Rebecca Smith Pollard, aka Kate Harrington

Rebecca Smith Pollard published a book of poems to mark the U. S. centennial in 1876, and also a novel with some questionable messages. She also developed a method to teach children to read that was ahead of its time.

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• 2:45Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 3:00Holly Frey?

  And I'm Holly Frey.

• 3:01Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sometime last year, some folks here at work asked if we had anything planned for the show to go along with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that's being celebrated this year. I think it is safe to say that there is not a year in which either of us would really be interested in the kind of like, over the top patriotism and national pride that is usually expected to go along with that kind of a milestone observance. We especially were not in the mood for that when we were asked. 2025. I did, though, go looking around to see if there was anything that was kind of more

• 3:45Tracy V. Wilson?

  off the beaten path that might spark my interest and also let us say to the folks at work, yes, there will be something related on the calendar. Our recent episode on Casimir Polaski, unrelated to that conversation. That was just a coincidence. Somehow, in my search for something that would let us say, yes, we do have something on the calendar, I found Rebecca Smith Pollard, who also published under the name Kate Harrington. And her connection to the US semi-quintcentennial is that she published a book of poems to mark the US centennial in 1876.

• 4:23Tracy V. Wilson?

  That is not much of a connection. And this episode's also mostly not about that. Because Rebecca Smith Pollard's major influence was not this book of poems that she published. It was creating a method for teaching children to read that was really influential in her time and still has relevance today. She also wrote a novel that was meant in part as a critical response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. So we're going to be talking about that as well.

• 4:53Holly Frey?

  Rebecca Harrington Smith was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, on September 20th, 1831. Her mother, Marjorie, was born in Ireland and immigrated to the US with her family when she was a child. Rebecca's father, Nathaniel Ruggles Smith, was born in Massachusetts, went to Harvard, and then became a teacher, mostly in private schools. He liked to teach the works of Shakespeare, and he wrote his own grammar and spelling books. A grammar textbook by Samuel Kirkham described Nathaniel Ruggles Smith as a, quote, "distinguished and acute grammarian." Nathaniel also established and edited a literary journal called The Hesperus, and Rebecca was their youngest child.

• 5:38Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, that literary journal was apparently one of the first, if not the first, literary journals published west of the Mississippi.

• 5:47Tracy V. Wilson?

  It's been a running theme on the show lately that we don't know much about people's early lives, but we don't know much about Rebecca's early life. There's even some uncertainty about her middle name. A couple of sources I found gave it as Hutchinson rather than Harrington. I'm not totally sure, but I think this is because she had an older sister named Rebecca Hutchinson, who only lived for a few months, and that was the year before this Rebecca was born. At some point, the Smith family moved west. First, they moved to Ohio and then to Kentucky. Apparently, this move is because Marjorie was ill, and they hoped that the change of climate would help her. It's hard to say what impact this had, but from what I was able to piece together, Marjorie

• 6:32Tracy V. Wilson?

  Smith lived until 1872, when she died at the age of 84. She outlived Rebecca's father, who died in 1859 at the age of 75.

• 6:43Holly Frey?

  While living in Kentucky, Rebecca became a teacher, and she also started publishing her writing. She published poems- In the Louisville Journal, under the name Kate Harrington, often with a notation of Prairie Cottage and the year the poem was written at the end. In 1854, she and another poet, Miss M. E. Wilson of Maysville, Kentucky, each wrote a poem called Moonlight Tryst that was inscribed to the other. These were published in the journal together with a note from the editor saying that, quote, "Two of our romantic young poetesses, living more than 1,000 miles apart, made a covenant to meet in spirit on a particular night and talk to each other in poetry."

• 7:26Holly Frey?

  When Kate Harrington didn't submit anything to the paper for a while in 1855, her next poem appeared with this note from the editor, quote, "We are heartily glad to see you back, dear Kate. You must never play truant so long again." She also published essays in other newspapers around Kentucky.

• 7:46Tracy V. Wilson?

