The Story of Mankind – Hendrik Willem Van Loon – The Story of Mankind is a book written and illustrated by Dutch-American journalist, professor, and author Hendrik Willem van Loon. It was published in 1921. In 1922, it was awarded the Newbery Medal for an outstanding contribution to children’s literature. This was the first year the Newbery Medal was awarded.
Written for Van Loon’s children, The Story of Mankind tells in brief chapters the history of Western civilization, beginning with primitive man, covering the development of writing, art, and architecture, the rise of major religions, and the formation of the modern nation-state. Van Loon explains in the book how he selected what and what not to include by subjecting all materials to the question ‘Did the person or event in question perform an act without which the entire history of civilization would have been different?’.
Hendrik Willem van Loon[a] (January 14, 1882 – March 11, 1944) was a Dutch-American historian, journalist, and children’s book author.
He was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the son of Hendrik Willem van Loon and Elisabeth Johanna Hanken. He immigrated to the United States in 1902 to study at Harvard University and then Cornell University, where he received his AB in 1905. In 1906 he married Eliza Ingersoll Bowditch (1880–1955), daughter of a Harvard professor, by whom he had two sons, Henry Bowditch and Gerard Willem. The newlyweds moved to Germany, where van Loon received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1911 with a dissertation that became his first book, The Fall of the Dutch Republic (1913). He was a correspondent for the Associated Press during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and again in Belgium in 1914 at the start of World War I. He lectured at Cornell University from 1915 to 1916; in 1919 he became an American citizen.
Van Loon had two later marriages, to Eliza Helen (Jimmie) Criswell in 1920[8] and playwright Frances Goodrich Ames in 1927, but after a divorce from Ames he returned to Criswell (it is debatable whether or not they remarried); she inherited his estate in 1944.
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