Continuing her unique approach to "horizontal history", Genevieve Foster explores the wide world of William Penn from the 1660's to the early 1700's - a world reaching across the courtyards of the Sun King in France to the Great Wall of China and beyond to Colonial America. 

Penn's contemporaries included such colorful figures as Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Edmund Halley, Sir Issac Newton, Shah Jahan (who built the Taj Mahal), and the great explorers Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle. His life also spans a fascinating age of world exploration and discovery. Penn's Quaker beliefs undergirded his relationships with the Pennsylvanian native tribes and established the longest standing peace treaty between American Indians and European settlers. Wonderful maps and illustrations by the author complement the text.

About the Author:

Genevieve Foster began her career as a commercial artist, illustrator, and advertiser. In the late 1930s it occurred to Foster to write about history in a "horizontal" versus "vertical" fashion, i.e., that national histories should not be taught in isolation from one another. She said that the way history was traditionally taught was "about as dull and unsatisfying, as a play might be, if only one character appeared upon the stage, while the others faintly mumbled their lines in the wings, out of sight of the audience."

She was at the forefront of this new method of historical writing, which viewed history as a cross section of intertwined events and looked at a person in their worldwide historical context. In her books, she integrated global historical events into the telling of a person's life. Her purpose was to make historical figures "alive for children". During her career she wrote 19 nonfiction children's books. Foster traveled extensively and most of her books were translated into 12 languages and were distributed by the U.S. State Department.