Hypnopaediac, or the midnight love of learning

  In 1784, a Scottish gentleman published a tract at the mysterious printshop of Joseph Crukshank, on Market Street, Philadelphia. The tract burned with a fiery invective against slavery, a command for the abolition of the corrupt practice in the United States, and a scalding criticism against Great Britain for corrupting the land with the practice in their idolatry of the sugar trade. [1] The tract formulated a Christian worldview against slavery three years before the first meeting of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and seven years before William Wilberforce officially joined in the crusade against slavery. Charles Crawford’s tract Observations upon Negro Slavery wasn’t a monumental piece that swayed hearts and minds. However, the tract is remarkable in the systematic design of how a Christian ought to perceive slavery. What is even more remarkable, however, is that Crawford himself was a slave owner, and not a middling one either. He owned 184 sl...

"Teacher, no! Not Shakespeare!" ...was the response from my junior high students last year, on the morning I told them that we would soon be reading William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar . But the worst was yet to come - I told them we going to read it out loud . There was a palpitating silence for a few seconds after I told them this new bit of information. For a class of not-quite-teenage boys and girls, the sudden realization that they were going to be forced to act out lines from a play, especially one written by Shakespeare, was disarming and disorienting. For them, William Shakespeare was a wrinkled old man from an age far removed, who wrote dusty old plays with words not even in the dictionary.      However, it wasn't always so. A hundred and sixty years after Shakespeare was dead and buried in the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford upon Avon (yes, that's a real name for a city), the English-speaking world had elevated William Shakespeare to th...

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