MY OWN U.S. HISTORY BOOK! | MAJOR EVENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY

oh my gosh you guys i can't believe we are in this moment ah this like one second takes me from not having a book out into the universe to having a book out into the universe i'm gonna post my first post about my new book it's so exciting but also just like now it's out there okay okay i haven't done yet okay i'm going to my drafts oh okay let's do this together okay here is the image from my drafts okay all right i have my caption ready okay i'm gonna post it oh i'm gonna i'm gonna push share okay ready one two three oh my gosh okay it's there it's there it's in the instagram universe oh my goodness okay it's in stories it's on the feed all right okay it's out there all right let's this is a good distraction to like not look at my phone now let's talk about this book you want to see it i just posted the cover reveal so here it is this is what it looks like book number two it's called major events in american history 50 defining moments from pre-colonial times to the 21st century an american history book for kids very long title by megan duvarny forbes this one is a really really good companion for my first book this one came out earlier this year and it's a book of 15 biographies of famous americans this one was really fun to write and this provides all of the context surrounding the people in this book and then other contexts as well so 50 events it was um it was hard to narrow down 50 events and then it was also hard to like decide on on the ones that we should include we changed this outline many many many times so just to give you a little sneak peek on the inside this one is very colorful it has several different sections that it's broken up into so different like eras and they're all in different colors so they're easy to find and i i love that i love when things are color coded so if you look at the contents here we have early america starting in 1050 ce to 1600 and then colonial america from 1600 to 1763 the american revolution national expansion civil war and reconstruction and then there's another page that shows you the rest of the sections industrial america progressive era the great depression and world war ii post-war america and then america in the 21st century and it starts off like this so the very first entry the very first event is the founding of the city of cahokia and this is basically in like st louis so if you live around there this would be a really fun chapter for your students to read and our final chapter is the black lives matter movement starting in 2013. so this is a wide book it covers literally a thousand years so this almost goes against everything you normally do as a historian so most historians kind of become more and more specialized the further into their career that they get so if you ever talk to professional historians sometimes they're kind of weird because they know every single detail about like one really specific thing so i can tell you a lot about civil rights in the u.s virgin islands in the years right after the united states purchased it from denmark like that's my very very specific area of expertise this book was a challenge for me because it required scope but i also just like so badly want to provide depth for students even students who are in the age range that this is targeted for which is like 8 to 12 year olds i believe that they deserve those details and sometimes even like conflicting accounts or like information of the things that historians really aren't sure about and that we shouldn't be giving them a history with like a fairy tale narrative where one day this happened and then there were bad guys and then the good guys defeated them and then we all lived happily ever after until the next crisis so that part was it was an exciting challenge to get to write something so comprehensive but also just really difficult i'm gonna set this down for a minute so i can talk with my hands um so i began this project at the very beginning of 2021 i think it was january when we started talking about it and um i did most of the writing like march april may finish it up in june i think i was behind on my deadlines as usual i had to go work in hotel rooms at night again just like this process of the last book that i wrote so if you want to see the process of writing a book in a pandemic as a teacher with a toddler i have a vlog that covers the whole the whole process for writing this book and it was really really difficult and then for this one the process was pretty much the same so um the difference was that i was doing 50 chapters instead of 15 and when i started writing in march i was like okay i can do this like we're basically still on lockdown i was teaching virtually so i would teach in the mornings until like one or two o'clock and then i had you know my late afternoon evenings to read and research and write and get my chapters in and then a couple weeks into this process i ended up having to go back into the classroom to teach like a hybrid model that was really frustrating but anyway it just kind of like threw off my workflow because when i envisioned like okay yes i can write 50 chapters in a matter of weeks just a few months like i had that particular grueling schedule in my head and then going back in person just changed the like flow of my day and how i had to operate and how i had to teach and so it ended up being quite stressful we also moved in the middle of april so i had to pack up all of these many many many books and you know like we didn't have internet for a couple days and i'd like find everything so um yeah that was a challenge so in general just writing a book in a pandemic while working full-time and being a mom is a challenge and even a couple of my friends that i talk to like all the time were like when did you do this they're like i know you know your your basic day and i don't