A movement to bring back teaching about the ancient Greek and Roman worlds
So fascinating. Some excerpts:
[In the 18th Century in the US] Both elementary education and higher education taught the classical world, but for different reasons. For the vast majority, whose only access was to elementary education, the ancient world was taught to provide a common referent for participating as a citizen in the new American Republic. The over-arching intention was to provide citizens with an understanding of what the Founders were trying to accomplish when they used classical republics as their model to create the United States. Students needed to understand what “tyranny” was and why the Founders wantedto avoid it, what the difference was between a “republic” and a “kingdom,” why the former was to be preferred to the latter, and how, in turn, a “republic” differed from a “democracy.” The classical world provided many such examples that had inspired the Founders, so they were taught to young citizens to help them understand the Founders’ intentions…
The advent of the Progressive movement in the early twentieth century led to a pernicious change in elementary education, namely, the replacement of history with “social studies.” Ralph Ketcham, Anders Lewis, and Sandra Stotsky write: “In 1913 a committee led by Thomas Jesse Jones, a Welsh immigrant deeply interested in the education of African Americans, created a report entitled ‘Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.’ Jones and other members of the committee believed that education had to be made “relevant” to students. And history, according to Jones was not relevant to the vast majority of students who would, after a few years of schooling, go off into factories and never have to bother themselves with the boring, arcane facts of the past. In place of history, schools should offer “social studies” classes that would help children accept their lot in life by teaching them skills they would need in the factories of the modern world.”
The Jones report was widely adopted by Progressive education reformers throughout the country and led many states to replace history with social studies. As Ketcham and his colleagues point out, “History was too far removed from the immediate needs and wants of children. It was too arcane, too academic, and too likely to involve abstract thoughts. The fragile minds of so many American youngsters could simply not handle history.”24 As late as 1967, an article entitled “Let’s Abolish History,” argued that “no teacher at any grade level … should teach a course in history as content.”
I was taught “social studies” in grade school, but everyone knew it was just a strange name for history. My teachers were old, most of them born in the 19th century, and they weren’t into anything newfangled. We were taught at least something about the Greeks and Romans back in grade school, and more again in high school. But I remember it being more about dates and battles and names rather than concepts.
The article has excerpts from some current textbooks that had an almost instantaneous soporific effect on me, a reminder of how much I hated history in school even though history really does interest me. How do they manage to leach all the life out of it?
I took a wonderful one-year course on Greek and Roman history in college, taught by a young, black-bearded man who was the son of a major symphony orchestra conductor.
He looked like a Greek warrior!
He brought it all to life, a truly terrific teacher. It did not hurt that I had taken Latin in high school.
But on the last day of class he arrived shaven, and looked so very ordinary, so average!
Disagree. Elementary education should emphasize literacy and numeracy, so that an average youngster can diagram a sentence and do elementary algebra by his 14th year. Civic education should be introduced as a 3d subject about halfway through, to give the young a grounding in the fundamentals of American history, geography, and government – say, 65% history, 25% geography, 10% government.
At the secondary level, your manpower should be divided roughly in threes: 1/3 academics and the arts, 1/3 vocational-technical subjects, and 1/3 basic education and life skills for those still lagging at the end of elementary school. Classical history would be for the minority of students following the secondary academic course of study.
I lived for a number of years in a suburban township outside of Rochester; the local school district had awarded it’s first high school diploma in 1893. As late as 1902, the City school district (which encompassed a population of about 150,000) was served by a single high school. I tend to doubt youths received more than bits and pieces of classical history at that time.
“How do they manage to leach all the life out of [history]? [Neo]
Neo,
I have always been a proponent of using art history to accompany teaching history. To young children without breadth of vision it is hard to see the value of history. What 10 year old really cares about the battles of Tours or Hastings or the fall of the Roman Empire? Art history, however, can allow a history teacher to actually illustrate the historic changes they present in class and oftentimes it can be used to illustrate how those same changes are still taking place in modern society. Look at your own admissions in this blog; above you refer to history instruction as soporific, your own interest in it aside, but throughout the years you have referred to the art history courses you have taken with much more positive remarks.
We are visual beings living in a world with increasingly visual stimuli (e.g., television, the internet) to not use this as a tool in the K-12 world is, sadly, a great opportunity missed.
