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Keep It Clean! - Don Brown

By Don Brown

Release Date: 2025-10-21

Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels for Kids

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This entertaining graphic novel from award winner Don Brown will get kids talking, since it's all about the history of dealing with poop, pee, and dirty hands.

Part of the Big Ideas That Changed the World graphic novel series, this full-color book is appropriate for the classroom and includes a timeline, endnotes, and a bibliography.

In 1895, an engineer named George Waring was appointed New York City’s first commissioner of street cleaning. His task? To make a city with millions of people livable.

Narrated by Waring, Keep It Clean! explores the concept of public health, which means ensuring clean water and adequate sewage disposal for everyone, and covers topics such as personal hygiene, sewer systems, and chemical water treatment.

Acclaimed author-illustrator Don Brown takes readers on a journey through history and around the world, from Greek, Roman, and Aztec aqueducts and the dawn of bathing (including social public bathing in Japan and religious bathing ceremonies in Machu Picchu) to the invention of soap in the Middle East, the first use of flush toilets approximately 4,000 years ago, and the first toilets used in outer space—a Big Idea when you consider that early astronauts on Apollo 11 had none!

Full of facts and colorful historical figures, Brown chronicles both historical mishaps—like rivers full of human waste and King Henry VI’s notorious basement of poop—and monumental scientific breakthroughs including Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch’s discovery of the link between microbes (germs) and disease.

Brown also highlights how social classes became divided not only by wealth and culture but also by smell, and calls attention to modern-day health crises.

Today, nearly two billion people around the world live without clean water and about 3.6 billion people—nearly half of the world’s population—live without proper sanitation. Breaking down concepts in an accessible, kid-friendly way, this nonfiction graphic novel shows why “keeping it clean” is vitally important whether it’s a city, town, home, or person.

Big Ideas That Changed the World is a graphic novel series that celebrates the hard-won succession of ideas that ultimately changed the world. Humor, drama, and art unite to tell the story of events, discoveries, and ingenuity over time that led humans to come up with a big idea and then make it come true.

More from the Big Ideas That Changed the World series:
Rocket to the Moon! (#1)
Machines That Think! (#2)
A Shot in the Arm! (#3)
We the People! (#4)
All Charged Up! (#5)
It’s About Time! (#6)

Keep It Clean! - Don Brown

By Don Brown

Release Date: 2025-10-21

Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels for Kids

(0 ratings)
Read Download
This entertaining graphic novel from award winner Don Brown will get kids talking, since it's all about the history of dealing with poop, pee, and dirty hands.

Part of the Big Ideas That Changed the World graphic novel series, this full-color book is appropriate for the classroom and includes a timeline, endnotes, and a bibliography.

In 1895, an engineer named George Waring was appointed New York City’s first commissioner of street cleaning. His task? To make a city with millions of people livable.

Narrated by Waring, Keep It Clean! explores the concept of public health, which means ensuring clean water and adequate sewage disposal for everyone, and covers topics such as personal hygiene, sewer systems, and chemical water treatment.

Acclaimed author-illustrator Don Brown takes readers on a journey through history and around the world, from Greek, Roman, and Aztec aqueducts and the dawn of bathing (including social public bathing in Japan and religious bathing ceremonies in Machu Picchu) to the invention of soap in the Middle East, the first use of flush toilets approximately 4,000 years ago, and the first toilets used in outer space—a Big Idea when you consider that early astronauts on Apollo 11 had none!

Full of facts and colorful historical figures, Brown chronicles both historical mishaps—like rivers full of human waste and King Henry VI’s notorious basement of poop—and monumental scientific breakthroughs including Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch’s discovery of the link between microbes (germs) and disease.

Brown also highlights how social classes became divided not only by wealth and culture but also by smell, and calls attention to modern-day health crises.

Today, nearly two billion people around the world live without clean water and about 3.6 billion people—nearly half of the world’s population—live without proper sanitation. Breaking down concepts in an accessible, kid-friendly way, this nonfiction graphic novel shows why “keeping it clean” is vitally important whether it’s a city, town, home, or person.

Big Ideas That Changed the World is a graphic novel series that celebrates the hard-won succession of ideas that ultimately changed the world. Humor, drama, and art unite to tell the story of events, discoveries, and ingenuity over time that led humans to come up with a big idea and then make it come true.

More from the Big Ideas That Changed the World series:
Rocket to the Moon! (#1)
Machines That Think! (#2)
A Shot in the Arm! (#3)
We the People! (#4)
All Charged Up! (#5)
It’s About Time! (#6)

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Rocket to the Moon!

The Pacific Rim Collection

All Stations! Distress!

Drowned City

Storming the Black Ice

The Navy Justice Collection

The Unwanted

Aaron and Alexander

Henry and the Cannons

The Great American Dust Bowl

Gold! Gold from the American River!

Bring Out the Best in Every Employee

Let It Begin Here!

The Navy Jag Collection

Travesty of Justice

The Train Jumper

He Has Shot the President!

The Notorious Izzy Fink

Defiance

Older Than Dirt

In the Shadow of the Fallen Towers

A Shot in the Arm!

Fire of the Raging Dragon

Black Sea Affair

83 Days in Mariupol: A War Diary

Teedie

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Fever Year

Run and Hide

We the People! (Big Ideas that Changed the World #4)

War and Warriors Volume One

Home School / Christian School Guide to TREASON - Teacher Guide

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Understanding Life: Tap Into An Ancient Cellular Survival Program to Optimize Health and Longevity

Home School / Christian School Guide to TREASON - Student Guide

All Charged Up!

Machines That Think!

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Keep It Clean!

Kangaroo Court: How Dirty Prosecutors and Sleazy Lawyers Destroy Political Opponents, Attack Free Speech, and Subvert the Constitution

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