“Bootstraps Uplift”:
Messages and Mythologies of the New Industrial Order
McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader, 1870
Children in front of Oak Square School, Massachusetts, 1855
“Mrs Auld Teaching Him to Read,” an illustration from the
biography of Frederick Douglass
African-American education in the post-war South, ca. 1870
Thomas Nast, “Union is Strength,” Harper’s Weekly, 1870
A modern “common school” in Montana, 1893
A modern “common school” in Boston, 1899
William H. McGuffey
Illustrations from McGuffey Eclectic Reader, 1879
Illustration from McGuffey Eclectic Reader, 1877
“Charlie and Rob,” McGuffey Eclectic Reader, 1879
Mark Twain and Charles Dudley, Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, 1873
Moving water, Kansas, ca. 1890
A Jewish immigrant family sewing garter belts for income, c. 1890
Horatio Alger “rags to riches” novels
The Royal Path of Life: Aids to Success and Happiness (1877)