The Story of Mankind
[Audio Description]
(Instrumental music)
Hi, I’m TJ Moaton, and this is Useful. I’ve shared most of the context on the website, so I’ll spare us the long intro. What you need to know is that over this year, I’ll be reading every Newbery Award winning book, and recording an episode on that book, diving into why the book was made, how it was received when it came out, what the legacy of the book is, and what it can show us about what societies have considered about the role of children within them.
What you should know about me before we begin – I took a college class called Children and Society: Is There Still a Childhood. I had to read some of the novels I’ll be reviewing down the line and revisit my own childhood, but in the context of understanding child development within formal education systems (i.e. should an 8-year-old read a book for 11-year-olds, and what does that mean for the child’s development if they can or can’t). It was a powerful course, and although I didn’t want to be a children’s teacher, I left the class wondering – “What do we teach children about how to be in this world, on the systemic level?”
So let’s get into it. The first book on the list is The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon – a book about the history of Western civilization written by the author for his grandchildren, and the very first winner of the Newbery Award for Children’s Literature.
Main Topic Discussion: “What is Newbery, and why does it matter?”
“And now behold the fate of the freeborn farmer! He had done his duty toward Rome and he had fought her battles without complaint. But when he came home after ten, fifteen or twenty years, his lands were covered with weeds and his family had been ruined. But he was a strong man and willing to begin life anew. He sowed and planted and waited for the harvest. He carried his grain to the market together with his cattle and his poultry, to find that the large landowners who worked their estates with slaves could underbid him all along the line. For a couple of years he tried to hold his own. Then he gave up in despair. He left the country and he went to the nearest city. In the city he was as hungry as he had been before on the land. But he shared his misery with thousands of other disinherited beings. They crouched together in filthy hovels in the suburbs of the large cities. They were apt to get sick and die from terrible epidemics. They were all profoundly discontented. They had fought for their country and this was their reward. They were always willing to listen to those plausible spell-binders who gather around a public grievance like so many hungry vultures, and soon they became a grave menace to the safety of the state. But the class of the newly-rich shrugged its shoulders. “We have our army and our policemen,” they argued, “they will keep the mob in order.” And they hid themselves behind the high walls of their pleasant villas and cultivated their gardens and read the poems of a certain Homer which a Greek slave had just translated into very pleasing Latin hexameters.” Ch. 24 – The Roman Empire
I’d like to think of this book (The Story of Mankind) as an encyclopedia meant for children. Going into reading this book, and knowing nothing about it, I expected the first winner of a prestigious award to be a book with characters facing some type of trial. And then we start the book, and we’re talking about evolution, in regards to how we evolved as cells on this planet into the eventual prehistoric humans we claim as our ancestors. I had to know right away if the book was banned or challenged at any point, I actually spoke with a co-worker and we had to find out how close this was to the Scopes “Monkey” trial.
And for those who don’t know, the case – which occurred in 1925, three years after the book came out – involved a high school teacher in Tennessee who was accused of violating a Tennessee law forbidding teachers to teach human evolution in public schools. It was a high profile trial, and the teacher “Scopes” was found guilty, although the verdict was overturned on a technicality.
In the book actually (The Story of Mankind) , van Loon makes reference to William Jennings Bryan, the three time presidential candidate who was representing the side of religious orthodoxy, claiming that “[W]hile I am writing this Mr. Bryan is addressing a vast multitude on the ‘Menace of Darwinism,’ warning his hearers against the errors of the great English naturalist.”
So, why would the committee in charge choose a book that not only begins the story of human beings with evolution, but also covers the history of religion in ways that religious traditionalists of many faiths would possibly disagree with, contextualizes the development of class and class struggle, and deliberately humanizes all of the great actors of history (well, not all of them, but we’ll get into his bias later – which he willingly admits to having).
So, let’s talk about the “committee.” We’ll cover a bit of background here. It was more than a committee. The Newbery Medal was established in 1921 at the annual conference of the American Library Association as part of a desire to “encourage quality, creative children’s books and to demonstrate to the public that children’s books deserve recognition and praise.” The thing to remember is that even in our current point in time in the 2020s, we’re not really far removed from the development of the concept of childhood in Western societies. We’ve always had unwritten stories and songs and verbal and non-verbal ways to educate and entertain children. But how we saw those children was different. There are debates about what the previous ideologies around the concept of childhood were. Were children just mini-adults, did adults understand children were in different developmental stages, have we ever known or cared about how children feel about how they are growing up? But, children were viewed in general as needing to be taught, if not through formal education, then through stories that conveyed values and attitudes within the societies they came from. But over time, particularly in Europe, as society changed, and ideas about children changed, there were constant developments in the documenting and recording and sharing of folk tales and the development of picture books.
