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Friday, May 23, 2014

Wayland - "No Lickin', No Larnin'" - (not just) Keeping the Public in Public Domain


'Tis the season for graduations.  Back in the days of one-room schools and rural schools, 8th grade was considered upper level education.  The literacy level for most adults was 3d or 4th grade.  "The 3 Rs" of Readin', wRitin', and aRithmetic was good enough back then for farming or even most city jobs.  Bet you can't pass this 8th Grade Final Exam from Salina, Kansas in 1895!  (Be sure to read beyond the exam to the further discussion about the test and the Snopes analysis of it.) 

Here's an interesting and very short story about those days and education from an old Indiana textbook called History Stories for Primary Grades by John W. Wayland, Ph.D.

Doctor Wayland's credentials are given on the book's title page as "Professor of History and Social Science, State Teachers College, Harrisonburg, Virginia         Author of HOW TO TEACH AMERICAN HISTORY."    An online article from the Rockingham, VA schools tells much more.  That state teachers college went by various names: State Normal School in Harrisonburg, Virginia which later became Madison University.  I always love that name of "Normal" for a teachers college.  It meant students were taught the "norms" of what was expected.  Doctor Wayland was one of their first faculty, later the department head for History and Social Science and taught at other universities and Bridgewater College.  He wrote about thirty books and, surprisingly, the lyrics to the song, "Old Virginia." 

The illustration for the story is serviceable, but other enjoyable illustrations are in the book as Caldecott Award winning artists, Maud and Miska Petersham, were employed to show even a textbook can be fun and go beyond the ordinary.  (That link to the Petershams is the ubiquitous Wikipedia article, but do yourself a favor and don't stop with just reading that!)

The actual story, "No Lickin', No Larnin'" talks about the adult novel by Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier Schoolmaster, based upon the Indiana rural teaching experiences of his brother, George Cary Eggleston.   He wrote other books, both for adults and children, including a popular children's book called The Hoosier Schoolboy. Each can be found at Project Gutenberg along with others of his works.  As revealed in the subtitle, "A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana", these give a good look at rural schools of the 19th century with both humor and the dialect of the Indiana area.   It's interesting that the Project Gutenberg version uses a revised editon where Eggleston's Introduction and Notes explains how the book came to be, including his rationale for the language style.  The fact that, by then, it was translated into French, German, and Danish is mentioned along with the difficulty of achieving anything similar in translation.
Because of the interest here in copyright, it's worth including Eggleston's statement:
"The Hoosier School-Master" was pirated with the utmost promptitude by the Messrs. Routledge, in England, for that was in the barbarous days before international copyright, when English publishers complained of the unscrupulousness of American reprinters, while they themselves pounced upon every line of American production that promised some shillings of profit. "The Hoosier School-Master" was brought out in England in a cheap, sensational form. The edition of ten thousand has long been out of print. For this large edition and for the editions issued in the British colonies and in continental Europe I have never received a penny. A great many men have made money out of the book, but my own returns have been comparatively small. For its use in serial form I received nothing beyond my salary as editor. On the copyright edition I have received the moderate royalty allowed to young authors at the outset of their work. The sale of the American edition in the first twenty years amounted to seventy thousand copies. The peculiarity of this sale is its steadiness. After twenty years, "The Hoosier School-Master" is selling at the average rate of more than three thousand copies per annum. During the last half-dozen years the popularity of the book has apparently increased, and its twentieth year closed with a sale of twenty-one hundred in six months. Only those who are familiar with the book trade and who know how brief is the life of the average novel will understand how exceptional is this long-continued popularity.

For more on rural schools be sure to look at my multi-part series.  While the common usage of "one-room school" is popular, a two-room school -- one for boys and one for girls -- was frequently available for those young scholars who were considered educated if they reached third or fourth grade.  Of course the need for those children to help out on the farm or with younger children and household chores might make them older than our typical U.S. 8 and 9 year-olds of today.

I'm writing this on the Friday before the long Memorial Day weekend, itself a subject of controversy based upon its own history.  Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer and teachers can feel their students already mentally leaving the classroom.  Be sure to join a library Summer Reading program, possibly even catching my own.

More children join Summer Reading programs than play Little League and it helps maintain and even improve reading skills over the summer vacation.

Don't forget to check here for the many stories in the Keeping the Public in Public Domain series.
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This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories. 

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my normal monthly posting of a research project here.  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my monthly postings as often as I can manage it.   









Saturday, May 17, 2014

Deihl - The Story Queen Moon Heard - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Don't recall ever seeing a Memorial Day story before!  With the holiday fast coming, there's just time enough to learn a story and some facts about it.  History.com has a brief video and article giving a good overview of the holiday.  I remember older adults calling it "Decoration Day."  Their site and a few others explain the way the holiday started.  Today's story looks back the time when it was only about the Civil War, which is how the Day began.








The History site was a quick overview.  A more thorough explanation, including even the Confederate observance, is given by the Department of Veterans Affairs.  

Wonder about those red poppies sold at traffic intersections?  Go to Memorial Day's History page.

Of course, you may also want to check the ubiquitous Wikipedia article for additional information.  We no longer celebrate it on the traditional day since it became a national holiday in 1971.  Instead it's a 3 day unofficial start to summer, but it's worth remembering why it exists.

As for facts about today's story from Holiday-Time Stories, Edna Groff Diehl wrote various children's books in the early 20th century and a Pennsylvania poetry award in her name exists, but more about her isn't easily found.
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This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories.