remember hearing a ton about this like when did you do this and i was like yeah in in the middle of the night like i just i didn't really sleep and if you've been here for a while you know that even though these chapters were shorter these 50 chapters as compared to my 15 chapters of the last book that doesn't mean i did any less research i uh i'm just very vigilant with my research i just there's no way that i could live with myself if i did a sloppy job on research so you can't see this whole thing but this is like a rolling cart full of history books i mean these shelves are also full of history books that i read and referenced and used in order to do the best job that i could on this book one interesting thing about just like doing the research for this book and you know looking at so many major events in u.s history that teachers teach about every year is that some of the events were pretty difficult to find quick easy information for so that's the thing about the internet we always say that like you can look up anything you need to know on the internet and for historical research that's really not true a lot of research is behind paywalls and most of the good information that you need is in books that are not you know just like free pdfs online like these authors you know need to need to recoup their research cost and be paid for their expertise and all of their hard work so i spent i don't it would i'm not i can't add it up i don't want to know i don't know i don't know how many books i bought between the research for this one and this one as well as documentaries podcasts museum websites i borrowed my friends jstor login because there's no way to get one without a college email address you can't even like pay for it oh and then for a while though they were allowing teachers access like during the pandemic but then they took that away so anyway the research process was intense and there's always more that i wanted to put in here but this is what i always say that i want good quality history researched by actual historians that is then filtered through the eyes of a teacher into a format that's accessible to students so i got a chance to do that so that's really cool that you know despite how grueling the process was that now we do have this in the end this is not the only us history book your students are ever going to need but as a teacher i do think this is a pretty good resource for you to have as a reference even like the choices that we made in the events that we decided to include i feel like were very they were very very thoughtful i had to fight quite a bit for a few of them and i feel like the breadth and depth was you know the best that i could get in in 50 events it was nice also to be able to kind of like go from one event to the next and show the cause and effect or you know like how one thing led to another because we tend to learn history in such a fragmented way where you learn about this event like okay and then later on you learned about something else and we don't always do a great job of connecting the two and then you know we haven't built up that mental muscle to be able to look at what's happening today and see how previous historical events have impacted what we're living through today so that was very much on my mind as i was writing one really huge focus for me in the first couple of sections this early america section which i agonized over the terms that we use like i didn't want to use pre-colonial looks like cochia for example like it's just centuries before colonists were ever there it just seems weird to classify it under like pre-colonial but colonization was a world-changing huge process and i do feel like now the term itself is just a little bit has more of a negative connotation it's not as neutral anymore but it is accurate so um yeah a lot of like the terminology and everything i was interviewing like you know my old professors that i had during my master's program the head of the history department i mean i was reaching out to all the historians that i know i was just pulling in as much information as i could possibly get to really do the best job possible for your students because i want them to have good information and if you are maybe like an english teacher and you're teaching a novel set during a certain time i wanted you to have this reference where you could turn to let's say plessy versus ferguson for example and have really great information accurate information that included the perspectives of many groups of people and offer this to your students i think i got off track from what i was saying before um but so the early american sections it was so important to me that it wasn't portrayed as like all of the things that british settlers did in these early years because america was such a diverse place by then there were hundreds of indigenous tribes who spoke different languages had different cultures and you know made alliances with different people different other tribes and the colonizers coming in there were people from spain and france and england it was just a very diverse place like people would have spoken multiple languages in order to be able to trade and do what you needed to do in order to survive and the british colonists were not the main characters in this world they could not even survive there at first but eventually they did become major players through a number of events that are explored in this book but just over and over and over again i tried to highlight as many stories as possible of all of the people who were involved in these treaties and these battles and these wars and who impacted policies and as we move into like the revolutionary war and the founding of the united states it's really important to look at the the documented motivations behind why a lot of the founding fathers made the decisions that they did and we don't have to wonder about very much of this at