The American Child

An eight-year-old at a public-health exhibit is transfixed by vaccination charts and photographs of calves. His father has given up golf to answer the boy’s questions—and to show him how a citizen’s life touches the state.

In early twentieth-century America, Elizabeth McCracken finds children at the center of adult conversation and effort. Through moments like this one, she asks what parents hope to accomplish when they turn a child’s curiosity into a lesson: not simply to explain the world, but to prepare boys and girls to take part in it. From the origins of drinking water to the threads in a piece of gingham, no question seems too small to deserve a practical answer. How far can this careful, hopeful work of preparing children for the future go?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.