Word: mcguffey
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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During his time as Education Secretary, Bennett had become convinced that the country needed an update of McGuffey's Reader, a collection of moral tales children could read, and have read to them, to help counter all the junk on TV. When he left the Bush Administration, Bennett set out to produce such a book. With help from a brainy young assistant named John Cribb, Bennett considered 5,000 stories, selecting 320 and organizing them under 10 virtues: self-discipline, compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loyalty and faith...
...Just grow up as fast as you can," a storekeeper advised Jonathan, and so , he did, throttling the hatred that gave his life meaning. He learned to read from his only possession, a secondhand McGuffey's, and molded himself a crude set of false teeth. At 16, he ran away to Denver and got a job as a railway brakeman. He also made a friend, nicknamed College, whose family in Maine welcomed Jonathan after their son's death. Jonathan traveled the country in a vain search for his father -- someone to give him an anchor and a bloodline. In time...
...sense of the new but also yearned for the traditional. In the '20s newly minted products were routinely labeled STRICTLY AMERICAN. Collecting Americana -- "antiqueering," as it was known -- become a national hobby. Henry Ford filled warehouses with what he called "American stuff": Duncan Phyfe tables, endless volumes of McGuffey Readers and Thomas Edison memorabilia. John D. Rockefeller Jr. set about restoring colonial Williamsburg, Va., in the painstaking detail that only a billionaire could afford. In the '30s the New Deal was sponsoring research into folk art and folk songs. For the first time the government, not the private sector, became...