  Sometime in the mid 1850s, the family moved to Iowa. And in 1856, Rebecca published a novel titled Emma Bartlett, or Prejudice and Fanaticism. The title page said that it was by "an American lady," but the copyright statement lists it as the work of R. H. Smith. In the words of her review in the Ohio Statesman, quote, "The heroine, Emma Bartlett, is the offspring of a young and lively German woman, who is driven with her relatives by political and religious persecution from her own land to seek a home in America. She illustrates, through a succession of thrilling scenes, the character of a gentle, noble, and gifted woman,

• 8:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  suffering from the evils with which a corrupt social system and an unwise and unjust prescription have surrounded her."

• 8:37Holly Frey?

  So, as Tracy mentioned at the top of the show, this book was written, at least in part, as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was published in book form in 1852 and became a bestseller. Uncle Tom's Cabin, of course, has its own very complicated legacy. Among other things, it was straightforwardly anti-slavery and is credited with sparking a surge in abolitionist sentiment in the US. But it also depicted black people in a very heavily stereotyped way. And Uncle Tom became an insult to describe black people who were perceived as subservient or complicit in their own oppression.

• 9:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  At least 30 novels were written in response to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which are often grouped together under the umbrella of anti-Tom literature. At least a third of these novels were by women, and they were mostly written by writers living in the South. A lot of anti-Tom novels were explicitly pro-slavery. I did not read this entire book, but I did read selections from it. And Emma Bartlett has kind of a broader focus than that. In the words of a piece in the Weekly Courier of Otomo, Iowa, it was, quote, "designed to illustrate the evils of abolitionism and know-nothingism."

• 10:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  The review from the Ohio Statesman that we read from earlier described the book as exposing, quote, "political and religious prejudice and fanaticism as seen in abolitionism, know-nothingism, and kindred heresies."

• 10:17Holly Frey?

  Abolitionism was obviously the abolition of slavery. The Know-Nothing Party was an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political party that flourished in the 1850s. Its name purportedly came from the idea that if members were asked about any nativist organizations they belonged to, they would say they knew nothing. Smith does not seem to have been Catholic herself. Her family were Presbyterians. But she was sympathetic toward Catholics and opposed to the anti-Catholic prejudice that was widespread in the 19th century. Some of this prejudice was connected to the influx of Catholic immigrants from Ireland who were fleeing the Great Famine that started in the 1840s.

• 11:02Tracy V. Wilson?

  So, Smith wrote this novel to expose know-nothingism as evil.

• 11:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  And she apparently thought abolitionism was just as bad. The book's abolitionist characters are hypocrites and they have self-serving motivations. There are rebuttals against abolitionist arguments scattered throughout conversations that take place among the various characters. Like, at one point, someone describes the idea of people as property as shocking. And the response is, quote, "And yet, who first brought them into a position to be sold as such? Was it not the inhabitants of that portion of the globe whose descendants are now continually crying against the sin of slavery? Good gracious." Another conversation frames accounts of brutality being carried out on southern plantations

• 11:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  as overblown or even fabricated. Basically, the same kind of nonsense that still is in internet comment sections today.

• 12:03Holly Frey?

  We're not saying that depicting something in a book is the same as believing or endorsing it. Plenty of writers depict evil or prejudice or violence in their books without it being an expression of their own beliefs or tendencies. But this book was explicitly written for political reasons. It is dedicated to the, quote, "true upholders of the Constitution and of the firm supporters of our glorious Union." The preface to the first edition said that she, quote, "endeavored to present some facts in fiction."

• 12:39Holly Frey?

  Just shaking my head.

• 12:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  No.

• 12:41Holly Frey?

  Oh, Rebecca.

• 12:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  I didn't know any of this when I picked her.

• 12:47Holly Frey?

  That's what makes it good. That's what makes it a good thing to discuss.

• 12:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  In the introduction to the second edition of the novel, Smith described it as demonstrating, quote, "two or three notions which have of late grown to the importance of political doctrines to be great political and social evils." The two chief conclusions which she thought these facts established were that a fellow creature's place of birth should not be made the test of his capabilities or Intrinsic worth and that there is neither reason, religion, nor justice in crushing the white man in order to liberate the blacks from a bondage in which they have been placed by circumstances which no ordinary foresight of man and no ordinary exercise of humanity could have prevented.

• 13:39Holly Frey?

  Once again, I say, oh, Rebecca. In this book and other writings, Smith was also deeply opposed to the idea of dissolving the Union over the issue of slavery. That's one of the reasons that she framed abolitionism as a fanatical evil. She thought that the abolitionists were forcing the country toward a civil war. Near the end of Emma Bartlett, a character even recites a five stanza poem that argues stridently against dissevering the Union.

