No textbooks for young people were more widely used in the nineteenth century than the McGuffey Readers. William H. McGuffey, an Ohio teacher-preacher of exceptional power, first published his grade-school readers in 1836. During the following decades McGuffey would sell more than twenty-two million copies. The McGuffey Readers hammered home lasting lessons of industry, honesty, and patriotism through a variety of reading lessons and parables. They also created a common curriculum for every student in the nation. Students everywhere absorbed such reading exercises as "Respect for the Sabbath Rewarded," "True and False Philanthropy," "No Excellence without Labor," and "The Patriotism of Western Literature." The popularity of the McGuffey Readers reflected the emphasis on moralism and virtue that pervaded the educational climate of the early republic, but the textbooks were neither sectarian nor openly political. As an advertising blurb printed with McGuffey's Eclectic Fourth Reader...