“Bootstraps Uplift”:Messages and Mythologies of the New Industrial Order

McGuffey’s Eclectic Reader, 1870

Children in front of Oak Square School, Massachusetts, 1855

“Mrs Auld Teaching Him to Read,” an illustration from the biography of Frederick Douglass

African-American education in the post-war South, ca. 1870

Thomas Nast, “Union is Strength,” Harper’s Weekly, 1870

A modern “common school” in Montana, 1893

A modern “common school” in Boston, 1899

William H. McGuffey

Illustrations from McGuffey Eclectic Reader, 1879

Illustration from McGuffey Eclectic Reader, 1877

“Charlie and Rob,” McGuffey Eclectic Reader, 1879

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley, Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, 1873

Moving water, Kansas, ca. 1890

A Jewish immigrant family sewing garter belts for income, c. 1890

Horatio Alger “rags to riches” novels

The Royal Path of Life: Aids to Success and Happiness (1877)