Presidents, Power, And The Story We Tell

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https://www.bookclues.com

Presidents aren’t just dates and policies; they’re people formed by families, faith, loss, ambition, and a country that rarely stops arguing. We sat down with author and veteran editor Mary Carol Ghislin to unpack her new book—a compact, classroom-friendly journey through every U.S. president that doubles as an eye-opening guide for adults who want the big picture without the bloat.

Mary Carol explains why she built each profile around three anchors: formative childhood moments, defining actions in office, and a clear, factual “footprint” on slavery and civil rights. That design turns biography into a timeline of American change, letting listeners watch ideas harden, soften, and finally move. Along the way, we test two loaded claims: Are we more divided than ever, and are modern presidents more corrupt? The answers surprise. From Washington’s anxiety about unity—and his striking promise of religious liberty—to social media’s megaphone effect, division looks less like a new wound and more like an old scar we keep picking.

We also grapple with power and ethics. Some leaders chased fame more than service; others crossed lines that history refuses to forgive. Buchanan’s shadow over Dred Scott, Wilson’s resegregation of the federal government, Truman’s push toward desegregation—these choices build a map of retreat and recovery that readers can follow across administrations. And then there’s character: Lincoln’s moral gravity without formal church ties, Reagan’s mother teaching forgiveness amid family struggle. These human details don’t excuse policy; they explain it.

If you teach history, this episode offers a ready-made structure for meaningful discussions. If you love history, it’s a fast track to the patterns that matter: constitutional norms like the peaceful transfer of power, the slow arc from slavery to civil rights, and the way personal conviction shapes public life. Listen, reflect, and share your takeaways with someone who disagrees with you—then subscribe, leave a review, and pass this episode to a friend who loves American history.

Mary Carol's publishing company

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Transcript

Host Intro & Presidents Day Setup

Michele McAloon 0:12

Hey folks, you're listening across where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. And my name is Michele McAloon. Okay, so I have an older recording that I am publishing today because we are at President's Weekend in the United States. And this, I recorded this over a year and a half ago, and it is a book that is a compendium about the presidents of the United States. So I thought it was good to repeat, and I thought it was worthy to repeat. I hope you enjoy it. And if you want to find out more about me, go to bookclues.com. All right, everybody, happy Presidents' Day weekend. Hail to the Chief. God bless. Mary Carol Ghislin spent 30 years in educational publishing, working as a writer, senior editor, and product manager for several Fortune 500 companies, and has taught English for 14 years. She holds a Masters of Art and Literature from Northwestern University, from which she received the Distinguished Thesis Award. Her previous published titles for children include Machines of the Ancient World and Organization is the key, a history of the development of the periodic table. And here we have today to talk to Mary Carol about her wonderful new book called Growing Up to Be President and A Journey to Freedom. It's a U.S. history for kids, but I'm going to say it's also for big kids, and we're going to talk about that too. And it is by her own uh publishing company called Candle Creek Publishing. So uh Welcome, Mary Carol. It's a delight to be able to talk to you, especially after reading this delightful book. And just to let the readers know, it's actually a book for you, what age group? I wrote it for middle school history teachers. Okay. And it is biographical vignettes of every single president that we've had. And the setup in it is absolutely brilliant. I'm just going to open the book right now to uh Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He talks about how he grew up, uh, how he stepped into the political world, how he restored public trust in banking, and the some of the things that happened during his presidency on every uh presidential description is the presidential footprint and their positions on controversial issues such as slavery, civil rights. I believe those are the two big ones, right, Mary Carroll?

Mary Carol Ghislin 2:41

That's right. Those are the two that I traced throughout history because I thought even if you just flipped from one of those boxes to the next throughout history, you could actually see a development and a change within our country just based on what each president's position on those institutions were.

Michele McAloon 3:01

Okay, you're an author that's done several different books, from the periodic table to the presidents. Why have you decided to undertake this project? What is specifically motivated you to do this?

