Steve Sheinkin is an award-winning writer of  stories for kids about American history. When he started out, he was a writer of boring textbooks for kids about American history. When he started, he was young and ambitious and he wanted to bring new energy to textbook writing, to mine American history for fresh new details and anecdotes that could capture the interest of fifth graders…!

This is an interview about how he failed.

And he shares stories about the awful push and pull of priorities for teaching our origin stories to American children.

It’s also a story about Benedict Arnold’s leg.

Credits

Steve thinking about history.

Steve Sheinkin is an award-winning author of history books for young adults. You can visit him at http://stevesheinkin.com

Thanks to MT Anderson for introducing me to Steve, and helping me with this show.

Music and sounds for this show were found on freesound.org

Articles

How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us, New York Review of Books, 2012

Texas Textbook Massacre, Huffington Post, 2010

Texans on Review Panel Push for Creationism in Science Textbooks, Huffington Post, 2013