• 14:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Unfortunately, this book, which was written when she was 25, is the biggest example we have of Rebecca Smith Pollard's thoughts on this. I looked through newspapers for other stories or essays or poems that she might have written later on to see if they revealed anything in how or whether her opinions might have evolved during and after the Civil War, and I really did not find all that much. Her 1876 book Centennial and Other Poems does include a dirge for Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune and one of the founders of the Republican Party. He was deeply opposed to compromising over the issue of slavery in the lead up to the Civil War.

• 14:53Tracy V. Wilson?

  So this poem describes Greeley, who was one of the people who worked to convince Abraham Lincoln to commit to ending slavery with the Civil War, as a spirit who, quote, "so nobly endeavored to save from disunion the land of the free." So does this poem mean that she came to see slaveholders as the threat to the Union rather than abolitionists? I really cannot say.

• 15:19Holly Frey?

  I have theories. See you Friday. We will get to her work as an educator after a sponsor break.

• 15:29Speaker 04

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• 15:32Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:24Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 16:30Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:11Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 17:36Speaker 07

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• 18:20Speaker 07

  based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 18:32Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 19:16Tracy V. Wilson?

  and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 19:42Holly Frey?

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 20:25Holly Frey?

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:51Holly Frey?

  On April 6, 1858, Rebecca Harrington Smith married poet and newspaper editor Oliver I. Taylor. An announcement of their marriage in the Louisville Journal described Rebecca as having, quote, "achieved considerable eminence in the literary world." On their wedding anniversary, a year later, they welcomed a daughter named Mary. Sadly, Oliver died of typhoid in 1860. Two years later, Rebecca married James Pollard, who was elected to the Iowa State Senate that year. James had four children from a previous marriage, and he and Rebecca had three surviving children together: Adelaide, Eleanor, and Joseph Addison Smith Pollard.

• 21:34Holly Frey?

  Most written mentions of Joseph refer to him by his initials, J.A.S.

• 21:40Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1870, Pollard published a book of poetry under the name Kate Harrington. It was called "In Memoriam, Mamie," April 6, 1869. It was in memory of her daughter Mary, who died on that date, which was her 10th birthday and the anniversary of Rebecca's wedding to Mary's late father. This was a series of poems that were written for her daughter, but also to any other mother who had loved and lost a child. Quote, "It matters little what her station proved, or of what nation, race, or tribe she'd be. I'll place her sympathy beyond all price. I'll give her confidence and perfect trust. Such friendship, true and strong, as never dies,

• 22:24Tracy V. Wilson?

  but lives when lips that pledge it turn to dust." Pollard apparently had an ongoing correspondence with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who wrote to her that this collection brought tears to his eyes. I found references to this in writing about Pollard, but I did not find the actual letter.

• 22:42Holly Frey?

  Pollard's book Centennial and Other Poems came out in 1876, also published under the name Kate Harrington. This collection starts with Iowa's Centennial Poem, which is a patriotic poem celebrating the American Revolution. Of course, Iowa was not really part of the revolution. At the time, what is now Iowa was claimed by Spain and not Britain. This poem starts out describing Iowa as a barren wild 100 years before, home only to indigenous people who she refers to as "the red man." But it goes, quote, "We share the nation's glory too, by holding to the world's broad view. Our men of Mark are genius rare, scattered like sunbeams everywhere."

• 23:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  The United States Centennial took place just a decade after the official end of the Civil War. So this was near the end of the Reconstruction era, and federal troops were still stationed in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. So for some people, this was a strange and difficult time to be celebrating a national centennial. The country still seemed very divided. A lot of ways, it was becoming more divided. This poem alludes to this, calling for, quote, "prodigal sons to return and to be given a generous welcome, and to, quote, 'give them robes of a right royal hue. Let the rings that restore them be offered by victors who honor the blue.'"

• 24:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  The poem ends, quote, "We ask you to pledge them true-hearted, a covenant promise anew, remembering, monge patriots departed, no line parts the gray from the blue."

• 24:22Holly Frey?

