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  • What an Old Sears Roebuck Catalogue Teaches Us About Gun Control

    What an Old Sears Roebuck Catalogue Teaches Us About Gun Control1

    As I write these words, a reproduction of the 1897 Sears Roebuck Catalogue, published in 1968 by Chelsea House, sits at my elbow. The fat catalog is a casual reader’s delight and a historian’s treasure trove. Here are medicines like laudanum, herb tea, and castor oil. Here are tools, bobsleds, gasoline stoves, windmills, bicycles, clothing

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  • What an Old Coin Collection Tells Us About Money From the Past

    What an Old Coin Collection Tells Us About Money From the Past2

    I was recently given a coin collection that belonged to another relative. Most of the coins in it are not in circulation anymore, and while you don’t see them every day, they are definitely not rare. Most aren’t in good condition either. In fact, they look much worse for wear than the coins you get

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  • What Americans Often Forget

    What Americans Often Forget0

    Our nation’s birthday is approaching once again, along with the celebrations which have accompanied the holiday for so many years. In recent years, however, Independence Day celebrations are often overshadowed by bickering over race or class. With this in mind, I’d like to share a story from my classroom years ago. As a former teacher

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  • What Americans Can Learn From this 1940s Anti-Nazi Film Going Viral (Video)

    What Americans Can Learn From this 1940s Anti-Nazi Film Going Viral (Video)0

    The same day neo-Nazis and antifascists clashed in Charlottesville, Michael Oman-Reagan shared on Twitter a 1940s short-film titled “Don’t Be A Sucker.” The film, produced by the U.S. War Department in 1943, depicts an ornery bigot on a soap box seeking to enlist fellow Americans to his cause while denouncing Catholics, blacks, immigrants, and other groups. Oman-Reagan,

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  • What American Students Learned about the Pilgrims in 1913 vs. Today

    What American Students Learned about the Pilgrims in 1913 vs. Today0

    I was reminded that Thanksgiving is fast approaching when I drove by a local school the other day and saw children leaving the building wearing Pilgrim and Indian hats. This morning I got to thinking: the story of the Pilgrims’ arrival in America is quite a common lesson in the early elementary classroom, but is

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  • What American Education Has in Common with the Dark Ages

    What American Education Has in Common with the Dark Ages0

    The period of the “Dark Ages” is synonymous with cultural deterioration in the West. It is typically applied to those centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the 5th century, and is regarded as a time when education dramatically declined. In his classic Education and Culture in the Barbarian West,

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