Smelling the Past
By Mary Lord
Forget the grim green face on the $1 bill. The real George Washington was a good-looking babe magnet whose elegance made Abigail Adams swoon (and husband John jealous). Yet this dapper, auburn-haired dandy pulled a ragtag army through a winter so punishing that the ground of its Valley Forge outpost was dotted with the blood of shoeless soldiers.
Doesn't sound like the Founding Father you read about in school, does it? But then, why should history be dull as dust, when "it's stories and adventures," argues Joy Hakim, 72, the J. K. Rowling of social studies. Two decades ago, the Colorado grandmother and former schoolteacher set out on a mission to tell America's tale with more panache than her three children's turgid textbooks. Her simple premise: "If a book isn't good enough for people to buy in a store, it isn't good enough for kids to read in schools."
And read they have. Hakim's 10-volume narrative, A History of US, has sold more than 4 million copies to families and school systems nationwide, winning her a prestigious James A. Michener writing award and inspiring Harry Potter-like raves from her many young fans. Freedom, her just published chronicle of the nation's struggle for independence and civil rights, features a foreword by George and Laura Bush. The first couple also appear in a star-studded, eight-week PBS series based on the book that kicked off last week.
Not bad for an author whose work was rejected as too interesting by 15 publishers before Oxford University Press took a gamble in 1993. And even that was a fluke. Hakim (pronounced HAY-kim) had heard that the publisher planned to jump into the U.S. textbook market, so she sent a manuscript to former President Byron Hollinshead. She phoned him an hour after it hit his desk, prodding: "Well, what do you think?" Hollinshead read the book that night and discovered a "real page-turner." The rest, as they say, is history.
Learning backward. Like the American Revolution she illuminates with such precision and passion, Hakim's crusade against "the calcified textbook industry" didn't spring from a sole spark. As an editorial writer for the Virginian-Pilot in the turbulent 1970s, she saw her daughter, Ellen, learn history backward, studying the civil rights movement before being taught its roots in slavery. Years later, Danny, her youngest, lugged home a U.S. history text from his private school that "was so bad" Hakim resented having to shell out $32 for it. "Don't worry, mom," her son reported two weeks later. "The teacher hates the book, too, and he's not using it."
As a child in Rutland, Vt., Hakim also struggled through boring textbooks and "hated history, like everybody else." Then, at Smith College, she took Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Donald's course. Hakim recalls frantically scribbling down the names and dates that filled the first lecture, only to have Donald conclude the session by announcing that this was how not to teach history. The rest of the semester was spent exploring the personalities and ideas that ignite imaginations and debate. Hakim was hooked.
When Hakim was in her late 50s with her last child finishing high school, she came across a study showing that kids' comprehension was higher for work written by journalists than for textbooks. She decided to take a year off from work and write a readable history text. A prodigious reader able to absorb a book a day, Hakim began with classic accounts by Samuel Elliot Morrison and others. She roamed the streets and archives of colonial Williamsburg, borrowed 15 books per visit from the local library, and visited such places as California's gold rush territory to "smell the smells."
And everywhere, Hakim haunted old bookstores. Son Danny, now Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times. recalls "books taking over the whole house." Her investment paid off in the sparkling details those old tomes yielded, from the ice chunks and fog that greeted Washington crossing the Delaware to Virginian Wilmer McLean, who saw the Civil War begin on his Manassas farmland and end in his Appomattox home. Hakim unearthed cruel villains like Panfilo de Narvaez, a one-eyed, red-bearded conquistador who slaughtered hundreds of American Indians for no reason, and heroic mavericks like Ida B. Wells. "I like people," says Hakim, "who don't do what they're expected to do."
If Hakim favors history's renegades, it may be because she's bucked tradition herself. Born Natalie Frisch, she was among the few Jews growing up in rural Vermont, where her father had a furniture business. She met her future husband, Naples-born, Indochina-bred businessman Sam Hakim, on a boat to Europe when both were in college, and she spent most of her adult life in a genteel, WASP-y enclave of Virginia Beach, Va. Hakim worked at a time when many moms stayed home, honing her trademark spare prose as the Virginian-Pilot' s first female editorial writer. "She was definitely ahead of her time," says daughter Ellen, a marketing executive in Denver, citing the wheat germ and carrots mom stocked for after-school snacks and the museum forays that were hardly the norm for her peers.
Hitting the keyboard each morning, Hakim strung history's baubles into a vivid, jaunty narrative. She then paid local fifth graders $5 each to "edit" the drafts, identifying passages as B for boring, G for good, and NC for not clear. (One child, for instance, thought sending someone a wire meant literally that.) Scrutiny by such historians as Civil War scholar James McPherson saved her from "stupid mistakes" like calling a bayonet a sword. Result: Instead of the usual litany of dates and faces, Hakim captures the fear and awe of Columbus's crew discovering the seaweed mats of the Sargasso Sea, and she puts the founders in the pungent context of carriage-clogged streets and few bathtubs. "There's lots of horse manure in history, and our kids need to know about it," she says.
Fan mail. Judging from the adoring letters that dot the walls in Hakim's study, the manure of history has appeal. Indeed, one fifth grader wrote that he'd rather read her book than play Nintendo. Another reluctant reader found himself "on the edge of my chair" and eagerly awaiting the next book, while Katie Rahowkski, a middle school student from Elmhurst, N.Y., wrote Hakim: "You saved me from another year of boring social studies textbooks."
Despite its success, A History of US remains a hard sell. To ensure their textbooks pass muster with state or local boards of education, many publishers agree to scrub potentially provocative passages. Hakim refuses to allow this. Nor will she dilute America's story to conform to "politically correct" expectations, rebuffing one publisher's request to write "enslaved persons" rather than "slaves."
The fundamental problem seems to be that many Americans just aren't used to textbooks with attitude. Extremists on both the right and the left have quibbled over everything from Hakim's depiction of communism to her religious "preachings." One Florida district recently banned her books as too opinionated after a parent complained.
Yet Hakim perseveres. Her latest project is a history of man's quest to understand the universe, from Thales to string theory. As always, Hakim has her husband read each draft, consulting granddaughter Natalie, the clan's grammarian, on phrasing. But this time around, Hakim was offered a hefty $100,000 advance and a sure shot at publication. Who said American history has no second acts?
Bio
"There's lots of horse manure in history, and our kids need to know about it."
BORN Jan. 16, 1931
FAMILY Spouse Sam, a retired businessman and amateur actor; children Jeff (math professor), Ellen (marketing exec), and Danny (reporter); three grandchildren
EDUCATION B.A. in government, Smith, 1951; M.A., Goucher, 1954
This story appears in the January 20, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
Copyright © 2007 U.S.News & World Report, L.P. All rights reserved.
