Question

How did textbooks in the McGuffey Reader series shape the society and culture of the United States in the first half of the 1800s?

Answer 1

The readings inculcated moral values as well as literacy.

Step-by-step explanation:

McGuffey Readers, officially known as McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers: is a series of elementary school reading books that were widely used in American schools beginning in the 1830s.

Compiled by educators William Holmes McGuffey (1800–1873) and his brother Alexander (1816–1896), the McGuffey Readers helped to standardize English language usage in the United States

The series also did the followings:

1. The textbooks for the children taught children how to read, write, and spell.

2. The ones compiled for older students contained instruction in history, science, and philosophy.

3. Part of the textbooks series meant for parents and teachers taught religious, patriotic, and moral values. In other words, it teaches the importance of hard work and the divine blessings of the United States.

Answer 2

McGuffey Readers were a series of graded primers for grade levels 1-6. They were widely used as textbooks in American schools from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, and are still used today in some private schools and in homeschooling.

It is estimated that at least 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. Since 1961, they have continued to sell at a rate of some 30,000 copies a year. Only the Ray's Arithmetic series (1834-1913) matched it in popularity, written by a colleague of McGuffey's and begun in 1834. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Ron Powers notes that the Readers affected the first mass-educated and mass-literate generation in the modern world.

American composer Burrill Phillips composed a work entitled Selections from McGuffey's Reader, for orchestra, based on poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. It was completed in 1933.