About 120 million copies of McGuffey's Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.
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18 Facts About McGuffey Readers
2.
William Holmes McGuffey Readers established a reputation as a lecturer on moral and biblical subjects while he was teaching at Miami University.
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3.
McGuffey Readers had been recommended for the job by longtime friend Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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4.
McGuffey Readers compiled the first four readers, while the fifth and sixth were created by his brother Alexander Hamilton McGuffey during the 1840s.
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5.
The advanced McGuffey Readers contained excerpts from the works of well-regarded English and American writers and politicians such as Lord Byron, John Milton, and Daniel Webster.
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6.
McGuffey's Readers were among the first textbooks in the United States designed to be increasingly challenging with each volume.
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7.
In contrast, McGuffey Readers used new vocabulary words in the context of real literature, gradually introducing new words and carefully repeating the old.
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8.
McGuffey Readers believed that teachers, as well as their students, should study the lessons and suggested that they read aloud to their classes.
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9.
McGuffey Readers listed questions after each story, for he believed that asking questions was critical for a teacher to give instruction.
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10.
The McGuffey Readers emphasized spelling, vocabulary, and formal public speaking, which was a more common requirement in 19th-century America than today.
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11.
McGuffey Readers interpreted the goals of public schooling in terms of moral and spiritual education, and attempted to give schools a curriculum that would instill Presbyterian Calvinist beliefs and manners in their students.
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12.
The revised McGuffey Readers were compiled to meet the needs of national unity and the dream of an American melting pot for the world's oppressed masses.
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13.
McGuffey Readers's name was featured on these revised editions, yet he neither contributed to them nor approved their content.
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14.
Today, McGuffey's Readers are popular among homeschoolers and in some Protestant religious schools.
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15.
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ron Powers notes that the McGuffey Readers affected the first mass-educated and mass-literate generation in the modern world.
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16.
The McGuffey Readers canon contributed to an American belief in Shakespeare's authority as second only to the Bible.
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17.
McGuffey Readers was an avid fan of McGuffey's Readers first editions.
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18.
In 1934, Ford had the log cabin where McGuffey Readers was born moved to Greenfield Village, Ford's museum of Americana at Dearborn, Michigan.
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