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Technology Hasn’t Killed Public Libraries – It’s Inspired Them To Transform And Stay Relevant

By Danielle Wyatt and Dale Leorke/The Conversation

In 2017, archaeologists discovered the ruins of the oldest public library in Cologne, Germany. The building may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls, and dates back to the Roman era in the second century. When literacy was restricted to a tiny elite, this library was open to the public. Located in the center of the city in the marketplace, it sat at the heart of public life.
We may romanticize the library filled with ancient books as an institution dedicated to the interior life of the mind. But the Cologne discovery tells us something else; it suggests libraries may have meant something more to cities and their inhabitants than being just repositories of the printed word.

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Posted on August 27, 2018

Four Centuries Of Trying To Prove God’s Existence

By Lloyd Strickland/The Conversation

The 17th and 18th centuries were a golden age when it comes to trying to prove God’s existence.
Today’s efforts are on nothing like the same scale as they were hundreds of years ago, now that secularism is as common among philosophers as it is among the general population.
And this is not the only difference to have occurred since that golden age, which is the focus of my new book, Proofs of God in Early Modern Europe.
Here are three other things that have changed over the centuries:

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Posted on August 17, 2018

Arne Duncan, Unreliable Narrator

By Aaron Pallas/The Hechinger Report

If I ever try to write a memoir, you have my permission to slap me. There are so many ways that things can go wrong, and just a few in which they go right.
Do I have the standing to generate interest in my story? Do I have anything interesting to say? Can I weave a tale that links my life to the things I care about?
All rhetorical questions, as I have no intention of taking electronic pen to paper. But I do read memoirs – most recently, How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success from One of the Nation’s Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education, by Arne Duncan.
The 53-year-old Duncan has been, in my view, the most influential of the 11 Secretaries of Education since the founding of the U.S. Department of Education in 1980.

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Posted on August 13, 2018

Think Confederate Monuments Are Racist? Consider Pioneer Monuments

By Cynthia Prescott/The Conversation

In San Francisco, there is an an 800-ton monument that retells California history, from the Spanish missions to American settlement. Several bronze sculptures and relief plaques depict American Indians, white miners, missionaries and settlers. A female figure symbolizing white culture stands atop a massive stone pillar.
The design of the “pioneer monument” was celebrated in newspapers across the country when it was erected in 1894. Today, however, activists argue that the monument – particularly its depiction of a Spanish missionary and Mexican “vaquero,” or cowboy, towering over an American Indian – is demeaning to American Indians.

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Posted on August 8, 2018