  Centennial and other poems also includes poems to and about members of Pollard's family, including her late daughter, a memorial to William G. Belknap, son of Grant's Secretary of War William Worth Belknap, a temperance poem, some nature poems, and some poems that were written by her late father.

• 24:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  In addition to writing poetry, Pollard continued to work as a teacher, mainly at schools for girls, including in Keokuk, Iowa. That's a school that she ran from 1875 to 1877. It seems like she and her husband, James, were separated by 1877, so especially after that, her teaching and her writing would have been really necessary to support herself and her children. James died in 1902.

• 25:09Holly Frey?

  It seems like Pollard was ahead of her time as a teacher. 19th-century schools often involved a lot of learning by rote and strict discipline. But she taught hands-on history lessons with her students dressing up and reenacting battles. She cut up apples to help students learn about fractions, and she had a classroom garden outside of the school. Part of the lesson involved pulling up some of the plants at different stages of their development to see how they grew.

• 25:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1887, Pollard was awarded a patent under the name R. S. Pollard. This was for an educational appliance. And here's how the patent described this invention, quote, "Two or more plates connected together and shifting upon or within each other, and having upon their faces series of characters, which, upon a proper shifting of the plates, form and convey to the eye and mind different impressions, meanings, and objects, which, singly or improperly grouped, they do not indicate, whereby the mind of a student is trained by the constructive and synthetic methods in the formation of objects, characters, and the language."

• 26:20Holly Frey?

  In one of the accompanying illustrations, one of the plates is a ring with a series of letters written on it, like S, R, P, and M. The other plate is in the middle, and it has the letters A through T. So by turning that outer ring, you can see how these letters combine to form words: Sat, Rat, Pat, and Matt. Another illustration shows this setup being used for arithmetic. These devices would be made from blackboard or something else that could be erased so that a teacher could prepare the board to go along with whatever the day's lessons were.

• 26:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  Pollard had started teaching back when she was living with her parents in Kentucky. So at this point, she had at least two decades of experience as a teacher. She also had her father's example as a teacher. And she had decided that teaching children phonics was critical to their learning to read.

• 27:14Holly Frey?

  This was right in the middle of a centuries-long debate in the United States about how best to teach children to read. The idea of teaching children through phonics, very basically meaning the relationship between letters and the sounds that they make, goes back to at least the 16th century. When the first formal schools started to be established in North America, children were typically taught the alphabet and the sounds made by each letter. Students put that into practice by reading the Bible or historic or political texts, since there were no textbooks made specifically for children until the 17th century.

• 27:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  I will just say I did not look into the history of reading education outside of the United States at all for this episode. So we are not going to be talking about that. Some of the earliest reading and spelling textbooks in North America were phonics-based. Those included Noah Webster's The American Spelling Book, also called The Blue-Backed Speller, which came out in 1783. He also released A Grammar in 1784 and A Reader in 1785. We talked about Webster and his influence more in our two-parter on the Dictionary Wars, which came out in June of 2023.

• 28:27Holly Frey?

  In the mid 1800s, school started moving away from phonics in favor of a method that focused on learning whole words, or the look-say method. One advocate of this was Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder of the First American School for the Deaf and namesake of Gallaudet University. In his book, "The Mother's Primer to Teach Her Child Its Letters," he wrote, "In the common modes, what can be more uninteresting than to commence with teaching a child to call certain arbitrary marks or letters which in themselves have no meaning by certain arbitrary sounds or names of the letters which also have no meaning? What an unintelligible and irksome task it must be."

• 29:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  So Gallaudet's method paired words with pictures, like a picture of a cat, along with the word "cat," so that the student could learn that whole word rather than its component letters. This method probably made a lot of sense to Gallaudet because of his work with deaf and hard-of-hearing students who either couldn't hear the sounds that were made by different letters and letter combinations, or couldn't hear them very well. But this method did not provide a way for students to decode written words that they didn't already know, other than to try to work it out from context, or maybe from illustrations that might be on the page. The first books designed for this method also only went up to the third grade, and

• 29:54Tracy V. Wilson?

  by necessity, they were focused on words for concrete objects and concepts that can be illustrated. So consequently, their vocabulary was kind of limited.

• 30:04Holly Frey?

  "The Mother's Primer" was written for the parents of hearing students, and starting in the 1840s, Gallaudet's method was popularized outside of schools for the deaf, in part by educational reformer Horace Mann.

