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“What does history mean to you?”

What does history mean to you? Is it alive, or is it dead and buried in the past? Is it a list of dry happenings with drier dates, or is it full of exciting or solemn moments and people doing the things you do, only in a finer, bigger way?”

These simple questions, asked of boys and girls in grades 5-8, begin Eleanore Hubbard’s Citizenship Plays: A Dramatic Reader for Upper Grades (1929). She continues, “If you had been present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, do you suppose you would ever think of it as an uninteresting document of long words?” Of course not!…

Romantic Figures

There is nothing romantic in figures, and the average man takes little interest in any subject pertaining to them. As a result of this antipathy, there is plenty of historic evidence of man’s endeavor to minimize the hated drudgery of calculation.” –J. A. V. Turck Origin of Modern Calculating Machines (1921) Apologies for the false …

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