Mary Carol Ghislin 3:12

Yeah, well, there were two questions in the public discourse that have been coming up relentlessly in the past six years and that really were compelling to me, and I couldn't stop thinking about them. The first one was this statement that we're more divided than ever before. And I really thought, is that really true? We have been always a country of strong individuals, and strong individuals have always disagreed. And I thought, is it really true that we're disagreeing more now than we ever have been? And I wondered how we could even get the answer to that question. But the other question that was in my mind all the time was a statement that was in response to a statement that keeps coming up in the news. Whenever they interview Mr. Trump's supporters, they always say, Well, I may not like him, and uh maybe he does lie sometimes, and maybe he does cheat sometimes, but all politicians do this. All presidents have done this. And I really began to wonder, is there a difference really between what we were currently seeing and what has been historically true for most presidents? And so those are the two questions that got me diving into some research for myself. And then I decided to start writing it up. A friend of mine said to me, So did you read all the biographies? I said, goodness no, it would take me 30 years to get through them all and glean a little bit of information for middle school history teachers to use. What I did was go back to all of the nation's most revered institutions to get their historical information about these presidents. So I used the National Archives and the Smithsonian and the National Park Service. Oddly enough, I was very surprised that they were a source. But apparently they own quite a lot of the presidential homes. And so they've got a lot of information about presidents. The presidential libraries you're talking about, right? And the presidential libraries as well, yep. I also used the one thing that wasn't a national source, but I mean a government source, was the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. They specialize in information about the presidents. And of course, the University of Virginia is President Thomas Jefferson's own university. So I felt like they were a good trusted source to use. So I no, I told my friend, no, I can't read all the biographies because I had decided I was going to write short summary-style biographies for teachers to use in the classroom, for middle school students to use, that would actually broach some serious topics, but not delve very deeply into them so that it would, you know, engender good conversation in the classroom. And those are the two big questions that were in my mind as I was working.

Michele McAloon 6:05

Well, let me ask you, what what answer did you find to those two questions? Are we more divided than ever? And are our presidents more corrupt than ever?

Sources That Built The Research

Are We More Divided Than Ever

Mary Carol Ghislin 6:16

It's interesting, and of course, anything I say here is my opinion and only. And my opinion, too. So I certainly am not what I would call a professional historian. I've made a career of studying history. I absolutely love history. I used to always say if I hadn't been an English teacher, I would have been a history teacher. And most people who are in the profession, they know they're very closely, they're brother and sister, actually. So are we more divided than ever? The first thing that surprised me more than anything else was that when George Washington was elected president, the first thing he did, Michelle, was travel the 13 colonies to unify the country. He was very, very worried that we would not be able to stay together as a country because the 13 colonies disagreed so much. And I was stunned to realize that. But he spent uh many months traveling from colony to colony, shaking hands. He was well received everywhere. He met a lot of native chiefs who wanted information about the status of their treaties. He he was talking to the governor of Georgia, who was very upset because when enslaved members of their population escaped to Florida, the Spanish government wouldn't return them. And he wanted to know what to do about that. And I thought, well, here's some border issues, and the slavery issues were right front and center. Right. And the divisiveness was right front and center. As a result of this trip, when he went to Rhode Island, he met a group of members of a Jewish congregation there. And when he returned, he got a letter from this Hebrew congregation in Rhode Island asking them if he could assure them that Jews were going to be safe in this new country. And he wrote a letter back to them that I have used in the discussion guide. His letter to the Hebrew congregation in Rhode Island assuring them that they would be safe became so famous it circulated around Europe and was published in Europe on, you know, in newspapers, because no statement of religious freedom had ever been heard before. And yet here he was stating this in his letter to this Hebrew congregation. He says something that I'm gonna read real quickly. He says, he says, For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution, no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens. Fabulous. Yes, and I thought, good heavens. So here we were in George Washington's very first term, and he's worried about unity in the country, and the Jewish congregation is worried about whether or not they're safe, and the Georgia governor is worried about his southern border. Interesting. I mean, wow, yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. And there are things like that actually throughout history, and I thought, are we more divided than ever? I my opinion is no, we're not. However, I think we have an additional problem, and that is that social media has the uh unnerving effect of amplifying our disagreements. And if people don't learn to take social media with a bit of a grain of salt, they believe too much in some things that they're hearing, and they stop talking face to face with each other. And I think that is a danger. But do we disagree more than ever before? My feeling is no, we really don't. These things have always been present.

Michele McAloon 10:21

That's you know, that is so interesting. I live here in Europe, and the one thing that is so different between Europe and the United States, and when I say Europe, I'm I'm talking, you know, a bunch of individual different countries, but um the attitude of Europe, the pattern of Europe is it's very quiet. In the United States, we don't, I mean, we can't be quiet. We don't have a minute of peace. We we love to talk, we love to argue, we love to put it out there on the street. We it's just the way we are. And I think it's a personality, a national personality that has come up from because we started from so many different places. And your president's your book on the presidents. I mean, you could not get what are we at 44, 45 now? Yeah, yeah, 45 more different individuals as you have presidents. I mean, there's some similarities, but we they really are 45 very, very different men. And that I think represents our country and maybe probably represents the noise in our country. And there's a lot that we do right in our country. On our on the local level, we work really well together. I think on our state levels, we work well together. It's just that federal, it's a circus, man, you know, and I think it is because of the social media.