• 30:18Holly Frey?

  Man advocated teaching children to read by focusing on whole words, and only after that to focus on the alphabet and spelling. This whole word model was fiercely debated among educators, but in the later part of the 19th century, it gradually became more widely used than phonics-based instruction in the United States.

• 30:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  So that brings us back to Rebecca Smith Pollard. In the late 1880s, so about 40 years after Horace Mann started popularizing the look-say method, she created a whole system for teaching reading, including a reader, a speller, and a teacher's manual, and it was based on phonics, which we'll talk more about after a sponsor break.

• 31:03Speaker 07

  Okay, chicken nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself.

• 31:45Speaker 07

  This new chicken nugget, reinvented based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 31:59Tracy V. Wilson?

  For any small business owner, there's a moment when you realize the next hire could be the difference between staying busy and actually growing. The challenge is finding the right person without wasting time sorting through candidates who aren't the right fit. That's where Indeed Sponsored Jobs comes in. When workplace chaos hits and you need someone who can step in and make a difference, this is a job for Sponsored Jobs. It helps put your job in front of candidates who match the criteria that matter most to you, whether that's skills, experience, certification. Or location. And you're certainly not alone in using Indeed. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. That's millions of businesses turning to Indeed to help solve

• 32:42Tracy V. Wilson?

  hiring challenges and find people who can help drive results. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. Get your $75 sponsored job credit today at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 33:09Holly Frey?

  We've all done it. Tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends. Not to cancel them,

• 33:53Holly Frey?

  not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:13Tracy V. Wilson?

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

• 34:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:14Speaker 06

  Livright, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S. S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paper back.

• 35:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 1889, Rebecca Smith Pollard published her first synthetic reader, synthetic speller, and a complete manual, Pollard's Synthetic Method of Reading and Spelling, which was a step-by-step guide for teachers on how to use the other two books with their students. She wrote in the preface to the manual, quote, "Instead of teaching the word as a whole and afterwards subjecting it to phonetic analysis, is it not infinitely better to take the sounds of the letters for our starting point, and with those sounds lay a foundation, firm and broad, upon which we can build whole families of words for instant recognition."

• 36:27Holly Frey?

  Her method included what she referred to as busy work, in which children practiced sounding out letters, or drew ladders that were used to illustrate the progression of tones that different vowels could make, or drew wheels with a sound in the center and a spoke for each word that can be made by adding a letter to that sound. She described these as families. So for example, the OT, the Ott family, included words like pot, tot, rot, and cot.

• 36:57Tracy V. Wilson?

  There was a lot of busy work. Those are just examples. But Pollard also acknowledged the need to make things fun, incorporating drawing and sketching and singing to illustrate different concepts. In the preface, she wrote, quote, "Why should not something be used to awaken and hold the interest of children in the drudgery of the first lessons in reading? Are not splints, balls, toothpicks, clay, and sandwork used for this purpose in teaching the first principles of arithmetic and geography? Every intelligent teacher knows, when the developing mind of the child no longer needs these devices or helps in the last named branches, why should there be any question as to when the devices of this method have served their purpose?

• 37:41Holly Frey?

  Pollard's method of teaching phonics involved focusing on the 26 letters of the alphabet and all the different sounds they can be used to represent. Students' textbooks were illustrated to help students remember sounds associated with different letters, like "RR" was shown next to a growling dog, while "H" was next to a panting dog. Stories incorporated the words and sounds that were the focus of a particular lesson, and these became more advanced over time. So Lesson 1 in Pollard's Synthetic First Reader focused on single-syllable words that rhymed with hat, can, or bag, while the first lesson in the second reader is focused on words ending in ing,

• 38:23Holly Frey?

  as well as talk, walk, each, piece, and square.

• 38:28Tracy V. Wilson?

  These textbooks sorted the letters into vowels and consonants, and then sorted the consonant sounds into subvocals or voiced consonants, and aspirates or whispers. She also described sounds as labial, lingual, dental, guttural, and pure aspirate, depending on where in the mouth each sound was formed. After learning the letters and these sounds, students could move on to learning combinations of sounds, like digraphs and trigraphs.

• 38:58Holly Frey?

