When an Ohio publisher released William Holmes McGuffey’s school primers in 1836 and 1837, McGuffey was an ancient languages professor at a rural college.
He quickly became an influential voice in the 19th-century common school movement, and his McGuffey Readers became something more: books that educated millions of Americans.
Over the course of the next 100 years, nearly every president as well as influential figures from Henry Ford to Laura Ingalls Wilder learned to read from McGuffey’s primers. Yet today, McGuffey is hardly a household name outside of conservative Christian home-schooling circles.