We start finding our beginnings of the modern children’s books we know of today in 18th-century England. The growth of the middle class and the ideas of philosopher John Locke, specifically around the concept of innocence, started to create the beginning of an industry. Professor MO Grenby writes, “In the 1740s, a cluster of London publishers began to produce new books designed to instruct and delight young readers.” That includes what is considered the first modern children’s book, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by none other than John Newbery, the namesake of our award. The point of the book was not just to teach kids, it was also explicitly made to provide enjoyment and pleasure for them, and it was the first to do so. I’ll leave it to you to decide if it still holds up!
So back to 1922, how was The Story of Mankind chosen as the first winner? By jury. Books were nominated by any librarian, and then a selected jury of Childrens’ Librarian section officers voted for the favorite. This book won with 163 votes out of 212. And after this year, the process was shifted that members at large could still nominate, but a special private committee would be created to select the winner. So this book is the only Newbery Award winning book to get the popular vote, as the process has now become more secretive, a fact that has been under debate for a while, but especially in the past decade. Let’s just say, there are people who want the voting decisions and process to be made more public, sort of like how you can sometimes read Oscar voters anonymous interviews where they reveal why they chose what they chose. There are people who don’t want that to happen as well. If it does happen, it’ll make my process of doing this project a lot easier.
Anyway, there were other books honored that year, a recognition for the runner ups of the voting. At first they were called citations, but in the future, runner-up books were given a Newbery Honor. They included:
The Great Quest by Charles Boardman Hawes (a pirate story I will go into a bit more detail about in a second)
Cedric the Forester by Bernard Marshall – (a medieval tale about the friendship between a young knight and a guy who lives in a forest who saves his life)
The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure by William Bowen – (an adventure story about a five-year-old boy and some friends he makes at the neighborhood tobacco store)
The Golden Fleece and the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles by Padraic Colum – (the story of Jason and the Argonauts and an intro to Greek mythology)
The Windy Hill by Cornelia Meigs – (a brother and sister learning about their New England family history) Cornelia is the first woman to be recognized by the American Library Association for this award, and would win a decade later, so stay tuned for her story
The Great Quest was the official runner up, with 22 votes. It’s hard to find a clear synopsis of that story, but essentially it’s a pirate story based in the 1800s, that goes deeper than the typical pirate stories of the time that were so popular in the 1920s in America, and included frank depictions of slavery, as one of the main characters is attempting to kidnap native Africans to sell as slaves, which the other characters are attempting to prevent that from happening.
So while we don’t know the exact reasons why The Story of Mankind was chosen over the others, we do know that it overwhelmingly was chosen as the favorite. Let’s dive deeper into what it is.
(Instrumental Music)
“The Story of Mankind”
“In another chapter I have told you how in the year 800 a German Chieftain had become a Roman Emperor. Now in the year 1066 the grandson of a Norse pirate was recognized as King of England. Why should we ever read fairy stories, when the truth of history is so much more interesting and entertaining?” – Ch 30. The Norsemen
Hendrik Willem van Loon was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands in 1882. He immigrated to the US in 1902 to study at Harvard and Cornell University, married the daughter of a Harvard professor, and had two kids before moving to Germany where he received his Ph.D. He was a correspondent for the Associated Press at the start of World War 1. He eventually moved back to the US and became a US citizen in 1919. From the 1910s until his death he wrote and illustrated many books, including our award winner.
Van Loon states how he decided what to write about and what not to in the attempt to cover the history of human existence:
“Did the person or event in question perform an act without which the entire history of civilization would have been different?”
Therefore, once humans have evolved into our more recognizable ancestors, we as the readers spend a lot of time in the Middle East and North Africa, under the different rulers and kingdoms and nations that existed in that time, as he claims that area as the birthplace of civilization, and the start of all of the different trade routes and conquests and ideologies that built on each other to lead to the present day for his grandchildren. And that’s the most important thing to note, he wanted his grandchildren to have a fun way to know everything about their history, as European-Americans growing up after what was being called “the Great War” or World War I.
His direct remarks to his grandchildren are some of the most captivating parts of the book in my opinion, and more of what I want to focus on. Overall, I find his way of telling history direct, yet light-hearted, and he shows a lot of self-awareness in his writing. But I’m less concerned about proving whether or not he was right about history, he updated the book twice before his death, his son also continued to update it, and another author recently updated it in the past decade to include the LGBT rights movement. I’m interested in thinking more about what he wants to impart as lessons to children, as these sentiments were shared by more adults than just himself.
