Entries by Jim McCabe

Agent in Italy: A Memoir of a Spy in World War II with a Study Guide

I couldn’t hear a sound, either from the corridor and offices beyond the door or from the sleeping city of Milan outside. All the rest of the world could have died. It was stifling. Italian police stations are badly ventilated. My throat was very dry and I kept coughing. I smoked another cigarette but that […]

Runaway Russia: An American Woman Reports on the Russian Revolution

A “Gripping Account” —The Wall Street Journal Florence Harper was the first American female journalist in Petrograd. Sure that trouble was coming, she waited “as I would for a circus parade.” From the women’s bread protests of the heady first days when the mob seemed “good-natured” to the later horror of the “Marseillaise”-singing crowds being […]

They Called it “Purple Heart Valley”-A Combat Chronicle of the War in Italy by Margaret Bourke-White

An excerpt from The New York Times review by Foster Hailey, November 26, 1944: “Reading Miss White’s remarkable book and looking at her even more remarkable photographs, many of them taken under fire, you know that all the American men and boys, in Italy, in France, in India, China, Burma and the many Pacific islands, […]

From a Pulitzer-Prize Winning War Correspondent with Maps and a Study Guide

Read about the first year of the Korean War in “War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent.”  The author, Marguerite Higgins, was the first woman to win a Pulitzer for international reporting. The book is about the battles at the start of the war as the armies moved up and down the […]

Why Does the Volume of Reading Matter?

See how the volume of reading influences reading comprehension. Could the volume of reading matter more than intelligence in reading comprehension? What did Anne S. Cunningham and Keith Stanovich discover in their research? https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/cunningham.pdf What are the barriers to more reading which Cunningham and Stanovich advocate? How do literacy practices influence the achievement gap in […]