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my normal monthly posting of a research project here.  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain"should continue along with my monthly postings as often as I can manage it.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Mother's Day Story in "Bones" Format

Back on April 18 I posted on Literacy and the "bones" of stories.  Here's the bones of a fun story for Mother's Day.  The great thing about Story Bones is you make the story your own and can learn it Quickly!

The "Be Nice" story about the mother who stroked her pregnant-with-twins belly constantly saying, "Be nice." Nine months - no births, nine years - no births - finally when the woman is in her nineties and about to die, she gives birth to two old men who are arguing, "No, no. please, you go first." 


That's from Jackie Baldwin's wonderful S.O.S. -- Searching Out Stories section under Patience in section 9's Emotions, the General category.  That same section, a bit further has The Human Condition and you might want to look there at Parenting stories, even though it says "Parenting - Discipline Stories."  I particularly liked #4 there.  What is it?  A great idea for getting help with housecleaning.  Look it up.

Her site won't be growing further, so you may want to know many of the suggestions on it came from fellow storytellers on the Storytell email list hosted by the National Storytelling Network.  It's an excellent resource.

I'll be back next with a wonderful Public Domain story easily used for Memorial Day plus some resources on the holiday.  (To see more, click on Keeping the Public in Public Domain where I frequently offer Public Domain stories too good to be forgotten.  There are 64 so far and I'm only in the "D" authors working my way through my collection.)

Until then, Happy Mother's Day.


Saturday, May 3, 2014

da Vinci - The Paper and the Ink - Keeping the Public in Public Domain

Ever since The Da Vinci Code was published, the already large amount of material on or by Leonardo da Vinci seems to have exploded.
Hidden in plain sight in all his notebooks filled with sketches and ideas are his FABLES!  Even as I work on this, my husband commented, "I didn't know da Vinci wrote fables!"
Several authors have translated them and their work is not Public Domain, but the ideas of that wonderful old genius are freely available to the ages.  Some of his fables are even just considered Italian folklore.  (In case you're wondering, they've also been verified as originating with him, as opposed to his re-stating earlier fables.)
Bibliomaniac that I am, I came across one of these translations and knew they deserve a place here.  The interpretation and transcription by Bruno Nardini opens with the fable of "The Paper and the Ink."  Here's my own brief retelling of da Vinci's fable.

There once was a page of paper sitting on a desk along with other sheets of paper.  Suddenly a pen wrote all over it.  (In those days the pen first had to dip in ink.)
The paper was outraged, "How dare you write all over me!  Look at what a mess you made of me!"
"Calm down," said the pen.  "I merely put words on you, turning you from a blank sheet of paper into a message.  Now you hold the thoughts of a person, making you important because you save those thoughts."
Not long after, someone tidied up the room with the desk, burning the many sheets of paper.  Just as it was about to be thrown in the fire, the paper with the words, however, was kept because its message might be important.

Words!  How important they are to storytellers and thinkers and our audience.

Here are some other recent books of da Vinci's fables:
  • Edgar Herbert Brice-Smythe - Leonardo's Fables and Jests
  • Sidney Colvin and Jean Paul Richter - Fables and Other Writings (Annotated Edition) -- Richter's 1880 edition is listed below in the online resources
  • Bruno Nardini -  Fables of Leonardo da Vinci --where I first discovered da Vinci's fables
  • Renaissance Fables: Aesopic Prose (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies)
  • Ed Tasca - The Fables of Leonardo da Vinci

If you want some online introduction to the fables, try:
  • Facebook has a page announcing the book, Tales of Leonardo Da Vinci mentioning all manner of illustration, but not the writing.  I love, however, where it says "Improve your brain with the tales of Leonardo Da Vinci! His fables convey evergreen, eternal truths, infect the modern reader and extend a better understanding of human relationships and society."
  • From Old Books.org -- This is the Humorous Writings section in Jean Paul Richter's Fables and Other Writings mentioned above.  You might also check out the home page of this interestingly quirky Canadian site by fellow bibliomaniac, Liam Quin.  It includes over 3400 free images and a few books for sale
  • Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks (the full text translated by Edward M. C. Curdy -- for just the fables go to Book IV starting on p. 252 near the end)
  • Recently I also discussed story "bones" and, in this Wikisource article  about The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, the Humorous Writings are in that format
  • There's even a Teacher's Guide for the fable of "The Ant and the Grain of Wheat", an excellent fable about the importance of delaying gratification to get an even better result
  • Youthwork Practice looks at the cautionary fable of "The Hungry Fox."  The Charles Haddon Spurgeon article there applies it to 1 Peter 5:8, but most of the questions could easily be applied to judging the safety of a situation or people.

I'm sure this doesn't exhaust the subject of Leonardo's fables.  I found a great cartoon taking the famous da Vinci drawing

and turning it into "Leonardo Dude Vinci." Part of The Dudeism Principle with many items for sale at
The Dudeism Printfection Store
. . .  after a look at the old boy's humor, I think it would make him smile.
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This is part of a series of postings of stories under the category, "Keeping the Public in Public Domain."  The idea behind Public Domain was to preserve our cultural heritage after the authors and their immediate heirs were compensated.  I feel strongly current copyright law delays this intent on works of the 20th century.  My own library of folklore includes so many books within the Public Domain I decided to share stories from them.  I hope you enjoy discovering new stories. 

At the same time, my own involvement in storytelling regularly creates projects requiring research as part of my sharing stories with an audience.  Whenever that research needs to be shown here, the publishing of Public Domain stories will not occur that week.  This is a return to my normal monthly posting of a research project here.  Response has convinced me that "Keeping the Public in Public Domain" should continue along with my monthly postings as often as I can manage it.