  Pollard's books also included tables of all the diacritical marks and the sounds they corresponded to. The busy work included having students mark their textbooks with diacritical marks, corresponding to the sounds made by each letter in each word. This was controversial, both because people objected to the idea of students writing in books and because people thought this busy work was tedious. Pollard later suggested having students make their marks on a piece of transparent material so the book itself remained unmarked.

• 39:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  Pollard did not invent the idea of teaching phonics. As we said, a lot of the earliest reading textbooks for children in the United States were phonics-based until the field of teaching had moved toward a whole-word approach. But she was one of the first to combine spelling and reading books with a teacher's manual so that everything went together. She also developed literature readers that became gradually more advanced for children to move on to after they had mastered the basics. She developed all of this material over the course of about eight years with the help of her daughter Adelaide, who had also become a teacher and also wrote hymns.

• 40:12Holly Frey?

  Pollard's phonics-based reading instruction became really influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her system was used all over the country, and multiple other textbook writers took inspiration from her. A review of Pollard's Advanced Speller appeared in the journal Education in 1897. The reviewer wrote, quote, "This book teaches the pupil to spell, which is its great merit. The need of such a book is made painfully evident by the newspapers, the books, and the business letters that one reads. Bad spelling is a fault of our busy, hurried, American life. The author of this volume has done much to correct this fault. We believe in her system.

• 40:55Holly Frey?

  It teaches its students to think as well as to write and speak correctly. It teaches him to note accurately the component parts of a word to form a scientific opinion as to its proper pronunciation. We would like to have our own children taught by this system, and we hope to secure the introduction of this book in the schools attended by them. We commend it to all teachers."

• 41:19Tracy V. Wilson?

  Proponents of Pollard's method included Edward Everett Hale, who was an advocate of education for the freed people and of the Chautauqua Adult Education Movement. In "The History and Pedagogy of Reading with a Review of the History of Reading and Writing and of Methods and Texts and Hygiene in Reading," which came out in 1915, Edmund Burke Huey wrote of Pollard's method, "The main business of the method is to make the child able to pronounce words for himself as he comes to them in reading new matter, and it accomplishes this result pretty effectually."

• 41:54Holly Frey?

  Huey also described the method as having been worked out with care and completeness, and as successful at getting children to learn word structure and word calling, or recognizing and calling out the words. But he didn't praise Pollard's method across the board. He also described it as, "intensely artificial and adult in its conceptions, and destructive of right habits of reading and of using language generally." He was also of the opinion that working up from phonetic elements to words, to ideas, to sentences, as the opposite of how the mind naturally works.

• 42:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  In her later years, Rebecca Smith Pollard wrote a number of religious hymns, and in 1891, she wrote a letter to George T. Angel, founder and first president of the Massachusetts Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, noting, "The kindly mention you frequently make of our Catholic friends." So Pollard, based on the way Angel had written about Catholics, thought that he might appreciate an experience she'd had while traveling to train teachers to use her reading methods. That included visiting a lot of convents to train the nuns who taught in Catholic schools. She said she had been dealing with an eye inflammation for some time during one of these visits, and one of the Catholic mothers told her not to go to the doctor yet, but

• 43:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  that they would have all 1,100 children in their schools pray for her. "What wonder that the shadows lifted, the clouds dispersed, and that ere the week had ended, there was naught to dim my vision save the grateful tears which I could not banish when I remembered how quickly the loving Savior responded to the children's calls."

• 43:35Holly Frey?

  Pollard's last published poem was called "Althea," or "The Morning Glory," and it came out in 1912 when she was 80. Unlike most of her earlier poetry work, she published it under her own name, Rebecca S. Pollard. It's a long poem. It's more than 30 pages, and it's a meditation on faith and mortality with a lot of flower imagery.

• 43:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Rebecca Smith Pollard lost most of her eyesight toward the end of her life. She spent the last years of her life living with her son in Fort Madison, Iowa. She died there on May 29, 1917, at the age of 85. A poem she had written several years earlier but had never published, titled "Heaven," was read at her funeral. She was buried at Farmington Cemetery with a marker that says Rebecca Smith Pollard, and then, under that, in quotation marks, Kate Harrington.

• 44:27Holly Frey?

