Lessons From My Grandma’s History Textbook

It’s Surprisingly Relevant

Even when I was a little kid, I loved thinking about history. My grandma noticed this and, in the mid-1990s, she gave me her elementary-school American history textbook, something that she had kept and treasured for about fifty years.

I still have that book: The Rise of American Democracy, published in 1944. For many years I valued it primarily as a link…