all they wrote all of this down we saw hamilton last night which i love there are many issues with hamilton that i will acknowledge uh but you know one of the reasons that you can write i have it around here somewhere a thousand page book on alexander hamilton is because he wrote everything down thomas jefferson wrote everything down the reason we know so much about them is because they wrote everything down there there is not much to wonder about when it comes to the motivations of highly educated politicians in the 17 and 1800s who wrote letters about their every thought so um you know that section is always interesting to research as a us history teacher in california you teach basically like the american revolution up kind of into reconstruction and i feel like that is a section of american history that we generally teach poorly i think it's probably like a transition period as far as like curriculum for a reason so you know eighth grade u.s history ends with reconstruction it's kind of the thing that most teachers don't get to and then 11th grade u.s history in california anyway picks up there and it's it's pretty disjointed so it was also just important for me to do the best job that i could in writing about these years after the civil war and the challenges that the people of the united states faced and the violence that was still occurring and a lot of the laws that were passed almost immediately after let's see there was um which chapter did i like the 15th amendment chapter goes into this pretty well i think so after the civil war and the 15th amendment was passed we had quite a few black senators in the south because black people were allowed to vote and they were over 50 of the population and so that's a pretty good recipe for electing your own black senators uh almost immediately after there was backlash and voting rights were limited and violence increased and we wouldn't see another black senator until barack obama almost a hundred years later so just getting some of that perspective in like five pages three pages actually you know that's like a little difficult to do but just trying to make some of those connections was important and then we have lots of chapters about like inventions that really change things for people in the united states and the world i guess and really these invention chapters are are set within the context of the whole world and all of the many many people who contributed to the eventual like discovery of these inventions but more importantly like the patenting and whoever could like start a company first and mass-produce these things because lots of other people like had the same ideas and we're working on similar products and stuff so yeah just you know trying very hard to like complicate a little bit of these stories that we've simplified so much that they they aren't accurate anymore trying to put a little bit of the complication back in actually so that kids can practice you know having a better understanding of history and how complex and nuanced it is the plessy versus ferguson case chapter is also one of my favorites i feel like this isn't always taught with all the nuance that it should be or with the strategy that um plessy and his team went into it with like so many of these court cases and like landmark court cases that i write about in here were so strategic they were not just a matter of happenstance they had so much organization behind them so i really tried to include that as well and then we get more into this more recent history like the stock market crash the attack on pearl harbor some of these things that are a little bit harder to write about because they're so recent like the cold war the cold war is really really difficult to research i was trying to find good research for students and teachers and it was difficult so i bought some books you know i spent quite a while trying to figure out like what type of a focus i wanted to go with on the cold war so that research was really really interesting actually one of the hardest chapters for me to write was the chapter on the 911 attacks and actually i i submitted that chapter to my editor and she was like no you need to start from scratch like just throw this one out and start over um because i mean you know i was like 40 something chapters in already and then writing about the first thing that i had actually lived through in this book and my memories clouded my work a little bit and i i did in my laziness like write that first draft a little bit more like a fairy tale like we all woke up one day and there were bad guys and then good guys came in and eventually we lived happily ever after and my editor was like no that is not gonna work what changed and that was kind of like our lens for all of this like okay here's an event in order for it to make it into the book it had to change life in america in a significant way after it occurred so who was impacted who benefited who did not benefit what did life look like after this event so yeah um doing history is is always a really emotional process for me just as i'm looking at this is this is my country and these are my ancestors my people the the legacy that i live in now it's often really emotional to just like wrestle with with all of the all the things that have happened but i i really believe in just like doing excellent history and starting students young and learning about these things and looking at the past with clear eyes so that we can look at the future clearly and look at ourselves clearly in the position that we're currently in so i'm really really excited for you guys to get your hands on this book and to start using it in your classrooms the biggest struggle i will say is collaboration that's the biggest struggle for me um most things that i do it's just like a one-woman show around here and even you know all through like grad school and everything that you do you kind of have