Getting Students to Read . . .

Randall Stephens

Over at Times Higher Education Tara Brabazon wonders how to get underaduates to care about reading ("Bringing Them to Books," March 9, 2011). I enjoy Brabazon's snarky reports from across the Atlantic. This one is particularly witty and relevant.

"One short sentence chills the expectations of teachers," Brabazon begins. "A student, in reply to a tutorial question or query about an assignment, shrilly replies: 'I don’t like reading.' This is an ice pick through scholarly culture. It is naive. It is short-sighted. It is foolish. It is ignorant. Without reading, a student is trapped within the limitations of their own life, confusing personal experience with researched expertise. Reading builds a productive network of authors, approaches, theories and evidence." For Brabazon, "Reading is not meant to be liked or disliked: it is a way to understand the views of others." How should professors "support the act of reading," she asks. Brabazon describes her use of GoodReads, a social media site where readers across the world post reviews and comments about their books. "GoodReads enables students to comment on books, meet authors who are registered on the site and commence a dialogue with an array of interested groups." Sounds like a great idea.

In my classes I use other, rudimentary strategies. I usually give a very basic quiz on the day that a book is due in class. (Sounds awful, I admit, but it works.) The quiz is elementary, asking the most simple questions to ensure that students are at least reading the book that we will be discussing in class. In my experience students need to know that reading is not optional and the quiz tends to help.

Still, how can a professor "make" a student care about reading? I occasional begin my classes by describing a recent book--by a historian, sociologist, religious studies scholar--and then using that as a hook for the lecture of that day. I also start off classes by pointing out a history book or a newspaper article that connects the topic we are covering in the class with a current event or a larger historical theme. Maybe, just maybe, that will make students think about how reading and being informed makes their lives richer and more interesting.

We know that reading widely helps individuals develop as writers. So, I tell my students that if they want to fine tune their writing and become better writers, they should read opinion journals, newspapers, serious nonfiction, and the like. William Zinsser puts it well: "writing is learned by imitation." He suggests that students find a writer whose style they like. "Study their articles clinically. Try to figure out how they put their words and sentences together. That’s how I learned to write, not from a writing course."

I'd be curious to know what carrots others use to attract students to the practice of reading.

Amateurs, Professionals, and Popular Histories

Dan Allosso

As I look at the historiographical “tree” I drew, it strikes me that the books on it have all been chosen by historians. I wonder what it would look like, if it included books that were especially important at imparting historical ideas to the general public?

The other day, Lisa responded to Chris’ post with a comment about appreciating older scholarship, and the “parents/grandparents” element of our intellectual lineage. I’ve been thinking about that, as I’ve been reading professional historiographies (John Higham, Peter Novick, Ian Tyrell) this week, along with assessments of the influence and popularity of books: Frank Luther Mott’s Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947) and Cowley & Smith’s Books that Changed Our Minds (1939). Malcolm Cowley and Bernard Smith's book, dedicated to Charles Beard, consists of a series of essays on authors or books deemed especially influential by American intellectuals responding to a New Republic inquiry. While it does not provide first-hand information about the books that influenced regular people (or even women, since all the respondents were apparently male), many of the people they polled had written books that did influence large groups of Americans. Carl Becker, for instance, nominated William Graham Sumner's A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals (1907), “which impressed me with the relativity of custom and ideas,” and Hans Vaihinger's The Philosophy of 'As If ' (1911), which “confirmed me in the notion that social thinking is shaped by certain unexamined preconceptions current at the time.” (quoting Becker’s letter, 6) Beard said “Brooks Adams’s two books are thumping,” which the editors took to mean The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895) and Theory of Social Revolutions (1913). Both Becker and Beard recommended Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (1923).

Beard himself was the second-most widely recommended author, just behind Thorstein Veblen (really!); An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and The Theory of the Leisure Class got an equal number of votes. Authors popular with the surveyed intellectuals for their body of work rather than a particular title included Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Autobiographies included Henry Adams’, Theodore Dreiser’s, Joseph Freeman’s, Robert M. La Follette’s, and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, which is called “the key book of the depression...[that] came at exactly the right moment.” (12)

