The diversity of student populations in the United States presents educators with many challenges. To provide effective reading instruction for the individual student, teachers must understand the enormous variety of reading methods and materials that exist and make independent decisions based on their students' particular needs. Research indicates that educators are often influenced by reading instruction fads that quickly fade, making it more challenging to develop a repertoire of teaching strategies in which a teacher may have confidence. This book examines a variety of reading methods used in American schools from the 19th to the 21st century, and the literature promoting or critiquing them, to help teachers become informed decision makers and better meet the needs of students.

"This very important book is original, sweeping, and wise about the relation between education and liberal democracy in the United States. The Pangles reconsider superior ideas from the founding period in a way that illuminates any serious thinking on American education, whether policy-oriented or historical". -- American Political Science Review. "An important and thoughtful book, stimulating for citizens as well as scholars". -- Journal of American History.

Home to the so-called big five publishers as well as hundreds of smaller presses, renowned literary agents, a vigorous arts scene, and an uncountable number of aspiring and established writers alike, New York City is widely perceived as the publishing capital of the United States and the world. This book traces the origins and early evolution of the city’s rise to literary preeminence. Through five case studies, Steven Carl Smith examines publishing in New York from the post–Revolutionary War period through the Jacksonian era. He discusses the gradual development of local, regional, and national distribution networks, assesses the economic relationships and shared social and cultural practices that connected printers, booksellers, and their customers, and explores the uncharacteristically modern approaches taken by the city’s preindustrial printers and distributors. If the cultural matrix of printed texts served as the primary legitimating vehicle for political debate and literary expression, Smith argues, then deeper understanding of the economic interests and political affiliations of the people who produced these texts gives necessary insight into the emergence of a major American industry. Those involved in New York’s book trade imagined for themselves, like their counterparts in other major seaport cities, a robust business that could satisfy the new nation’s desire for print, and many fulfilled their ambition by cultivating networks that crossed regional boundaries, delivering books to the masses. A fresh interpretation of the market economy in early America, An Empire of Print reveals how New York started on the road to becoming the publishing powerhouse it is today.

The popular, “thought-provoking study” that explores how contemporary prejudices change the way each generation looks at the nation’s past (Library Journal). Historian Kyle Ward, the acclaimed co-author of History Lessons, offers another fascinating look at the biases inherent in the way we think about, write about, and teach our own history. Juxtaposing passages from US history textbooks of different eras, History in the Making provides new perspectives on familiar historical events, and sheds light on the ways they have been represented over generations. Covering subjects that span two hundred years, from Columbus’s arrival to the Boston Massacre, from women’s suffrage to Japanese internment, History in the Making exposes the changing values, priorities, and points of view that have framed—and reframed—our past. “Interesting and useful . . . convincingly illustrates how texts change as social and political attitudes evolve.” —Booklist “Students, teachers, and general readers will learn more about the past from these passages than from any single work, however current, that purports to monopolize the truth.” —Ray Raphael, author of Founding Myths