The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Sneha Mathan

The Story of Mankind revolutionized former methods of telling history. It received the first Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. Nevertheless, critics and public alike hailed it as a book for all ages. Van Loon recounts history as living news, relating everything in the past to the present. He writes informally, making world history wonderfully alive and exciting.

Of this book the author writes, “the entrance of America upon the scene of international politics as the most important actor…convinced me that proper and reasonable understanding of historical cause and effect was the most important factor in the lives of the rising generation. And so my book treats the entire history of the human race as a single unit. It begins with the dim and hardly understood realm of the earliest past; it can be contained forever.”

Hendrik Willem van Loon (1882-1944) was a Dutch-born American popular historian, born in Rotterdam, who migrated to the United States in 1903. A journalist and history teacher, in 1922 he published the bestselling The Story of Mankind, and from then onwards produced a number of popular histories.