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  • Were Americans Illiterate Before the Arrival of Public Schools?

    Were Americans Illiterate Before the Arrival of Public Schools?1

    • September 6, 2016

    Were most Americans illiterate before the creation of our public education system in the 1830s? That seems to be a popular assumption, but is it true? If you’re looking for statistics, they’re notoriously hard to get when it comes to literacy rates in past centuries. Most historians of early American history have gravitated toward signatures on

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  • Wendell Berry’s Unsettling Description of Modern Life

    Wendell Berry’s Unsettling Description of Modern Life1

    • July 31, 2015

    “Man is a political animal.” Chances are that you’ve come across this line from Aristotle. You’ve also probably encountered the John Donne line that “No man is an island entire of itself.” And you may have heard them used to justify our life in modern society, where many of us are packed into cities and

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  • Wendell Berry: What We Lose When Small-Town America Collapses (And How to Recover It)

    Wendell Berry: What We Lose When Small-Town America Collapses (And How to Recover It)4

    What does America risk losing with the loss of small, rural communities? Writer and farmer Wendell Berry has spent much of his writing career contemplating this question. One way he has approached it is through his novels and short stories, and his fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, typifies all that is best about small-town

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  • Wendell Berry on Consumerism in America

    Wendell Berry on Consumerism in America0

    In one of my favorite movies, 12 Monkeys, Brad Pitt’s character Jeffrey Goines is a bit crazy, and we are first introduced to him in a mental institution. But there is more than a hint of truth in the following rant he makes to Bruce Willis’ character, James Cole: “There’s the television. It’s all right

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  • Wellesley Student Paper Defends Censorship… with Horrible Grammar

    Wellesley Student Paper Defends Censorship… with Horrible Grammar0

    Critics of political correctness allege that America’s college students are now so immersed in ideological political activism that they are not learning very much. How to write English, for example. Editors at the Wellesley College student newspaper, The Wellesley News, recently wrote an editorial defending the intolerance now sweeping the nation’s universities. Unfortunately, in their

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  • Well, This 1835 Warning to America Was on Target

    Well, This 1835 Warning to America Was on Target0

    • September 22, 2015

    A passage from Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1835 classic Democracy in America. It’s from chapter 6 entitled “What Sort Of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear”: “I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike,

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