Trudy E McNair
As a baby boomer, Trudy grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Chicago, Illinois. After she graduated from high school, her family moved to Texas where she received her undergraduate degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and her graduate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and Rice University in Houston. Her main focus of study was history and literature.
While at S.M.U., she studied for a summer semester at Oxford University, England, which was one of the seminal experiences of her life and instilled in her a life-long love of travel to Europe. Shortly after college, she spent a summer studying in Asia, including Tokyo University, which instilled in her a life-long love of Japan.
She was able to return to Oxford as a Florida college professor in 1995 on a scholarship from the English-Speaking Union of Central Florida. She also returned to Japan in 2009 during a sabbatical semester.
Although England and Japan have a special place in her heart, she also loves France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Russia.
She also dabbled in theater during and after college. Her favorite roles were Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio in grade school and Lady Macbeth in graduate school, and the narrator in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
She moved to Florida with her family in 1989 and began a twenty-five-year career as a Humanities professor at a local college. As a professor, she was frustrated by the students’ lack of knowledge of history and the arts. She was inspired by a lecture by American historian David McCullough, who said that the schools in America were producing “history illiterates.” She feels that textbooks are the key to learning and that the dullness of Humanities and history textbooks is legendary.
Over a period of years, she published five Humanities textbooks with Kendall Hunt Publishers. They are part of a series entitled A History of Art and Civilization and cover The Ancient World, The Medieval World, The Renaissance and Baroque Periods, The Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism, The Asian World, and The Modern World.
Her books were extremely popular with her students, who are eager to learn when material is presented in an interesting and exciting way.
Another dream of Trudy’s was to write and illustrate her own children’s book. Her first book is Atwater the Elephant, her second The Victorian Age and the Origins of Christmas Traditions, and her third book is Klara’s Trip to Amsterdam.
In the early 1980s, she won a writing contest to travel to the Netherlands as a guest of the Dutch government and KLM. One of the highlights of the trip was a reception with Queen Beatrix at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. This trip was the inspiration for her children’s book Klara’s Trip to Amsterdam.
McNair Publishing