Social Media’s Amplifier Effect

Mary Carol Ghislin 11:42

I I think social media has made it worse because the algorithms, of course, that they use feed us information based on what our likes and dislikes are. So we get a narrow view of the world. Right. We only see things that mirror what our own choices have been. And so when we see something that is different, we think, what's happening here? This isn't the way the world is. When in fact, no, the the world has always been a kaleidoscope. And particularly in the United States, we are a kaleidoscope, and there's not really anything new about that. What's new is that our vision is kind of narrowing uh with social media, I think. That's interesting. Now, are we are our presidents more corrupt? Well, now that's very interesting. I was shocked to learn there are two things about that that really surprised me. One was Franklin Pierce and I think is it William Henry Harrison, who pursued the presidency out of a desire just for fame. They literally just wanted fame. I was shocked by that. I thought, was that even possible to do that without really very much background? And yet these two actually did succeed in doing that. No one thought they were good presidents during the four years that they served. That's right. But they did manage, they did manage to get up there. In fact, Franklin Pierce was just mocked by his fellow soldiers. He realized, oh gosh, if I want to be president, maybe I should have a military career. So he gets appointed brigadier general when he has had no military experience at all.

Michele McAloon 13:23

I saw that six years, right? Six or five years, right.

Corruption Then And Now

Mary Carol Ghislin 13:26

And I thought, you've got to be kidding me. And then falls off a horse in his first battle, breaks his leg, and is, of course, screaming in pain, poor guy. But the soldiers were having none of it. They just made fun of him. But even given all this, you know, he does make it into the presidency. I have a friend who's from New Hampshire and she said, Oh, we're all so embarrassed by Franklin Pierce. She said she was a teacher, and she said every year on President's Day, they had to come up with something nice to say about Franklin Pierce. And she said it was always kind of hard, but they chuckled among themselves because they they recognized he wasn't a very good president. William, I think it's William Henry Harrison. His grandfather had signed the Declaration of Independence. So he sort of had this feeling that he should be president, but he really wasn't a very good one. And his grandson, Benjamin Harrison, thought the same way, and he really wasn't a very good president. So that kind of that kind of thing surprised me that there were men who made it into office who really weren't qualified for the office. But the other thing that surprised me, when you go all the way back to James Buchanan, when you talk about real deep corruption, I was surprised that as a lawyer, he interfered with the Supreme Court and actually interfered in such a way as to convince a friend of his who was on the Supreme Court to uh side with Southern justices in the Dred Scott case. And so it is universally recognized that Buchanan did influence this decision, which of course is shockingly corrupt. The president is in charge of the executive branch, and he should not be messing around with the judicial branch. But he did this before he actually took the oath of office after he was elected, because he was trying to calm the country down. Everyone was on fire over the issue of whether new states should be allowed to have slavery enshrined in their constitutions. And of course, the northern states were saying they should not. We don't want any more, quote, slave states. But Buchanan thought he believed in states' rights, which was really a code for let the states do whatever they want, which means they get to have slavery if they want. That was really what it was code for. And so he announced to the country that the Supreme Court was coming up with a decision on the Dred Scott case soon, and all of this would be resolved. Everyone should calm down. The opinion that they came out with was has been decided, and you're a lawyer, so I'm sure you're familiar with this, has been determined to be the worst decision that the Supreme Court in the United States ever made.

Michele McAloon 16:31

Oh, absolutely. And I think we still live kind of with vestiges of Dred Scott.

