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In the ever-evolving world of social media trends, TikTok has seen its fair share of fascinating and sometimes perplexing content. Lately, a concerning trend has emerged where some TikTokers are romanticizing and downplaying the Great Depression, a pivotal period of economic struggle in American history. Influencers on the platform are making bold claims about the
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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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“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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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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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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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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