But in fact, if you go back to
McGuffey's Reader, or if you go back to the 1800's, if you go back to Abraham Lincoln, you find that much more common as we look at how do we evaluate not others, but ourselves--how you evaluate yourself.
it assumes the past repeats itself, which hardly seems likely, and that the past can be understood by posterity as offering simple moral lessons--history as a kind of
McGuffey's Reader writ large--when in fact history is almost never morally binary, but rather bears out Walter Benjamin's saturnine claim that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.
RELATED ARTICLE: From
McGuffey's Reader to Musical Chairs: A Brief History of "Character Education"
"Is the Internet the most important educational event since
McGuffey's reader? Who knows?" Converge, 2(4), 60-62 (April).
The two books, read straight through, seem like hastily pasted-together collections of platitudes and pieties, part
McGuffey's Reader and part nineteenth-century math and science exercise book.
His poem "The Blue and the Gray," which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867, was printed in the hugely successful 1879 edition of
McGuffey's Reader. Consequently, it was known by millions of schoolchildren.
"
McGuffey's Reader," (Houghton Mifflin, n.d.), <http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ ah_058200_mcguffeysrea.htm>(accessed May 2, 2005).
Waldron cites Westling as writing of Becky dying "old, blind, raving and reciting passages from
McGuffey's Reader." Westling actually wrote: "Like Becky Hand [sic], Mrs.
"From 1836 to 1920,
McGuffey's Readers were so widely used that they sold 122 million copies." (14)
The equipment consisted of four desks about 10 feet long, two tables and two chairs, a few
McGuffey's Readers, a few geographies, arithmetics, and ninth-grade grammars.
McGuffey's readers and primers are two of the most well-known and widely used textbooks in the history of U.S.
(20) Originals naturally vary in price and condition, but the entire revised 1879 collection may be downloaded or read free of charge from numerous online sources, including the contemporary Internet sites Project Gutenberg,
McGuffey's Readers World, or The McGuffey Readers.