One problem with textbooks is they are written not for the student but to be sold to a committee picking textbooks or to impress other teachers/professors. The average textbook makes any subject boring.
I once had a Statistics text that was written in such a way that the examples and explanations were fun to read. You could tell that the person who wrote the book was still in love with the subject and wanted to share that love with you.
That is my suggestion for text book writers. Most of the people who end up writing textbooks started with a love of their subject be it math or art, physics or history. If you didn’t love it you would not have started down the road to being so well versed in it. If you no longer feel that love you should not write a textbook.
If you set out to write a textbook don’t let the scholarly tone your need to impress other academics guide you into making your subject boring.
There are very few boring subjects.
There are a lot of boring textbooks.
I didn’t care for history in school until I got my schedule messed up somehow and needed to take “World History” class in summer school to free up a conflict for some other course I wanted to get in. I expected it to be awful, all day every day and taught by a coach. Instead I loved it, all about the rise of the Neolithic Era and civilizations forming in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Not even in college did I ever take a history course that so jazzed me. I enjoy reading about ancient history to this day.
“History was too far removed from the immediate needs and wants of children. It was too arcane, too academic, and too likely to involve abstract thoughts. The fragile minds of so many American youngsters could simply not handle history.”24 As late as 1967, an article entitled “Let’s Abolish History,” argued that “no teacher at any grade level … should teach a course in history as content.”
MBITRW, history is the most accessible of academic subjects. Recall Thos. Sowell’s book Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas . The enemies of education the last four generations have been…teachers’ colleges.
Art Deco:
Why should we care about secondary education in 1902? The % of HS grads in those days was low!
Here is an example of a 1912 Eighth grade exam. Puts our current situation to shame, and most of those kids then finished with the 8th grade and went to work, even in Rochester NY!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744163
“How do they manage to leach all the life out of it?”
Part of the reason, I think, is that a high % of ‘educators’ don’t really have much curiosity or interest in *knowledge*…and they find it hard to believe that anyone else does. Hence, nothing can be taught as interesting in its own right, but has to be packaged in such as way as to make it ‘relevant’.
Puts our current situation to shame,
The content doesn’t map precisely to what might have been on the 8th grade examinations given me, but it doesn’t put me to shame. I’ve been out of school a while, though.
Why should we care about secondary education in 1902? The % of HS grads in those days was low!
I didn’t ask you to ‘care’ about it. I was pointing out that people’s time in school was comparatively circumscribed.
There are very few boring subjects.
There are a lot of boring textbooks.
Martin: Can’t resist a tweak on the acting maxim about small parts.
There are no boring subjects, only boring textbooks.
You’re quite right about the importance of love for a subject for the writing.
When I took first year Russian, my teacher used a standard college text and it wasn’t bad, but my teacher’s real love was Prof. Alexander Lipson’s unconventional text which was used at MIT and my teacher would quote Lipson’s book.
It looked like an author’s first draft — photocopied typed pages with crude hand-drawings, cheaply bound. Plus the language examples were flat wacky — stuff about hooligans, loafers, cigarette smokers, Soviet workers, and peculiar philosophizing.
___________________________________
How do shock-workers [leading workers of socialist industry] live?
Shock-workers live well.
Where do they work?
They work in factories.
How do they work?
They work with enthusiasm.
What do they do in parks.
In parks they think about life.
About what life?
About life in factories.
That’s how shock workers live!
http://masterrussian.net/f24/alexander-lipson-????????-9114/
___________________________________
There was more than the humor. Lipson had some new approaches which simplified the complexities of Russian grammar — which are considerable. (My other textbook was devoted solely to Russian verbs of motion!)
Reportedly Lipson’s approach helped students stick with Russian and master it more quickly.
The main point of studying Classics and History is that the folks who end up running the world and making decisions which affect the rest of us Cattle need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the realization that Everything Has Happened Before. Multiple Times. Modern Elites are not special. There is no Hall Pass from the Human Condition and Upper Case H History. Having an OLED TV the size of their living room wall does not change that.
Human Nature is innate. There truly *is* nothing new under the sun where the human spirit and human nature are concerned. Life *is* tragic. Hubris -> Nemesis -> Catharsis. And so on.
