ABSTRACT
James Loewen has famously complained that children’s textbooks frequently whitewash the sins of history in order to please school boards. The result, he argues, is a version of history that is too boring to be useful or even interesting. But textbooks are not the only non-ction for children. Trade non-ction routinely addresses topics such as exploitative child labor, sexist governmental policies, hate groups, the environmental impact of consumer capitalism, natural selection, and even sex. Further, the two major awards for non-ction-the Orbis Pictus (established by the National Council of Teachers of English in 1989) and Robert F. Sibert (established by the American Library Association in 2001)—seem particularly interested in non-ction that grapples with controversy. Indeed, in the years during which the eld has enjoyed both the Orbis Pictus and the Sibert, roughly a third of the total awards have been given to books that focus extensively on the Civil Rights Movement and the Holocaust, historical moments lled with the sorts of villains that, Loewen argues, school boards hate to see.
