The New Yorker:

From 2005: Revisiting the origins of American democracy.

By Jill Lepore

In 1938, if you had a dollar and seventy-two cents, you could buy a copy of “The Rise of American Democracy,” a seven-hundred-page hardcover about the size of a biggish Bible or a Boy Scout handbook. While a Bible’s worth is hard to measure, the Scout guide, at fifty cents, was an awfully good bargain, and was, in any case, the book you’d most like to have if you were shipwrecked somewhere, not least because it included the chapter “How to Make Fire Without Matches.” But “The Rise of American Democracy” promised, invaluably, “to make clear how Americans have come to live and to believe as they do.” It was also a quick read. “A Simple Book,” its ad copy boasted. “Paragraphs average three to a page. Sentences are short.” Better yet: “A Democracy Theme runs through the whole text.”

The book’s authors, Mabel B. Casner, a Connecticut schoolteacher, and Ralph Henry Gabriel, a Yale professor, set out to make history matter. In a foreword written in the dark days of 1937, when Fascism, not democracy, was on the rise, they offered a sober historian’s creed: “We live today in perilous times; so did many of our forefathers. They sometimes made mistakes; let us strive to learn not to repeat these errors. The generations which lived before us left us a heritage of noble ideals; let us hold fast to these.” Above all, they wanted American schoolchildren to understand the idea of democracy. Gabriel, who went on to write “The Course of American Democratic Thought” and to help found the American Studies Association, was an intellectual historian. But the book is also full of practical teaching tips and “Real life Activities” (tested by Casner in her classroom in West Haven, Connecticut) that were supplied at the end of every chapter, and included instructions for an end-of-year finale—a class play to be performed some cool June afternoon—“The Rise of American Democracy: A Dramatization in Four Scenes.” It begins in front of a closed curtain:

Go to link