Many of our current and past problems stem from the insanely ignorant notion that humanity can be improved, that things will be so much better if we just tweak this or that (generally at the cost of millions of blighted or lost lives).
For the general public in a Republic, of course historical knowledge is of great value. They may not be able to philosophize but knowing what happened before will help the to put a brake on any egregious elite excursions into error.
As for education, at an early age it needs to be rigorous and facts and process-based. Problematic because the caliber of ‘Educationalists’ today is so low. Middle Class Dregs. Wannabes and LARPers… which is why you get elementary school mathematics waffling on about Set Theory (FFS you’re teaching little Johnnie, not Georg #@$*ing Cantor) and dumbass half-grokked linguistic theories which ensure that Children don’t learn to read.
None of these really tackle the issue of what is to be done with the ~70% of the population who are economically superfluous in the modern world. Plug them into the Matrix? Kill them all off (Can be sure Some Davos Bugmen are keen on this idea)? Bring back Oakum Picking? I have no idea.
Commodious Vicus of Recirculation.(*)
Not quite the way Glubb Pasha would have expressed it in his ‘Fate of Empires and Search for Survival’ — it’s a short book and every candidate for public office from Town Dog Catcher upward should be examined on it before being allowed onto the ticket.
But it’s far closer to being a fundamental rule of human existence than any unfolding of the Dialectic or other newfangled nonsense we tell ourselves.
For the rest: 1066 and All That 🙂
Surely the purpose of a good Education is to learn to know ourselves and our kind and to ensure that we don’t make things worse than they have to be through our hubris and ignorance.
* Hello Art Deco: Tr: ‘History is Cyclical’ / ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’. For extra credit, try not to live the Joyce bit as contortionist performance art 😛
@Huxley
That sounds like a fun way to learn. Another example is Percival Leigh’s Comic Latin Grammar ca. Mid-C19.
Zaphod: A Brit friend gave me “1066 and All That” and I laughed at some of the right parts, but my knowledge of British history is not as solid as I would like, and I found “1066” contaminated the real stuff!
@Huxley:
‘Contaminated the real stuff’ — Congratulations! You’re already far ahead of the Good People who have their heads stuffed with lies from the likes of Hobsbawm, Schama, etc. 😛
On a more serious note, it’s a pity that the West doesn’t have anything like Japan’s Jidaigeki historical dramas.
Hi Zahod,
YES! Japan’s Jidaigeki historical dramas are awesome! My wife and I have been hooked on them for some time. The best we have seen so far (got the DVDs of the series) are:
Gunshi Kanbee
Abarenbo Shogun
I sincerely wish that PBS were worthwhile and presented such historical dramas today such as they did with the Ken Burns series on the Civil War and (of course) the Band of Brothers.
As for History, as George Santayana warned:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Highly relevant to this thread:
https://qcurtius.com/
It’s a blog by a lawyer, ex Marines Officer, and (to the point) translator from Latin and Arabic.
I am in awe of his erudition and wisdom.
I strongly second Martin’s statement that textbooks are too often chosen to impress other educators rather than to educate students. I recall that my daughter and her fifth-grade classmates were taught about (and tested on) the Toltecs, Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs as to when and where were their empires. I doubt any of them knew the difference between a democracy and a constitutional republic.
My children attend a wonderful Classical school in Maryland called St. Jerome Academy where each year from Kindergarten through 8th grade focuses on a different period of western civilization. The kids begin Latin in K and are drilled in grammar, math, and writing. They are excited to learn, and it is wonderful to watch as they even incorporate the history they learn into elaborate games (such as building the Greek gods’ Mount Olympus out of sticks and dirt on the playground and reenacting battles). Arts is also a huge part of the curriculum and they learn the history or western music from chant and polyphony up through the modern day as well as how to create it (a huge percentage of the school participates in choir or instrumental music) and they are well-versed and able to identify major works of art going back to Ancient Greece. They are being used as a model for schools across the western world and constantly have visitors coming to observe and learn how to implement the curriculum at their own schools. This school started out as a failing parochial school set to close and after begging to be allowed to develop and implement this new curriculum a decade or so ago they now have a huge waiting list and people moving to the area to get in the school. Here is a link to the curriculum if anyone is interested:
http://stjeromes.org/education/parish-school/curriculum
“How do they manage to leach all the life out of it?”
