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The Old School

My review of Jonathan Zimmerman's Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory appears in today's Wall Street Journal ("In One Room, Many Advantages"). The book is well worth reading.  Among…
Bill Kauffman
June 26, 2009

My review of Jonathan Zimmerman’s Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory appears in today’s Wall Street Journal (“In One Room, Many Advantages”). The book is well worth reading.  Among other things, I learned that Gus Edwards, composer of the grating “School Days,” that cloying hymn to old-fashioned education which I have always hated, was a German immigrant “who spent most of his life in New York City and probably never set foot in a country school.”

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A stack of three Local Culture journals and the book 'Localism in the Mass Age'

Bill Kauffman

Bill Kauffman is the author of eleven books, among them Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette (Henry Holt), Ain’t My America (Metropolitan), Look Homeward, America (ISI), and Poetry Night at the Ballpark (FPR Books). His next book, Upstaters, is due from SUNY Press in 2026. He is a columnist for The American Conservative and The Spectator World. Bill wrote the screenplay for the 2013 feature film Copperhead. He is a founding editor of Front Porch Republic and has served as a legislative assistant to Senator Pat Moynihan, editor for various magazines and publishers, and vice president of the Batavia Muckdogs, a professional baseball team that was euthanized by Major League Baseball. He lives with his wife Lucine in his native Genesee County, New York.