Kirkus: Best YA Nonfiction of 2020!
About 1789: Twelve Authors Explore a Year of Rebellion, Revolution & Change
“The Rights of Man.” What does that mean? In 1789 that question rippled all around the world. Do all men have rights—not just nobles and kings? What then of enslaved people, women, the original inhabitants of the Americas? In the new United States a bill of rights was passed, while in France the nation tumbled toward revolution. In the Caribbean preachers brought word of equality, while in the South Pacific sailors mutinied. New knowledge was exploding, with mathematicians and scientists rewriting the history of the planet and the digits of pi. Lauded anthology editors Marc Aronson and Susan Campbell Bartoletti, along with ten award-winning nonfiction authors, explore a tumultuous year when rights and freedoms collided with enslavement and domination, and the future of humanity seemed to be at stake.
Some events and actors are familiar: Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Marie Antoinette and the Marquis de Lafayette. Others may be less so: the eloquent former slave Olaudah Equiano, the Seneca memoirist Mary Jemison, the fishwives of Paris, the mathematician Jurij Vega, and the painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. But every chapter brings fresh perspectives on the debates of the time, inviting readers to experience the passions of the past and ask new questions of today.
Our chapter addresses “Who Counted in America? The Beginnings of an Endless Conversation.”
Here’s how our chapter opens: “From our very beginnings, America’s most stirring pronouncements have been made in the name of ‘the people.’… The people rule themselves. Or, at least, that’s what we like to think our founders meant. Actually, they never clarified exactly which ‘people’ they had in mind…”
Other Contributors:
Amy Alznauer
Marc Aronson
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Summer Edward
Karen Engelmann
Joyce Hansen
Steve Sheinkin
Tanya Lee Stone
Christopher Turner
Sally M. Walker
Reviews
Kirkus (starred!) wrote that 1789 is a “thoroughly engrossing look at a pivotal year.” Best YA Nonfiction of 2020!
Publishers Weekly (starred!): “Cynthia and Sanford Levinson examine unresolved contradictions in U.S. founding documents in ‘Who Counted in America?’…thought-provoking…stirring.”
BCCB Recommended!