No kidding…
Much later in life, l learned that the best way to learn and understand history is to read the biographies of the principle players.
The most important point to be learned from teaching ancient history is for the student to expand their baseline of experience. Without history, we have only the experience of our own lifetimes, which are pathetically short in comparison to all of the human history of civilization.
If Americans knew history better, the 1619 Project of the NYT would have been laughed off as nonsense. But, since they do not, the vast majority were defenseless to to that insideous and destructive ideological pathogen.
How do they manage to leach all the life out of it?
______
Jacques Barzun wrote of a conversation with a Brit teacher of history complaining of that; the textbooks managed to exclude anything which might interest the kids. But he ended with “Thank God for Henry VIII!”
And there’s always Saki’s take:
http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ToysPeac.shtml
(Personally, I loved the subject as a kid. And the more battles, the better.)
If you want to read a good , attention keeping book about a specific piece of ancient Greek and Persian History, I recommend “ The Battle of Salamis” by Barry Strauss. The book is not just about the battle, but a look at some of the politics between the Greek City states as well as a glimpse into the politics of the Persian Empire. https://barrystrauss.com/books/the-battle-of-salamis/
Another book I recommend is “ The Peloponnesian War” by Donald Kagan. It is not as easy of a read as the first book I mentioned, especially if you have OCD like I do and want to find every town mentioned on one of the numerous maps in the book. One would do well to have a large , detailed table top map so you do not have to do so much flipping back and forth between maps. There is a lot of politics here in this book. Athenian democracy, the Spartan’s system, Persian,etc. Even Athenian Imperial Democracy….this book covers a lot of ground.
Oh my. I can tell readers of this blog are unfamiliar with the changed landscape of American schools. It is no longer about WHAT is taught in school, such as Greek and Roman history. It’s all about WHO is in school. The demographics of who are being taught from a decade ago, two, and especially three and four decades ago are radically different. So many kids in school today are not home-born, home-grown kids arriving into the classrooms and “bringing skills to the table” with all the benefits of a stable two-parent American family. Many if not most, certainly in urban areas, do not speak standard English, or English at all, which enables them to do their part in the educational process. The vast majority of kids are poverty-stricken, neglected refugees of single moms and/or divorced dads, and nearly all of the so-called students have had a significant deficit in skills, knowledge, abilities, encouragement, fortitude, even love, all necessary components for kids to do their part once they arrive at school. These kids have NO INTEREST in anything at all except daily survival, and whatever entertainment they can derive from their cell phones. Besides, to maintain their racial and cultural identities, learning about the Greeks and Romans, and all they accomplished and when, to them, would be a direct invalidation of who they are. Not gonna happen.
How do they manage to leach all the life out of it?
Here’s a review of the Lipson Russian course I mentioned earlier from the prestigious “Modern Language Journal.”
___________________________________________
“It is unfortunate that Lipson chose to employ humor throughout the book for it limits the appeal of what is otherwise a well-organized and clear presentation of Russian grammar and morphology.”
–“Modern Language Journal”
https://slavica.indiana.edu/bookListings/textbooks/A_Russian_Course_Part_1
___________________________________________
I suspect the limited appeal which concerns MLJ is not experienced by the students taking Lipson’s course.
Here is a book recommendation that provides a sweeping panorama of human history by deliberately focusing on the most violent bits. It’s called Atrocitology, Humanity’s 100 Deadliest Achievements by Matthew White. Despite its subject matter, it is often humorous and it is compellingly readable. In spite of that it is a serious historical treatment that provides significant insights. Check it out…
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0857861239/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fab_k3pCFbZMJJ5R6
Back in the 90s I took some time off and one thing I did was read history — of the universe, the planet, life and humanity. I can’t say I was exhaustive, but I did notice that the Greek/Roman flowering was the beginning of Western civilization as we know it and consequently much of today’s world civilization.
I don’t mean to disrespect Asia, Africa and the New World. I don’t know their histories well. However, something special happened in Greece and Rome and we are still living off that inheritance. Maybe, given time, it would have happened elsewhere. But it did happen in Greece and Rome, which makes that time particularly worthy of our study and respect.
