Education: History & the U.S.

"Your observations," wrote the President of the U.S. to an ambitious Army captain named Meriwether Lewis, "are to be taken with great pains and accuracy . . . and are to be rendered to the war-office ..." With that letter, in 1803, Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and William Clark off on their famous expedition. True to their instructions, the captains did put down their observations, and most of these have been carefully preserved and published. Then, in 1953, additional documents were discovered in the attic of an old house in St. Paul, Minn. Last week those papers were the subject of...

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