Moments of Time Travel: History Unboxed brings a human touch to learning about the past

According to Elizabeth Hauris and Stephanie Hanson, it is the humanity in history that makes it so fascinating. But unfortunately, Hanson said, “There is just so much emotion from it that’s missing when you boil it down to the facts for a test.”

But that’s all that many of us remember. When looking back at our days in school, what we associate with history, whether we like it or not, are those plain facts. Who won which battle. What happened on which date. Hauris, founder and owner of History Unboxed, and Hanson, the creative director and writer for much of the company’s material, seek to change this and make history come alive for kids.

History Unboxed creates history-related hands-on activity sets designed to complement educational curriculum. Spanning a wide range of historical topics, eras, and cultures, the boxes include a variety of era-specific living history activities that include art, music, cooking, and crafts, just to name a few. 

Hanson said, “When we can build this association from an early age, that history is fun, it is fascinating, then I feel like we’ve done a good job, and by changing it up so there is a little something for everybody, I think we do well at it.”

Living in History

When Hauris was a child, a teacher read a story to her class about a girl who worked at a living history site. Her interest sparked. She explained, “When I saw a photo of a girl my age doing things in a historic setting, it was real. And it was like there was suddenly this realization that these are people who lived lives and had dreams and deep thoughts and hobbies, who weren’t so different from me.” 

Hauris had her mother take her to see various living history sites until she was old enough to actually volunteer herself. When she was 10, She started at the Claude Moore Colonial Farm in McLean, which closed a few years ago. She said, “I was home educated, so I had weekdays free and I could go weed the corn fields and salt fish and stuff like that [just like they did in the colonial era] in colonial garb. And it was awesome.” Volunteering led to a job handling publicity and the educational programs for the site when she was older. 

Hanson’s love of history comes from a similar place. At the age of 19, she began volunteering in living history. Ironically, she hated history in the classroom, but enjoyed historical fiction and her volunteer work. It wasn’t until taking a mandatory American history course in college that she really connected with it.

She described her professor as being “really passionate about the people in history, and the entire American history curriculum was told through stories of people. And it was really relatable, and it was so much not about dates, or battles, or even always the most important people. It was about humanity, and I changed my major at the end of that semester to history.”

After earning her degree, she continued on to get a masters in elementary education while working at Mount Vernon’s colonial farm during the summer, learning many skills such as historic cooking. She said, “I ended up bringing that into my classroom too when I was teaching. I did a lot of hands-on history with my students.” 

The Boxes are Born

A serial entrepreneur with previous successful businesses under her belt, Hauris created History Unboxed in 2014. Roughly 6 months later a mutual friend put her in contact with Hanson after hearing she was looking for a writer. They have been working together ever since while simultaneously home schooling their children: seven for Hauris, and four for Hanson. 

The company grew by leaps and bounds, with a gross income projected to reach a million this year. They ship over 10,000 boxes a year, throughout the US and internationally to the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Affiliations with homeschool groups and charter schools have helped the business grow. 

Both longtime residents of Amissville, Hauris and Hanson ran the numbers and realized they could save significantly by bringing most of the production and fulfillment in house, rather than subcontracting it out as they had been doing. So, they opened an office on Culpeper Street in Old Town Warrenton this past summer which gives them the space to operate at a lower cost and create jobs in the area, something Hauris feels strongly about. Also, with the operations at hand, it was easier to assess for quality and keep on top of things. Hanson said, “It’s such a wonderful community here in Old Town. There’s such a spirit of collaboration.” They plan to open a community location in Old Town where they hope to host classes and activities for children, such as historic cooking classes. 

What’s in Those Boxes?

When referring to her time doing living history, Hanson described feeling “moments of time travel.” Their goal is to supply moments like these to students with their products. Hauris said, “The idea was that hand-on history, like history crafts and recipes, could be available for kids who don’t participate in reenactments and for time periods where you don’t really see reenactments.” 

By including a variety of activities based on actual crafts and work from each culture and era discussed in History Unboxed (including all needed materials), they aim to make history and the people in it relatable to everyone. Each box also contains additional enrichment material and a full color magazine. 

Some of their favorites include the Egypt box, which has an activity that shows how mummification works by providing the materials and instructions for kids to actually mummify an apple or hot dog themselves, the Olmec box, which teaches them about an ancient ball game and includes a hot chocolate recipe since the Olmecs were the first to process chocolate as a liquid, and the Viking box, featuring a project that involves building your own drinking horn.

Hauris’s daughter, who was four when using the Viking kit, used other crafts in the box to make a strap for the drinking horn. She laughed, “She had this drinking horn slung across her shoulder, and she would just fill it up with a hose.”

While talking about her own kids working on a project, where her 9-year-old meticulously painted a historically accurate terracotta warrior as her 4-year-old “went to town with paint,” Hanson said, “It’s okay that the 4-year-old’s not going to remember anything about history, but what she is doing is building this association that history is fun.” One family reached out to them saying they still fly a kite built from one of the boxes each spring.

Fostering Cultural Appreciation

Bringing an appreciation of other cultures throughout history to children in an authentic way has been part History Unboxed’s mission, and as the company has grown, Hauris and Hanson have had the opportunity to collaborate with creators in other communities, such as Kelly Tudor and Laticia McNaughton, who are both Native American educators that helped them cover topics from American history. Some of the boxes include reading lists recommending works created by other cultures, like the Australian box’s reading list that features Aboriginal writers and artists.

After mentioning some ancient graffiti preserved from Pompei that Hauris said was not far off from the type of graffiti you’d find today, she said, “People don’t change that much. Their situations change, but I think that any one of us, if dropped in the past, we’d adapt to what was going on around us, but we’d fit in with our thoughts and our feelings in so many ways because I think people are more alike than different.”   

www.historyunboxed.com

Published in the November 2023 issue of Warrenton Lifestyle