Meet the author

Meet the author

Joy Hakim is a former teacher, newspaper writer, and editor who spent seven years writing A History of US, developing the books in classrooms and using children as her editors.If there was one thing the "editors in the classroom" taught Joy, it was that history should be engaging. And so it became Joy's mission to put the "story" back in history and make it fun again. The inspiring result: enthusiastic fan mail from children across the nation for A History of US. She has files bulging with letters from them, which she calls, "an unexpected bonus" to writing A History of US.

"Finding the story in a subject is to discover its essence. If we can teach our students to pattern the world into stories, we can turn them into powerful, analytical thinkers."
-Joy Hakim

Joy Hakim is the only author to receive an award from the National Council for Social Studies for writing textbooks.

Starting the series

United States History. Now that's quite a sizable topic to comprehend. Even understanding the details of a single period in our history could be a life's work. And who wants to slog through hundreds of pages of names and dates anyway? So you must be wondering, what exactly is it about A History of US that sets these books apart as lively alternatives to the dry, dreary tomes we're assigned to read in school?

When Joy Hakim first set out to write the history of the U. S., she thought she could spend a year producing one book. Once she had finished to her satisfaction, however, one year had become seven, and one book had become ten. She certainly had her work cut out for her"history can be an excellent teacher, helping us to make judgments and showing us both our successes and our failures. But as Ms. Hakim learned, history can also be misleading if we're not careful. Maybe we should just let her explain it to you though.

"Exact imagining. That's what historians are supposed to do. I know that because I read it in a book by George Steiner. He said, "History is exact imagining." Now Steiner is an erudite Oxford University historian. But exact imagining? That sounded like an oxymoron to me. And, even though I know Steiner is very smart, exact imagining seemed contradictory. Fiction is imagining. And history is supposed to be exact. But is there something imaginative about writing true stories from the past?

I thought about the way I write my history books. This is what I do: I pretend. In this book [From Colonies to Country] I pretended that I lived in the 18th century. I pretended that I was a Patriot. I pretended that I was a loyalist. Whenever I could, I got help with the pretending. I traveled and observed. I visited Boston nd Williamsburg and Monticello and Philadelphia and Charleston. I talked to people who knew about the past; I asked questions. And I read books, lots and lots of books, to learn all the details I could. That way, when I pretended, I wouldn't be ignorant about it. I wanted my pretending to be as exact as possible.

Exact as possible! Maybe Professor Steiner does make sense. If you want to be a historian you have to imagine yourself into the time and place that you are writing about, and then you need to be as careful and will informed and precise as you can be.

I found the same idea in a book by Francis Parkman (a historian from Boston who live in the 19th century and wrote about the French and Indian War). Parkman said that facts"even if they are exact"can mislead you, unless you use your imagination to put yourself in the past and understand those facts in their time in history. For instance, now that we know the facts about how the Revolutionary War came out, most of us think the Loyalists were wrong. But if you zoom back in time to 1775, you will find many serious-thinking Americans who believe that Patriots are a bunch of hotheads and that breaking away from England, the greatest nation in the western world, is a very poor idea."

This is what Francis Parkman said in a book called Pioneers of France in the New World:

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research [into] facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning and untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.... He must himself be, as it were, a sharer of spectator of the action he describes.

Now I've found there is a problem with this. It is easy to imagine yourself a hero or heroine of the past, but that is not fair to history. You also have to try to understand people you don't like. Pretending to be a slave escaping the British may be exciting, but if you want to understand and write about slavery, you also have to pretend to be a slave owner. You have to ask yourself why you own slaves and what will happen if you free them. And what are you going to do? And why?

Do you have an sense of the philosophy behind the books yet? Are you anxious to find out what's inside? Well, you've come to the right place. This website was created to tell you everything you might want to know about A History of US and then some (we even have sample chapters from each of the ten books!) Within their pages you'll learn about parts of our history that will make you proud, and parts that may prompt you to believe there's still room for improvement. Above all, these stories go beyond the politicians, the generals, the inventors and the revolutionaries to tell you what ordinary Americans were thinking and doing every step of the way.

And who better to explain it all than the people whose lives coincided with the events and developments that have defined the last 400 years? It is their fascinating first"hand accounts, rendered more realistic with photographs, political cartoons, maps and illustrations, that really enliven American history. So we would like to warmly invite you to take a look around whether you're a parent, a kid, a teacher, a homeschooler, a historian... or just plain curious! We're hoping you'll discover something new here, and we bet you'll have fun while you're at it.