Dear James,
Could you post a list of Books and Educational Material we should own or obtain to teach ourselves and our children and grandchildren on our real American History and real World History. I’d like to have and educational series from Kindergarten on up, to have on hand to give our next generation, for a well-rounded education. Thank you, Paula S.
JWR Replies: The folks that produce The Robinson Curriculum recommend a long list of “classic” books. Many of these are available free online (in PDF or Kindle reader format). There are many novels as well as nonfiction books including biographies and histories.
Start prowling used book stores and thrift stores. Also faithfully attend your library’s annual book sale, to pick up inexpensive hard copies of history books, civics books, and classic literature. To avoid exposure to leftist bias, try to find an Encyclopedia Britannica set that was published before 1965.
I don’t own a Kindle reader, but I did install the free “Kindle for Mac” reader software on my laptop, initially just to test our new SurvivalBlog.com Archives 2005-2010. (My #2 Son produced it in Kindle format, in advance of the CD-ROM version that is now in beta test.)
Parenthetically, I must mention that I am now hooked on Kindle e-books. I’ve downloaded more than 120 free e-books so far, by authors like Frederick Bastiat, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, Buffalo Bill Cody, Joseph Conrad, James Fennimore Cooper, Daniel Defoe, John Foxe, Edward Gibbon, H. Rider Haggard, O. Henry, Rudyard Kipling, John Marshall, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jonathan Swift, Zachary Taylor, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, General Ben Viljoen, H.G. Wells, and others. There are hundreds of classics available in Kindle format free of charge at the Amazon web site. And Project Gutenberg had thousands more. Take advantage of these free resources. OBTW, I am making backup copies of all of these e-books onto our Faraday-boxed backup laptop. (Our “laptop in a can.”) But nothing is more reliable than an “EMP-proof” hard copy book.