Introducing How We Got To Now, for the younger generation.
My new book on the history of innovation, written for middle-grade readers.
Six years ago, when we first started planning out the TV series that would become How We Got To Now, we knew from the beginning that we wanted to make a different kind of history show. Instead of focusing on political leaders or military conflicts or social movements, we wanted to tell the often unappreciated stories behind the modern world’s innovations: the creation of clean drinking water in big cities; the invention of refrigerators and air conditioning; the spread of cheap artificial light. But we also wanted to tell those stories with a fresh style: more playful, immersive, with vivid animations that explained the ideas and the history in a new way.
All of those elements were part of our deliberate ambitions for the show (and for the book I wrote to accompany it.) But what we didn’t anticipate at all was how much that combination of attributes would resonate with kids. We were definitely trying to attract a younger audience, compared to the average PBS series. We were thinking thirty-year-olds. But the show we made ended up appealing to an even younger generation. I heard countless stories after the series aired from parents who told me that they’d watched the show with their grade school kids. Something about the style and the content made it a show that could happily entertain a nine-year-old and a forty-nine-year-old at the same time.
In the months and years after the show first aired, I started to hear more stories about schools that were integrating the show into middle-grade and high-school curricula. The stories we told turned out to be a useful way of sparking interest in STEM, and inspiring the kids to be innovators themselves in their own lives. I visited some of these schools and talked to the students, and those visits were some of the most rewarding experiences of my career: seeing all those twelve-year-olds fired up about the history of innovation — not just the billionaires of Silicon Valley but also the heroes of public health and visionary infrastructure projects who didn’t end up making a fortune but who improved the world immeasurably nonetheless.
But in all those classes, there always a constraining factor. The show played wonderfully for a classroom of sixth-graders. But the book version of How We Got To Now was really a grownup book. So if kids wanted to dive into the world of How We Got To Now they could do it by watching television, but not by reading.
But now they can. Later this month, Viking Books For Young Readers is releasing a new adapted version of How We Got To Now for middle-grade readers. (10 and up.) Most of the stories from the original book are included, but the prose has been expertly adapted by Sheila Keenan to speak to a younger audience. I helped steer some of the changes, and wrote a new introduction and conclusion with the hopes of inspiring a new generation of innovative kids to tackle our 21st-century problems. I’ve never written for a younger audience before, so this was a real treat for me as an author. An added bonus: my 11-year-old son Dean got to read the manuscript in draft — given that he was in the target audience — and give me (remarkably extensive) notes on how to improve it.
As you can see here, the book is beautifully illustrated; the design should capture the imagination of young readers as much as the stories will. If you’ve got a young reader interested in tech or history — or you’re a teacher looking for a way to get your students into STEM — I hope you’ll check it out.
