About Lisa

Lisa Waller Rogers

Hi, I’m Lisa Waller Rogers and I write the blog, Lisa’s History Room.

“Oh, no! Another history blog?” you might say.

Yes, another history blog – and yet not – because this one’s different in a very special way. You see I don’t think of history the way many historians do, as a dull-as-dirt list of male U.S. presidents interspersed with big wars. While I might mention World War II or the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 in my blog, I will primarily write about people – fascinating people, people you can lie awake at night and think about. Because it is through people that you can really love history. I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “There is properly no history; only biography.”

It was my mother who nurtured this world view. Growing up, she spoke to me about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as familiarly as if they were neighbors. She trained me to view an adult’s behavior through the lens of his or her childhood.

The Duchess and Duke of Windsor

“Poor David!” she would say of the late Duke of Windsor, using his nickname. “He was always looking for a nurturer. His mother – Queen Mary – was cold, cold. She left him to cruel nannies to raise. One of his nannies would pinch him before presenting him to his parents every evening.” His father, King George V, was just as distant. In 1935, a year before his son ascended the throne of England, he told Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, “After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.” The Duke of Windsor found his nurturer in the person of Wallis Warfield Simpson, a twice-divorced American socialite the Brits considered an unacceptable consort for their king. And thus we have the explanation for the 1936 abdication of King Edward VIII.

My Credentials: After receiving my history degree from UT Austin in 1978, I taught elementary school for ten years, where I learned that the only way to interest my students in studying “social studies” was to replace their textbooks with historical fiction paperbacks. So we suffered through the Salem witchhunt with persecuted Kit Tyler (The Witch of Blackbird Pond), experienced the stirrings of the American Revolution through silversmith Johnny Tremain (Johnny Tremain), and slogged through the dreary Civil War years with Jethro Creighton (Across Five Aprils).

Since 1985, I’ve consulted and edited textbooks for Harcourt, an educational publisher. I’ve written articles for publications such as Parents, Boys’ Life, Texas Highways, and the Instructor. I collaborated on a frontier forts website for UT’s Texas Archaeological Research Lab. I received a 2003 Texas Commission on the Arts educational writing grant. I’ve appeared as a featured writer and speaker at schools, museums, fundraisers, libraries, book and history clubs, bookstores, the Texas Book Festival, the Texas State Library Association Conferences, and on local TV, MSNBC, and Texas radio stations. I am a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers, the Writers’ League of Texas, the Western Writers of America, and Women Writing the West.

THE GREAT STORM, 2002 Western Heritage Wrangler Award Winner

I’ve published five popular children’s history books, four with the prestigious Texas Tech University Press. Besides trade book sales, teachers across the country buy my books to complement history instruction and for use in college-level children’s literature courses. Book excerpts appear on state achievement tests.

I’ve written a new teen mystery, THE CANDY RAVERS, which I’ve posted here on this blog in its entirety. Click here  to read THE CANDY RAVERS or use the tab at the top of the site.

Click here to learn more about my other books or use the tab at top.