The vast majority of kids are poverty-stricken, neglected refugees of single moms and/or divorced dads, and nearly all of the so-called students have had a significant deficit in skills, knowledge, abilities, encouragement, fortitude, even love, all necessary components for kids to do their part once they arrive at school.
1. The ‘poverty level’ is something of a humbug metric. For the record, about 16% of all youngsters are living in households under the poverty level.
2. Two-thirds of all households with children are headed by married couples.
“The vast majority of kids are poverty-stricken, neglected refugees” and yet they have cell phones and entertainment. Being poverty-stricken now days ain’t what it used to be and it isn’t what it is anywhere else in the world. Funny that. Funny that it seems to be a US type of poverty of “education” and mass culture. Funny that charter schools seem to negate that “poverty” in their educational outcomes.
huxley,
I would say that Western Civilization is a chair with one leg Greeco-roman, one leg Judeo-Christian , which also includes the greater Middle Eastern influences within Judeo-Christianity, and one leg the local cultural influences of pre Roman or pre Western colonization. In the United States, the natives themselves influenced the European colonist. Some of our foods, such as corn, some of our fighting techniques, and as the deceased half Comanche blogger David Yeagley once observed, perhaps half jokingly, even gun traditions with a potentially hostile Indian behind every tree. I think about both sides of my family, one in Mississippi and one in Texas, and guns are taught to the males and some females from an early age. It is something that has likely been passed down all the way back to the frontier days.
jon baker: To be sure, Rome and Greece weren’t the only game in town for world civ. Still, they were big … yuge even. I have nothing against Judeo-Christianity either — study them too! — though Christianity as it developed owes a large debt to Greece and Rome as well.
Robert Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” wrote a lesser-known sequel, “Lila,” almost as good, in which he makes his claim for the United States as a hybrid of European and Native American cultures. I recommend it.
My special nod to Greece and Rome, though, was for philosophy, math and science. I don’t see how we get to modern thought and technology without them.
The Left’s “Year Zero” approach to history drives me crazy and makes me terribly sad.
It’s a good strategy — like a cult cutting off all a new member’s ties to family and the outside world — but so wrong, wrong, wrong.
I am so moved when I read history, about the deep visions seen and the steep prices paid to make them real, I can be reduced to tears. How about this scene from “Gladiator”:
_____________________________________________
[Maximus falls dead. Lucilla stands and turns to Senator Gracchus and the crowd in the Colosseum]
Lucilla: Is Rome worth one good man’s life? We believed it once. Make us believe it again. He was a soldier of Rome. Honor him.
Gracchus: Who will help me carry him?
–“Gladiator (2000) Ending Scene HD”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA_N_QVxbKg
_____________________________________________
That’s a lesson for today. We could do worse than show “Gladiator” to kids in school.
Make us believe it again.
It just occurred to me that “Make us believe it again” is MAGA.
Zaphod and Art Deco,
Your discussion of Joyce’s, “commodius viscus” reminded me of the TenGooz song, “Revolving Door,” which, coincidentally ties into the thread topic. https://www.jamendo.com/track/301457/revolving-door?language=de
It’s probably not to everyone’s taste, but I like it quite a bit.
As far as an enticing way to get most anyone over the age of 11 or 12 (through 100, I bought copies for my father-in-law and he loved them) interested in history and science I highly recommend Larry Gonick’s, “Cartoon History of the Universe” series. He even spends a lot of time on the Orient, especially China and India, and literally starts out at the beginning of the Universe, entertainingly going from the Big Bang through most all of creation. Really impressive feat and ought to get any young person reading more to investigate further.
cruisers:
Immigrant children and poor children can still respond to good teaching and learning whatever they are supposed to learn. The soft bigotry of low expectations is a crock.
Many of the immigrant children of our parents’ or grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ generation had it even worse in terms of poverty, but the expectation was that they would do the work. And many of them did. Nor did they get a pass for having only one parent or even being orphaned.
And they learned English – quickly. Because no one accommodated them.
There was a fashionable resurgence of classical studies and rhetoric in the Italian Renaissance.
As the husband of a woman who was born shortly after her parents immigrated to the U.S. I can vouch for Neo’s claim. Even though she spoke a foreign language at home her school made no special accommodation for her and she learned English quickly.
