baseball and what a hero is supposed to be, how an architect wins a commission and what a drafting table says about ambition, and the quiet work of deciding whose blueprint your life is going to follow.