Several of Cowley and Smith’s picks also appear in the lists of popular, “amateur” history I’m compiling from Higham, Novick, and Tyrell, which focuses more on the question of whether or not an author was academic, and how he (yes, 99% of the time, he) fit in the growth of the profession, but nevertheless offer some guidance regarding popularity. For example, former Senator and amateur historian Albert Beveridge’s Lincoln (1928) earned $51,000 in royalties in its first six months (Higham 75). H.G. Wells’ Outline of History (1920) was “issued by a hesitant publisher at an exorbitant price . . . it sold one and a half million copies--one copy for every twenty homes in the country--within twelve years.” (Higham 74) Although the multi-volume set is global in scope, it deals extensively with American history and perhaps contextualizes it in a way that resonated with readers. Volume Four begins with back-to-back photos of Lincoln at Antietam and Bismarck at Versailles. Novick compares sales of Wells’ Outline with J. Franklin Jameson’s American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926), which sold less than a thousand, and John D. Hicks’ Populist Revolt (1931), which “took seventeen years to sell fifteen hundred copies.” (Novick 193) Allan Nevins, always interested in popular history, said that Mark Sullivan’s Our Times (1926) had “probably done more to interest people in American history than anything else written in our generation.” (Tyrell 49)

Cowley & Smith mention that Robert Lynd responded to their survey on the most influential books, with authors like Alfred Adler, John Dewey, William James, Veblen, Thomas Huxley, and with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. These suggestions, the editors noted, were much different from the “books taken from the Middletown public library in 1935,” which Lynd described in Middletown (Chapter 17) and Middletown in Transition (Chapter 7). Those chapters probably deserve a closer look, alongside the titles I’ve pulled together on reader response theory and interpretive communities.

See also:

Waldo Frank, Our America

Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

Herbert Croly, Promise of American Life

Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money

Joseph Krutch, The Modern Temper (said to be “very influential in the colleges,” 13)

V. I. Lenin, Imperialism

John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World

Graham Wallas, The Great Society

John Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power

Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes

James Frazer, The Golden Bough

Regular People Read Erasmus Darwin?

Dan Allosso

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the grandfather of Charles Darwin, was a full-time British physician who traveled an average of 10,000 miles a year to visit patients. He was a founder of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and a prolific inventor. Zoonomia was Darwin’s major scientific publication and the leading medical/biological book of its day. Published in London in 1796, Zoonomia was reprinted the same year in New York, by “T. & J. Swords, printers to the Faculty of physic of Columbia College,” and again the following year by Thomas Dobson of Philadelphia. A “second edition” was published in 1803 by “Thomas and Andrews” of Boston. By 1818, a “Fourth American Edition” had been printed in Philadelphia, by Edward Earle. The continued popularity of Zoonomia over more than two decades suggests a wide readership outside of medical schools. The 1815 “Catalog of the Library of the United States” lists Zoonomia, The Botanic Garden, and Darwin’s posthumous poem, The Temple of Nature.

Like his grandson, Erasmus Darwin wrote about evolution through natural selection. Chapter 39 of Zoonomia, “On Generation,” presents Erasmus’ ideas on competition, extinction, and how “different fibrils or molecules are detached from . . . the parent . . . to form” the child. The Temple of Nature goes even farther, declaring “all vegetables and animals now existing were originally derived from the smallest microscopic ones, formed by spontaneous vitality” in ancient oceans.

When I was doing research in Ashfield, Massachusetts, I was surprised to find that six Ashfield children were named “Darwin” or “Erasmus Darwin” between 1803 and 1847. Erasmus Darwin never visited America, although he was a political radical, a friend of Benjamin Franklin and a supporter of American independence. Looking a little farther, I found there are at least sixty-three towns in Massachusetts where children were apparently named after Darwin before 1849! I also found 96 towns where there’s no record of a child named “Erasmus” or “Darwin” in the Vital Records (these two groups represent all the towns whose records I was able to find online).

It’s possible that a few of the children named “Erasmus” may have been named for the fifteenth-century humanist, or for remote family members (close ones would have showed up in the records I was searching). But I think most of them were named for the scientist, especially because in many cases the children are actually named “Erasmus Darwin.” So far, I’ve found no record of “Darwin” being a family name anywhere in early nineteenth-century Massachusetts, and Charles Darwin’s only significant publication before 1849 was his The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, published in 5 parts, 1838-1843. So there’s a high probability that a lot of people in Massachusetts thought highly enough of Erasmus Darwin to name a son after him.

In all, I found 112 children named “Erasmus,” “Erasmus Darwin,” “Darwin,” or, in a couple of cases, “Erastus Darwin.” But my initial search of Vital Record books available online missed 187 towns, whose records are not yet available electronically. After my PhD work is done, I’ll try to complete the map. In the meantime, I think it’s remarkable how widely read and apparently influential the works of Erasmus Darwin were in rural Massachusetts in the early nineteenth century!

(Green = places with a "Darwin"; Brown = places without; White = haven’t got to it yet)[See also Dan's sketches of these "Darwins" here.]