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"Sheinkin has made a career of finding extraordinary stories in American history." -- The New York Times Book ReviewUndefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team is an astonishing underdog sports story -- and more. It's an unflinching look at the U.S. government's violent persecution of Native Americans and the school that was designed to erase Indian cultures. Expertly told by three-time National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin, it's the story of a group of young men who came together at that school, the overwhelming obstacles they faced both on and off the field, and their absolute refusal to accept defeat.Jim Thorpe: Super athlete, Olympic gold medalist, Native American Pop Warner: Indomitable coach, football mastermind, Ivy League grad Before these men became legends, they met in 1907 at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, where they forged one of the winningest teams in American football history. Called "the team that invented football," they took on the best opponents of their day, defeating much more privileged schools such as Harvard and the Army in a series of breathtakingly close calls, genius plays, and bone-crushing hard work.A 2017 Horn Book-Boston Globe Nonfiction Honor BookThis thoroughly-researched and documented book can be worked into multiple aspects of the common core curriculum.



About the Author

Steve Sheinkin

From: I was born in Brooklyn, NY, and my family lived in Mississippi and Colorado before moving back to New York and settling in the suburbs north of New York City. As a kid my favorite books were action stories and outdoor adventures: sea stories, searches for buried treasure, sharks eating people ... that kind of thing. Probably my all-time favorite was a book called Mutiny on the Bounty, a novel based on the true story of a famous mutiny aboard a British ship in the late 1700s. I went to Syracuse University and studied communications and international relations. The highlight of those years was a summer I spent in Central America, where I worked on a documentary on the streets of Nicaragua. After college I moved to Washington, D.C., and worked for an environmental group called the National Audubon Society. Then, when my brother Ari graduated from college a few years later, we decided to move to Austin, Texas, and make movies together. We lived like paupers in a house with a hole in the floor where bugs crawled in. We wrote some screenplays, and in 1995 made our own feature film, a comedy called A More Perfect Union (filing pictured below) , about four young guys who decide to secede from the Union and declare their rented house to be an independent nation. We were sure it was going to be a huge hit; actually we ended up deep in debt. After that I moved to Brooklyn and decided to find some way to make a living as a writer. I wrote short stories, screenplays, and worked on a comic called The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey. In 2006, after literally hundreds of rejections, my first Rabbi Harvey graphic novel was finally published. Meanwhile, I started working for an educational publishing company, just for the money. We'd hire people to write history textbooks, and they'd send in their writing, and it was my job to check facts and make little edits to clarify the text. Once in a while I was given the chance to write little pieces of textbooks, like one-page biographies or skills lessons. "Understanding Bar Graphs" was one of my early works. The editors noticed that my writing was pretty good. They started giving me less editing to do, and more writing. Gradually, I began writing chapters for textbooks, and that turned into my full-time job. All the while, I kept working on my own writing projects.In 2008 I wrote my last textbook. I walked away, and shall never return. My first non-textbook history book was King George: What Was His Problem? - full of all the stories about the American Revolution that I was never allowed to put into textbooks. But looking back, I actually feel pretty lucky to have spent all those years writing textbooks. It forced me to write every day, which is great practice. And I collected hundreds of stories that I can't wait to tell.These days, I live with my wife, Rachel, and our two young kids in Saratoga Springs, New York. We're right down the road from the Saratoga National Historical



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