For instance, when talking about the history of medieval cities, he says:
“When you grow up you will discover that many people do not believe in “progress” and they will prove to you by the terrible deeds of some of our own contemporaries that “the world does not change.” But I hope that you will not pay much attention to such talk. You see, it took our ancestors almost a million years to learn how to walk on their hind legs. Other centuries had to go by before their animal-like grunts developed into an understandable language. Writing—the art of preserving our ideas for the benefit of future generations, without which no progress is possible was invented only four thousand years ago. The idea of turning the forces of nature into the obedient servants of man was quite new in the days of your own grandfather. It seems to me, therefore, that we are making progress at an unheard-of rate of speed. Perhaps we have paid a little too much attention to the mere physical comforts of life. That will change in due course of time and we shall then attack the problems which are not related to health and to wages and plumbing and machinery in general.”
If you ever had a relationship with your grandparents, did they ever talk to you like that? I’d like to know.
But as I mentioned earlier, he has his bias, which comes mostly in the ways that he talks about people that we might refer to today using the term BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) throughout the book, although people may have other terms. At one point, van Loon admits that while he doesn’t like Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon was a charismatic leader that he might have felt compelled to follow. But he has not a single nice thing to say about Genghis Khan, who is essentially relegated to being a savage that somehow ruled the largest contiguous empire in history that had its own world orders and cultures. The point isn’t to defend the controversial legacies of either emperor/colonizer depending on who you ask, it’s to point out that his focus on figures like Napoleon or Alexander the Great sometimes romanticizes them and the byproducts of their actions, and that highlights a bias, especially if this person is supposedly telling the story of all mankind. He displays awareness of his limitations, knowing he couldn’t really cover everything and that he could not be truly objective (something to note in contemporary discussions of the role of objectivity in telling history).
And that’s why even some later criticism I found about this book highlights that aspect. There’s very little about Indigenous history within the Americas. In one of the maps of the world he illustrated, the rest of sub-saharan Africa is highlighted in black with the label “Negroes” while the rest of the map has distinctive ethnoreligious labels. So the question to ask is what would that bias teach his grandchildren about their role in the world. Especially if they can see themselves in the story of mankind in a way other people wouldn’t.
Outro
Overall, this book was not what I was expecting to be the first winner of the Newbery Award for Children’s Literature, but a book that for its time was a “sweeping” account of the history of humans in a time where political factions in this country were attempting to prevent that history from being taught seems like a powerful choice to represent the idea of what children should know, even if not all children would have their histories told within it.
I like to end on the things I took away from the book that I feel are still relevant today. Clearly, this will change as I review books that are more recent.
We see the history of nations always being complex melting pots with shifting leaderships
We see the history of domination and power hoarding and class
The history of the idea of “modernity,” and in my opinion “indigeneity” as well.
The history of telling stories for education and entertainment
If you desire to read the book, I’d love to know what you think about it.
I’d also like to offer a few different ways to learn this history if you want to learn, but just don’t want to read this book:
Joy Hakim and a lot of her work is someone to check out. I’m especially highlighting her because she has received criticism for “trying to shoehorn multiculturalism” into pre-Modern western history, although time and new discoveries constantly prove it to be true.
CrashCourse – Youtube Educational videos on a variety of topics
And I’ll end with one longer quote that I feel ties together a lot of what this man wanted to impart to his grandchildren:
“It is easy to write a history of Greece and Rome or the Middle Ages. The actors who played their parts upon that long forgotten stage are all dead. We can criticize them with a cool head. The audience that applauded their efforts has dispersed. Our remarks cannot possibly hurt their feelings. But it is very difficult to give a true account of contemporary events. The problems that fill the minds of the people with whom we pass through life, are our own problems, and they hurt us too much or they please us too well to be described with that fairness which is necessary when we are writing history and not blowing the trumpet of propaganda. Often before have I warned you against the false impression which is created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the story of man into four parts, the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation, and modern time. The last of these terms is the most dangerous. The word modern implies that we, the people of the 20th century, are at the top of human achievement. There is no definite answer to any historical problem. Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish as those sluggish animals of the prehistoric world have perished. If you once get hold of this great truth you will get a new and much broader view of life. Then, go one step further and try to imagine yourself in the position of your own great great grandchildren who will take your place in the year 10,000. They too will learn history. But what will they think of those short 4000 years during which we have kept a written record of our actions and of our thoughts? They will regard the fear of death, which is still common among many people, as a childish superstition which was perhaps natural in a race of men who had burned witches as late as the year 1692. Even our hospitals and our laboratories and our operating rooms of which we are so proud will look like slightly improved workshops of alchemist and medieval surgeons. And the reason for all this is simple. We modern men and women are not modern at all. On the contrary we still belong to the last generations of The Cave dwellers. The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human race was given its first chance to become truly civilized when it took courage to question all things and made knowledge and understanding the foundation upon which to create a more reasonable and sensible Society of human beings. The Great War was the growing pain of this new world.”