Mary Carol Ghislin 16:36

It's terrible, just terrible. And Buchanan had a hand in that, and that was really startling to me, very shocking. One other way to answer your question, Michelle, is I thought, well, have presidents pushed things that were unconstitutional, knowing that they were unconstitutional, did they do that? And I, although I have to say I'm not a deep presidential historian, I wasn't seeing gross evidence of that. Certainly the judicial branch was doing its job over the centuries, and they were finding lots of laws that were passed that they would declare unconstitutional, saying you can't do that, you can't do this. But I didn't feel like they were doing anything that was other than their job under the Constitution to do. They were fulfilling their role as part of checks and balances. What I do think we have that is different, that seems to be different when Mr. Trump came into office is that we seem to have a faction within government that is knowingly trying to push things that are unconstitutional. And that is frightening to me. And specifically, I just published and uploaded a correction to the book. I missed something in George Washington that I was going to put in the discussion guide. And then when I decided to drop it in the discussion guide, I didn't realize that in dropping it out of the discussion guide, I didn't have it mentioned anywhere. So I put it back in the book. And that is that George Washington uh set the precedent for the peaceful transfer of power. And we can see through 200 years of the presidency, no one has ever breached that promise to the people that we believe in that. And so what we saw in this previous administration was shockingly different. And so that that was a little frightening to me. So are we more corrupt? I don't know that we're more corrupt in general, but I think seeing a level of corruption in the presidency, yes, is more than we've seen before. And so we do have to have a level of watchfulness about what we're doing now.

Buchanan, Dred Scott, And Overreach

Michele McAloon 19:03

You talk about the upbringings of the president. And what's really interesting is that that is very diverse from very poor to well connected to wealthy. It seems like it had more poor than wealthy and deeply connected, which seems to be in the spirit of our country in many ways. You looked at the background of these men to see how it sort of formed them, and you really bring that out. You and I yeah I guess you thought that was important to understand the men.

Peaceful Transfer Of Power Precedent

Mary Carol Ghislin 19:36

I did. One of the other issues that I've been tuned into in our country today is the role of church in our public schools. I always believed in the public school system because I believe in Thomas Jefferson's idea that if we're going to have an electorate that can vote, they need to be educated. They have to be literate, they have to be able to read and write. Sure. But I wondered, sometimes I think we get maybe pulled to extremes as to whether or not there should be any religion in schools. And I'm using air quotes here because we get the idea that somehow we don't even want to acknowledge that religion has any role in history. And I I find that a little bit odd because, as many people are very fond of pointing out, America or the United States was partly founded on this idea of religious freedom. Sure. And one thing that I thought was interesting was that we have two early colonies that were founded almost simultaneously within a decade of each other for two entirely different reasons. And I know that when I was growing up, I really didn't understand that. Jamestown was founded on commercial as a commercial enterprise. They were looking for new sources of wealth and for new trading partners and for dominance in a world market. And so a company sent a group of colonists out to found Jamestown. But Plymouth Colony was set up specifically to support this idea of religious freedom. I had a professor in college once. She was one of the nation's prominent scholars on Nathaniel Hawthorne. And she used to say that the reason as a society we sort of cling to this idea of religious freedom almost more than anything else is because the Puritans of Plymouth Colony left so many writings. And so we have a lot to read from them. We have writings from Jamestown, but they're not necessarily things that you might read for enjoyment. They're they're business documents, you know, they're list their lists of orders and shipping. Manifests and things like that, which is what they were based on. But when you go up to Plymouth, you've got diaries, you have sermons, you have all kinds of personal accounts like that, even the narratives of people who were kidnapped by Indians, these became popular. So you have a lot of things like that coming out of the Plymouth colony that didn't come out of the Jamestown colony, but Americans began to identify with that almost a little bit in the, and I'd say Jamestown maybe for a long time in the American psyche, in my opinion, was a little bit in the shadows. So nevertheless, we find ourselves now fighting over the role of a separation of church and state. And it comes right down to the role of the separation of church and state in a public school classroom. And I thought, I've been thinking a lot about that. And I always think that these arguments lack nuance. Yes, yeah. So to say as a public school teacher, we're not gonna even acknowledge that religion played any part in any president's upbringing to me is foolish. Right. Because in for some presidents, it did. For some presidents, it didn't. I decided that I really wanted to trace and name the religion that they had been brought up in. And I was looking to find some kind of event that had happened to them as a child, whether it had been influenced by their religious upbringing or not, that somehow was influenced who they became as an adult and may have even influenced their desire to be president. And I decided that I wasn't going to shy away from it if it was a religious influence.

Upbringing, Schools, And Religion

Michele McAloon 23:55

Mary Carol, I think now we're seeing an opening of where we're allowing religion. And that is coming through, I think it's coming through history, but it's also coming now through the charter school systems, through the Catholic, the parochial school systems, through the homeschools are now. And I think what we're going to do is we're going to have better educated now because they we are allowed to get away from that strict secularization.

