Excerpt from The Contribution of the Oswego Normal School: To Educational Progress in the United States The matter contained in these pages was originally projected as a thesis for a degree in the Department of Pedagogy of the University of Wisconsin. Upon the suggestion of friends the work has been enlarged with the hope that it may prove of some value to a future history of American pedagogy. Incidentally it is a small tribute to the life of a man whom to know was an education. Many have assisted in its preparation, and the writer takes this opportunity of making the following acknowledgments: - To the late Dr. E. A. Sheldon for access to many original sources possessed only by him, many of which were prepared at great sacrifice of time especially for this work, and for constant inspiration and encouragement extending over a term of years of helpful association. To Dr. J. W. Stearns (Director of the School of Education, University of Wisconsin), Professor Earl Barnes, and his wife Mrs. Mary Sheldon Barnes, for careful reading of the manuscript and fruitful suggestions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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Object Lessons: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Learned to Make Sense of the Material World examines the ways material things--objects and pictures--were used to reason about issues of morality, race, citizenship, and capitalism, as well as reality and representation, in the nineteenth-century United States. For modern scholars, an "object lesson" is simply a timeworn metaphor used to describe any sort of reasoning from concrete to abstract. But in the 1860s, object lessons were classroom exercises popular across the country. Object lessons helped children to learn about the world through their senses--touching and seeing rather than memorizing and repeating--leading to new modes of classifying and comprehending material evidence drawn from the close study of objects, pictures, and even people. In this book, Sarah Carter argues that object lessons taught Americans how to find and comprehend the information in things--from a type-metal fragment to a whalebone sample. Featuring over fifty images and a full-color insert, this book offers the object lesson as a new tool for contemporary scholars to interpret the meanings of nineteenth-century material, cultural, and intellectual life.