1789

The acclaimed team that brought us 1968 turns to another year that shook the world with a collection of nonfiction writings by renowned young-adult authors.

“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.

Featuring contributors:

Amy Alznauer
Marc Aronson
Susan Campbell Bartoletti
Summer Edward
Karen Engelmann
Joyce Hansen
Cynthia and Sanford Levinson
Steve Sheinkin
Tanya Lee Stone
Christopher Turner
Sally M. Walker

Marc Aronson is the author and editor of many titles for young people, including War Is . . . : Soldiers, Survivors, and Storytellers Talk About War, coedited by Patty Campbell; Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies; Sir Walter Raleigh and the Quest for El Dorado, winner of the Robert F. Sibert Medal; and 1968: Today's Authors Explore a Year of Rebellion, Revolution, and Change, co-edited by Susan Campbell Bartoletti. Marc Aronson teaches at Rutgers University and lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti is the author of numerous picture books, novels, and nonfiction books for young people. Her nonfiction work includes Growing Up in Coal Country; Black Potatoes: The Story of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–1850; Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow; and They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group. She is the recipient of a Newbery Honor, a Robert F. Sibert Medal and Honor, and an Orbis Pictus Award and Honor. The recipient of the Washington Post–Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award for her body of work, she teaches in the MFA program at Spalding University in Kentucky.