Mary Carol Ghislin 24:22

Yeah, exact exactly. I think the fact that someone was raised with religion, and you know, I think of Abraham Lincoln as a really good example of this. Although they don't use the word abused by his father, when you read about him, I think he clearly was. They argued a lot. Right. He lost his mother at a young age. And I think his father was probably just a real hard-bitten frontier man. And Abraham couldn't get away from him fast enough. And so he did. And he never declared a church as his affiliation. And yet, when you read his inaugural addresses, when you read some of his letters, and when you really get to know the man a little bit, you realize he was one of the most deeply moral men who ever occupied the Oval Office. Had he not had that deeply felt morality, I don't think he could have shepherded the country through the Civil War the way he did. But it was because he had a deeply felt natural morality, and clearly he had faith in God and faith in prayer, but he acknowledged all of us are praying to the same God, even the people in the South and the people in the North, and none of us have had all our prayers answered.

Michele McAloon 25:46

You show how deeply moral of a man and how deeply human he was, and shaped by probably more tragedy in his life than success in his life. Yes. It's a very personal touch on this president. One of the things that you do very nicely is you show how the presidency and how our US history has been shaped by the issue of slavery and civil rights. I think it is something that we are still very much in conversation with today, as we were when George Washington spoke to the Jewish Hebrew congregation. And you do, and you use in each one of the presidents has a vignette of where they stood in relation to civil slavery or civil rights. Why did you think that was important?

Lincoln’s Moral Core And Faith

Mary Carol Ghislin 26:38

I thought it was interesting. I was following up on a lot of conversation I've heard for many, many years about the label of founding fathers. And I know that for a while it was a controversial label to use because in one sense, and not I didn't think they were wrong. As black Americans became historians in their own right, they were pointing out that uh why are we revering men who were enslavers? And I gave me a lot of food for thought over the decades. It's an issue I've never stopped thinking about. I've listened to it long enough that I began to notice we were swinging, the pendulum was swinging back a bit to a more moderate understanding that founding fathers can really refer to quite a lot of people who did a lot to shape our country, even if they had never been presidents. I really appreciated this point of view. So that made me start to wonder: well, okay, are we in a place now where we can say even George Washington had been an enslaver? Even Thomas Jefferson was, although he's the most famous one that we all talk about. And I really wanted to know can we talk about this now? Can we say and put it in writing, yes, George Washington owned this many black Americans? Although it's interesting, I realized I couldn't call them black Americans because they weren't citizens yet. And that was another thing. It's a very subtle trace, but I think you you will notice it after World War, after the Civil War. I do start referring to them as black Americans, not just the black population, you know, who were enslaved. I thought it was interesting, and I I hoped and really felt that we were in a place in our country now where we could say, without fear or shame or embarrassment, these men owned black people and kept them enslaved on their property. And I thought, well, can we take a bird's eye view of that and watch it change just on those facts alone? And I decided to do that as a bulleted list for every single president. And I found that the bulleted facts, facts alone, with no discussion, were very interesting to watch them transform through the decades. Yeah, you really do.

Michele McAloon 29:16

It's a great picture of America. We changed, we transformed, and we moved into the civil rights movement, and we had Barack Obama. I mean, it that is miraculous for or the world, that is a miracle in itself. It it or I don't know if you want to call it a miracle, but it is truly transformative and it transforms the world.

Tracing Slavery And Civil Rights

Mary Carol Ghislin 29:37

It's it's very interesting. And I thought it was fascinating too when Woodrow Wilson came into power. He was the first president from the South post-Civil War who actually took up residency in the White House. And I thought, well, that's interesting because I was raised with a real reverence for Woodrow Wilson. And I wondered, now that I had established this tracing, of course, he fell into the civil rights era, I wondered how was he going to fare in with this lens, and was surprised that he doesn't fare very well. He actually, the federal government was starting to be integrated, and Woodrow Wilson came in and segregated the federal government. And it took all the way up until President Truman to start to reverse that trend. So when you realize that President Truman was in our contemporary era, and that even in the modern era, so-called modern, and I use modern to refer to World War I, up through World War II, contemporary to refer from World War II forward. So during the whole modern era, there were people, Americans, still struggling to hang on to the old way of doing things. And it wasn't until our contemporary era that somebody actually had the courage to stand up and say, we're not going to do that. You must desegregate the military, you must desegregate the federal government. And that it was fascinating to me. And you can see that just in that blue box of that bulleted list.