I think language boot camps (some of them including boarding) might be the ticket to promoting English proficiency. Some could be run by consortia of local school districts and some could be run by state education departments. (The point of bilingual education programs has been to provide employment for Hispanophone teachers and administrators). All regular schools should conduct their classes in English and only in English.
Art Deco,
A friend moved from Puerto Rico to Florida with his family. He, his wife and their two oldest children were comfortably bilingual as they had all lived in the States and Puerto Rico during previous moves, the youngest primarily spoke Spanish as she had lived her entire, young life in Puerto Rico.
A few weeks into the school year he and his spouse noticed the youngest daughter wasn’t speaking much English and learned her school had placed her in Spanish speaking classrooms. They went to the school to ask that she be placed in English only classes and the school DENIED their request.
neo
And they learned English – quickly. Because no one accommodated them.
When my late brother-in-law was 12, he and his family emigrated from Germany to the US. He arrived in June, so had 3 months of exposure to English before beginning school. English total immersion. Did well in life as a businessman, as did his brother, who got a doctorate in Chemistry from Berkeley. My sister did say that her husband didn’t read as much as others at his level because reading English was – decades later- still a bit of a challenge for him. I never discussed this with my brother-in-law, but he did get an MBA, so he did have some competence. (And after 4 decades in East Mass, had a touch of Boston accent in his speech.)
Back in the ’90s, I read an article about Cleveland Indians slugger Manny Ramirez- who later plied his trade for the Red Sox. At the age of 25, he was taking English lessons, as his English wasn’t up to speed. He had been in the States for 12-13 years. It is insane that someone who arrives in the US at age 12-13 is not proficient in English after a dozen years here. His “bilingual” classes – better called monolingual Spanish classes- in NYC had not helped him.
In the ’90s, I did some substitute teaching in TX. Because I spoke Spanish, I was often placed in bilingual classes. At times I saw the same students over several years. In one 4th grade bilingual class, some students asked me- not a native Spanish speaker- what some Spanish words meant. My unvoiced thought was that if students are being taught Spanish vocabulary in class, it is time for them to change over into being taught in English. Guess what: I substituted for the same teacher the following year, and the class was in English.
In that class and in others I encountered some students who came to the US with several years less schooling than their age peers, and within several years had caught up to their age group. In English!
They went to the school to ask that she be placed in English only classes and the school DENIED their request.
99% of the school administrators in America are ruining the reputations of the other 1%.
As to Art Deco’s comment 9/27:
One-third of American children are raised in single parent households.
That parent is almost always a woman. A great recipe for failure. Family courts are prejudiced in favor of females; a divorced dad cannot get full custody of the kids unless his ex agrees, even if he can show her marginal qualities to the court. Because uterus, or something. I’ve been there. My ex’s brother, a psychiatrist, urged me to seek sole custody, and he was talking about his sister! No way, as long as she wanted joint custody.
Poverty level is defined by those inside the Beltway. The poor are mostly not-poor. they are culturally self-impoverished.
That parent is almost always a woman.
The breakdown is about 80 / 20.
A great recipe for failure.
The economic stratum you occupy is a positional good. If the distribution of family configurations was today what it was in 1948, the common life would be better in many respects and more leveled in, but you’d still have economic strata and a great many people relying on desultory service employment.
The Deep State made sure nuclear families and clans self destructed. That’s how Americans are slaves but don’t want to recognize that fact.
“Gladiator” may be the last great Hollywood movie ever made.
It’s actually 85 v 15%, Art. I’d bet on the 85 card every time in Vegas; it’s damn near 5 out of 6.
The US has the world’s highest rate of single parent households, per Pew. The world’s highest, in case you missed that.
And per the Census Dept., “Female-householder families were the only family type to experience a statistically significant decrease in poverty between 2017 and 2018.” Curious, no? But female-only homes do not produce good men.
Service employment is not desultory to any but the elite. Law, medicine, teaching, accounting are all service professions too. Service is gainful employment!
As a young boy I fell in love with history particularly of the Colonial/Revolutionary War period and even though it was called “Social Studies” I always knew it as History. There was a series of books published in the late 1950’s that I would take out from the library called Landmark History Books and World Landmark History books and I find them on Amazon and mail them to friends children. This was history before “wokeism”.