  Around the time of Pollard's death, phonics started to fall out of favor again in the United States, with reading instruction once again moving back to focus on whole words. Then, in 1955, Rudolph Flech's book, Why Johnny Can't Read, criticized the abandonment of phonics, which led to another resurgence in phonics-based instruction. Then, that shifted once again with a move toward whole language instruction in the 1980s, and then the evolution of balanced literacy in the 1990s. This back and forth is sometimes characterized as the reading wars.

• 45:04Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I would say both the back and forth and the discussion around the back and forth has been characterized as the reading wars. Balanced literacy has been described as kind of a happy medium between phonics and whole-word instruction, taking the best parts of each of them. But there has also been a lot of variation in exactly what's involved in different methods that have been under this umbrella of balanced literacy. Some of its critics described balanced literacy as mainly a variation on whole-word instruction without enough phonics. Most recently, the idea of three queuing that is part of some balanced literacy systems has come under really heavy criticism.

• 45:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  Three queuing involves trying to figure out the meanings of unfamiliar words based on context clues or pictures or making a guess based on the sound made by the first letter, rather than teaching children how to sound out or decode unfamiliar words. A lot of public interest and criticism of this followed reporting by Emily Hanford at American Public Media and then a podcast that came out of that reporting called Sold a Story in 2022.

• 46:19Holly Frey?

  Today in the US, there's been a growing movement toward the science of reading, which bases reading instruction on techniques that can be backed by scientific evidence of their efficacy. Broadly speaking, phonics and phonemic awareness are two components of the science of reading, which also includes multiple other elements like vocabulary and reading comprehension. Because being able to sound out the word based on its letters or phonemes is only one step in the process of understanding what something means. The science of reading isn't a program for reading instruction, though. It's more of a body of research into reading and literacy and the use of that research to guide programs that teach reading.

• 47:01Holly Frey?

  And there is still, of course, a ton of controversy around exactly how best to implement all of this research.

• 47:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah, I have seen a number of discussions among teachers and other people who work in education who feel like some, uh, some systems that are framed as science of reading feel like that that's just the phonics part and not all of this other part that is also necessary to really being able to read. And this part, being able to figure out what, what individual words are, if you're not familiar with them, or even if you are, that is just one component of what is being described as a literacy crisis in the US. After I finished this whole outline, like first thing this morning, I saw an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

• 47:49Tracy V. Wilson?

  That talked about other factors contributing to this literacy crisis, including smartphones.

• 47:56Holly Frey?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Which the author of this article was like, I was kind of a naysayer in thinking smartphones were a problem, but there is a growing body of evidence that smartphones really are playing a role. Other factors were early reliance on AI chatbots to try to get information and a shift in the way, not just like the reading of words is taught, but once you get into reading pieces of work, a shift away from reading complete works to instead trying to get core pieces of information from very short excerpts. So instead of reading the entirety of a novel, reading a small amount of it and testing comprehension of that small

• 48:39Tracy V. Wilson?

  amount, which sort of has left people getting into high school and college without sort of the reading stamina to read whole, long works and analyze and follow them. We obviously are not teachers. We do not have hands-on experience with all of this, but it is clear that there has been a lot of debate about all of this in recent decades. It's things that are having a clear impact in how students are taught and how society functions as people are or are not able to read and make sense out of information. So that's Rebecca Smith-Pollard,

• 49:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  ahead of her time in some ways, but not others.

• 49:26Holly Frey?

  Do you want to read and make sense out of some listener mail?

• 49:29Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yes, this is kind of funny that we're talking about reading comprehension because I had to ask Holly earlier if she remembered me reading this email already. We don't think I read this email already, but apologies if I have read it twice. This is from Ellen. Ellen wrote, "Another vote for Lufkadi O'Hern," and wrote, "Dear Holly and Tracy, I started listening to your podcast when I had a very long commute to a job, was giving me insomnia and panic attacks. I was working for a very critical supervisor," I'm just going to skip ahead and say, "having a really rough time. And I remember when I read this email the first time, I got very choked up at the next part."