Michele McAloon 31:18

You really can. And it's it's not hard to read. It's really amazing to look at that. Let me ask you something, Mary Carroll. Which president has do you think your favorite story?

Mary Carol Ghislin 31:28

You know, I'm interested in speaking of childhood. I always think of Ronald Reagan's mother. He was raised in a religious household during the depression. Well, no, before, prior to the depression. But his father was an alcoholic. And his mother was a deeply religious woman. She had three sons, and she taught her sons to forgive their father. And it's interesting to me that their father had a government job. Their father worked for the Works Progress Administration during the Roosevelt uh years, helping his neighbors and people in their town try to find work. And there was Ronald Reagan, young Ronald, being raised with an alcoholic father whose mother told him you must forgive your father. And that is a story that has really stuck with me. Because I've thought a lot about religion in our lives when it acts as a as a very stern rule giver demanding that we imitate a certain idea of what morality is or what true religion is, faith. You know, when when it's presented to us as just imitation, this is what it looks like, this is what we all must look like. I always think back to Ronald Reagan's mother. Who lived it, who lived a religion, just lived it and knew that her husband was not a very good role model and did not want her sons to imitate their father. And yet, there she was uh raising them to be very religious. And of course, Ronald Reagan became one of our great conservative presidents. And yet he was not raised to be an imitator. I think that's something I wish we all understood better. I put that story in there. I think it's important and a real eye-opener.

Woodrow Wilson To Truman: Reversal

Michele McAloon 33:40

You go all the way up to President Trump. You haven't done President Biden because President Biden is still in office and we don't know how much longer he'll be in office or who will be in office next. But I can't recommend this enough for sixth through eighth graders. But I think a lot of adults would really enjoy this book. If anything, you can read it and then springboard into one of the adult presidential biographies. There's been some really good biographies that have been published within the last couple of years. I just read one on Harding. I mean, there's some great, great, great books coming out now about the different presidents. And you mentioned that there was a uh book club that wanted to look at this book. And I think that would it would be great. It would be a great way for Americans to be able to discuss who we are, what we've been, and what we can become, because this really is a book about transformation. And I, you know what? Your your discussion questions are really good. They would be great for a book club. Where can people get your book? And it's called Growing Up to Be President: A Journey to Freedom, U.S. History for Kids by Mary Carol Geislin. And where, Mary Carol, can people buy your book? It's available through Barnes and Noble and Amazon. Oh, great.

Mary Carol Ghislin 35:00

And this is a self-publication, too. Yes, it is. I, of course, I've been in publishing my entire career. I and I've been a senior editor for many, many years, and I decided I knew exactly what I wanted to write, and I didn't need another editor to approve of it for me. I was just going to go ahead and do it. Although I did have friends in the industry who did some editing for me and designing and so on. Yeah, I decided to just do it myself.

Michele McAloon 35:27

You know what? It's wonderful. Your sentence structure is very readable for a sixth to eighth grader, but it's not condescending and it's not stupid, dumbed down, what I'm trying to say. So it, I think I'm going to buy it for my sons who are grown up. I think they would love this book, actually.

Mary Carol Ghislin 35:44

So that's good. I'm I'm glad to hear it. Yeah, I I actually chose middle school because it's right at the age group where kids can start to hear some serious facts about things and might find many teachers can broach some serious topics in the classroom. So I didn't want to do K to 5. I thought, let's start out in junior high. We can talk about some serious issues. And the discussion guide is set up for that too, to help guide teachers, give them things to talk about. And I also have been concerned with students' readability and their ability to read proficiently. So I'm I wrote this in support of the new science of reading, is sweeping across the country. And there's a great call for filling in the knowledge gap. That's the other reason I decided to write this.

Michele McAloon 36:32

Mary, Carol, I congratulate you on it. It's a beautiful project, beautiful results. And I really hope it adds to some very beneficial discussions that we uniquely as Americans need to have and that we can have. And this hopefully gives us the confidence and the knowledge to maybe seek some understanding, the purpose of all knowledge. So that's true. That's true. Knowledge brings wisdom. It really does. Thank you so much, and thank you for your time today. And I uh I look forward to talking to you again sometime.

Mary Carol Ghislin 37:08

Thank you. It's been nice to talk to you too, and thank you for having me, Michelle.

Favorite Vignette: Reagan’s Mother

Michele McAloon 37:13

You have been listening to Crossword, where cultural clues lead to the truth of the word. My name is Michelle McLean, your host, and you can reach me at mystery hence at gmail.com, and that's mystery henceh.com.