For nearly 200 years there has been a controversy in the United States over how to teach reading.
In colonial days the New England Primer and, later, McGuffey’s Reader had an “alphabetic column.” It listed the alphabet (in capitals and lower case), the vowels, and syllables using the vowels. Children were to learn the sounds of letters before learning whole words.
In 1841, Horace Mann, the first Massachusetts Secretary of Education, complained about this method of teaching children: “[T]he alphabetic column presents an utter blank. There stands in silence and death, the stiff, perpendicular row of characters, lank, stark, immovable, without form or comeliness and, as to signification, wholly void.” These characters made the children “feel so deathlike.” [1]
Mann preferred a “far better and more philosophical mode,—whole words should be taught before teaching the letters of which they are composed.”[2] In his view, reading would be more rewarding if children could capture words and their meanings, without having first to go through the drudgery of memorizing the sounds of each letter of the alphabet and sounds of their combinations.
It may have been drudgery, but historian Albert Fishlow calculates that about 90 percent of white adults throughout the nation could read and write by 1840.[3]
The first 300 years of Christianity were troubled times. As Christians, inspired by their new faith, created churches all over the Roman Empire, they were persecuted and often cruelly executed because they refused to make sacrifices to the Roman gods. The persecutions were not continuous, and some Roman governors made a point of tolerating Christians, but the threat was always there.
One threat they did not face, however, was persecution by other Christians. Christianity was such a fledgling religion that it had no clear hierarchy or even ruling group immediately after the apostles died. It had no orthodoxy and no political power in those early years.
That would change. Heresies led to the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition; the deaths of so-called heretics like Jan Hus (burned at the stake in 1415), Sir Thomas More (beheaded in 1535), and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (burned at the stake in 1556), to name a few. Those later internecine persecutions could be just as horrifying as Jesus’s crucifixion was.
Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was the most prominent black American at the beginning of the twentieth century. He began and ran the Tuskegee Institute, an innovative industrial school for blacks, which is today Tuskegee University. He dined with President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House—the first time a black man had met with a president in the White House since Frederick Douglass met with Abraham Lincoln. He was a champion of education and moral betterment for all blacks (not just an elite). Thousands of boys were named Booker in his honor.
Washington’s fame declined after his death, however. W.E.B. Du Bois, an intellectual with a Harvard PhD, seems to have taken over the mantle of black leadership, after Washington’s death in 1915—if not before. Du Bois was much younger; he died in 1963.
Today Washington is sometimes disparaged as an “Uncle Tom” because he did not politically resist the growing Jim Crow restrictions of the South.
“Infantry wins battles; logistics wins wars.” This statement is attributed to World War I commanding general John J. Pershing (although I have yet to find the source). Military logistics means getting soldiers and equipment in place for battle or replacing casualties and destroyed equipment.
In 2015, Phillips Payson O’Brien wrote a book about World War II that supports Pershing’s claim. He began his book by saying, “There were no decisive battles in World War II.” [1]
“Industrially and technologically, the war was primarily a competition of aircraft development and construction,” he wrote. [2] The Allies won the war because they were able (in 1944, especially) to use air and sea power to destroy substantial production and transport of airplanes.
O’Brien’s analysis of World War II is controversial, of course, but his thinking sheds light on earlier history and alerts us to the future.
It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for fuel, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.”[1]
George Vanderbilt (grandson of the “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue.
Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on land that included about 125,000 acres of forest, much of it already logged. Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage the lands around the Biltmore estate, with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest. Pinchot hired a German forester, Carl Schenck, to work for him. Pinchot went on to be the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, and Schenck started the first forestry school in the nation.
“Pinchot implemented a management plan that improved the forest while returning a profit to the landowner, the first of its kind in America and served as a national model,” states the National Forestry Foundation on its website. [2]