• 50:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  In which Ellen said, "I especially appreciated your Friday blessing when you tell us all that you hope we have a restful weekend and do something that makes us happy. I want you to know how meaningful that little kindness was to me during that time." Now thankfully, I have a much better job, but still do a lot of driving. So I often have thoughts, velveteen rabbit, Philip Glass, embroidery. They have not yet made it into an email. But when I was listening to the Elizabeth Bisland episode and heard the name Lefkadio Hearn, I thought, "That name sounds familiar." As he went on, I remembered, "I have a book by him. Back in the early 1990s, my mother gave me his book, Some Chinese Ghosts. After I returned from living in Taiwan for a couple of years, she knew I was enjoying

• 50:50Tracy V. Wilson?

  reading the sort of weird old books you find in used book sales. This book was published in 1887, and my copy is a reprint by the Modern Library from 1927. The intro to this volume is a short bio of Hearn, written in such an entertaining and old-fashioned style, I decided to scan it and attach it for you. While his whole life story is extremely interesting, the book itself is a pretty rough read. It's full of Chinese transliterations, Victorian Orientalism, and lofty prose." Sounds about right. According to his bio, "This book was typical of his strange genius, and he considered it, quote, "an attempt in the direction, I hope, to make triumph someday, poetical prose." Poor Lefkadio, he was not a very good judge of what people in the future would like to

• 51:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  read. Maybe he would be a good candidate for a Halloween episode, because apparently, quote, "He gives the reader a ghostly shudder by building up an intimacy with the unseen." I will pause to say, I have him like, as a potential October topic for that reason. To return to the email, "Since embroidery was also a recent topic, I'm sending you a photo of my first needlepoint project, which I inherited unfinished from my husband's grandmother. She had started it as a wedding present for me and had finished about a third of it when she passed away. I had never done needlepoint before, but it was such a beautiful pattern based on an artwork by Mukha that I decided to try it. After all, needlepoint is just one stitch. How hard can it be?

• 52:17Tracy V. Wilson?

  Well, it ended up taking four years to finish it, as it is quite large. But since then, I've completed several much smaller projects and even learned to do more than one stitch." That's Pet Tax. Here is a photo of our grand tortoise. He is a Russian tortoise named Ivan the Turtle. He loves to go outside and dig in the garden and is fond of eating snowdrops, dianthus, and petunias when he can reach them. Thank you so much for your podcast and especially for being your lovely, smart, kind, unique selves. You make me feel better about the world. Best wishes, Ellen. I want the email to show me the blocked content.

• 52:56Tracy V. Wilson?

  Oh, my goodness. We have a little tortoise out in the yard looking at what appears to be a small ceramic statue of a bunny.

• 53:05Holly Frey?

  Adorable.

• 53:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Incredibly cute. And this needlepoint is really lovely. I don't even know how to describe it, but it's beautiful and it's lovely that you finished all of that.

• 53:15Holly Frey?

  Yeah, I love that conceptually very much.

• 53:18Tracy V. Wilson?

  Yeah. I am sorry for the loss of your husband's grandmother who had passed away while working on this. Anyway, beautiful. What a great email. So, thank you again, Ellen, for this email and for the PDF from some Chinese ghosts and these beautiful pictures. It's a beautiful story. If you would like to send us a note, we're at [email protected]. If you would like to see our show notes with all of the sources for the episode, including all of Rebecca Smith Pollard's work that we talked about, that is at our website, which is missedinhistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.

• 54:08Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 54:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Whether you're calling the wise women in your life, video calling your girlfriends across the country, or checking in on someone who always knows how to make you smile, staying connected matters. Those small conversations, shared laughs and quick hellos, are what keep relationships strong even when life gets busy. Some of the most life-giving conversations start with just a phone call. That's why AT&T guarantees the network you can rely on, so you can focus on the moments and people that matter most. That's the AT&T Guarantee. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details.

• 54:59Speaker 04

  Livrite, publishers of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. "Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book," writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims that it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback.

• 55:27Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 55:58Tracy V. Wilson?

  Long hours, work deadlines, family commitments. You give so much to everyone else. Isn't it time to invest in yourself? The University of Arizona Global Campus is built for working adults with flexible online degree programs designed to fit your life. Your previous education, training, and eligible experience may even help you earn college credit. At UAGC, you can take one accelerated course at a time, helping you move toward your goals in five- and six-week class formats. Visit uagc.edu today. This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brew's Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel.

• 56:38Speaker 07

  Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at B K F S E A dot com.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.