like your advisor but you're doing everything yourself so um the collaboration piece in this is working with an illustrator and that's another thing that i'm not used to as a historian like you know you write like a 50 page paper and there's there are no pictures in it as historians we keep things very boring like just text occasionally you'll include like a cool primary source image or something like that so images are tough but i think for students you know this this really helps to spark their interest and you know just help them even be like willing to take a look at this at all so i'm so appreciative of this illustrator for all the work that they did 50 images 50 plus i guess because there's more in here than even just the chapter oh my goodness would have been so much work where the collaboration is hard is that i didn't get to interact with that illustrator i saw like some early sketches and things that i was able to give feedback on but some of the images are just not the way that i was imagining that they would turn out and i mean this is just something that you know you and your students can look at as you go through as a teacher i very rarely use like illustrations like as much as possible and i would recommend this to all teachers use actual images or actual primary sources whenever you can and even primary sources can be um inaccurate and very skewed and very biased but then those are things that we we get to look at right so like this image for example of the boston tea party is based on a primary source document that primary source document was already fairly inaccurate and kind of just dramaticized so in this image it looks like mohawk indians were the people carrying out the boston tea party and that these guys and wigs were like cheering them on and if you read the text you'll see that that's not the case at all that's that's just not at all what happened but this is based on a primary source and so i'm sure that the illustrator was just like looking at that picture and trying to like recreate that picture probably rather than like going from my text so some of those things i'm like conflicted it's hard for me to see my text next to a couple of images that i wouldn't have gone with but again that's just like not something that i'm used to as a historian so you know there's always going to be like those issues with history books and even with primary texts and read critically and observe critically and that's just part of how history is is done i guess i don't i don't really know how to ensure that like every portrayal of everything is always as accurate as we can possibly make it while also employing the skills of very talented artists when we're all working from our own different houses i guess so that part of it is i'm i'm still struggling with it i'm not gonna lie but overall very very happy with how it turned out and i really love just i think that the overall aesthetic is just very appealing for students i think just a lot of fun i can't tell you how how much i love this color coding this is going to be a really useful resource in your classroom so i'm so so proud of that i will link this book below of course so that you can pre-order it comes out on october 12th i believe it's books always come out on tuesdays yes october 12th and today is september 12th so exactly a month from today i will try my best to edit this and hurry up and get it out to you so you only have about a month to wait you know you've got most of the school year still before you you know to use this book so i would love to answer any questions that i didn't address in this video or if there's anything else that you'd like me to talk about or talk you through for this book i mean i think the cool thing about having someone write a history book who is also like accessible to teachers like that's my thing we're part of this whole community right is that you can ask me questions about this and challenge me on things and we can kind of do this together like most people who write history books we have no idea who they are and no way to interact with them at all so i think this would be really really cool oh i was also gonna say there's another book coming out that i've already pre-ordered from this same publisher and it looks amazing and i think you need it as a companion to this book here's what it looks like it's called native americans in history by jimmy beason and it's very much like in the same little collection as like this book that i wrote but i think this one is just imperative to have in your classroom so please also order this one i'm gonna link this one down below as well and it it comes out before mine okay it comes out on september 21st so it's gonna be out really soon so definitely order this one i'm also still you know so excited about my first book if you haven't gotten this one yet get this one then you've got this and then you've got this great little collection started in your classroom or at your house maybe for your own kids of us history written by really passionate historians and writers and educators thank you so much for watching and i can't wait to see this book out in the wild ooh i gotta i gotta go check instagram now you guys i gotta see i gotta see what's happening oh my gosh oh my gosh all right guys i'll see you later have a great day bye [Music]

Channel: too cool for middle school

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Keywords: ethical fashion, sustainable style, fair trade fashion, us history, virgin islands, middle school, teaching, teacher, classroom, english, history, english teacher, history teacher, sixth grade, eighth grade, junior high, high school, education, classroom organization, vlogger, mommy vlogger, teacher vlogger, bulletin boards, classroom ideas, teacher goals, bookstagram, book haul, author

Id: ND0qnOJJx1E

Length: 26min 43sec (1603 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021