Word: essay
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Truth & Truisms. The chief pleasure of Ben Franklin during these years was journalism, and it is Franklin the journalist who dominates this book. There are the Addisonian "Silence Dogood" letters with their gently satiric barbs at Harvard College, bits of local gossip, humorous anecdotes, and a masterful and intricate essay on the value of a paper currency. In the profoundest sense, Franklin began a lifelong dialogue with his fellow Americans on their democratic destiny ("In those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own"). But entertainment always...
...espouse and spread the libertarian philosophy of freedom from all institutional control and of men's absolute rights. It invites men and women from 16 to 60 to its five two-week summer sessions. Tuition and meals for two weeks cost only $150, and there is an essay contest for scholarship applicants...
John Stuart Mill, in his essay On Liberty, considered eccentricity in a nation's character to be "proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained." Britain has always esteemed such doughty dotties as the 19th century Roman Catholic naturalist, Charles Waterton, who devoted his life to exterminating black rats in England on the ground that they were foreigners smuggled into the country by Hanoverian Protestants. The 1951 Festival of Britain even set aside a section of one pavilion to commemorate oddballs. Britain's contemporary eccentrics manifest more energy than originality, but Britons...
...studied classical Greek in night school "for fun." A naval radio instructor had spent all his liberties in the Mediterranean haunting archaeological digs. Others were just as hungry for academic pursuits, though a bit rusty. Most needed help in such forgotten arts as ordering their thoughts in a coherent essay. "At the beginning," recalls Principal Thomas Hollins, "they acted as if they were trying to paint a picture with a pickax...
...weekly throughout the year and offer half-course credit and a grade, thus encouraging those who show genuine interest, and eliminating those with no serious intentions. If they wish, non-Honors students who do well in these interdepartmental tutorials might on the strength of their record and a qualifying essay be readmitted to Honors. Honors students, furthermore, should also be allowed to enroll in these tutorial group as much as facilities would permit...