Famous Men books...

[MerryAtHope]

Is there a difference between the books edited by Shearer and the books put out by Memoria Press--edited by Haaren & Poland? Thanks! Merry :-)

[karensk]

...a brief comparison -- here.

 

The Famous Men of... series was originally written in the early 1900s, I believe, for a public school system (maybe in New York state?) by Haaren and Polland. The original version is probably the one available for free @ Baldwin Project. There are also two separate edited versions: Greenleaf Press's by Shearer and Memoria Press's. In addition to that, each publisher wrote their own books to add to the series. Shearer wrote Famous Men of the Renaissance, and I think Memoria Press came out with Famous Men of Modern Times.

 

HTH!

[abbeyej]

The MP ones have beautiful full-color paintings and maps. We actually replaced our Greenleaf books with MP 'cause we liked them so much better.

[Cleopatra]

In case you're interested, you can get audio versions for free at Librivox!

 

http://librivox.org/newcatalog/search.php?title=&author=Haaren&status=all&action=Search

[chiguirre]

Thank you Cleopatra! We spend a lot of time in the car and these will be great to listen to.

[MerryAtHope]

Thanks for the link, Karen, very helpful!

[brownie]

This has me intrigued. It may be what I was looking for for next year. I looked up both versions. The Greenleaf is said to be for middle to high school level and MP is said to be for elementary. Does anyone know if the reading level is that different or it is just the expectations in the questions? Because it does seem to make sense that MP would be more regurgitation then and Greenleaf more thought provoking based on grade level expectations.

 

Also I am wondering if the 'extremely Protestant worldview' provided by Greenleaf would be concerning for me as a Catholic?

 

I got a lot of my info off of Cathy Duffy's review site.

Brownie

[MerryAtHope]

This has me intrigued. It may be what I was looking for for next year. I looked up both versions. The Greenleaf is said to be for middle to high school level and MP is said to be for elementary. Does anyone know if the reading level is that different or it is just the expectations in the questions?

 

Oh, I'd like to know this too!

[MerryAtHope]

bump

[ScoutTN]

:bigear:

bump

[karensk]

This has me intrigued. It may be what I was looking for for next year. I looked up both versions. The Greenleaf is said to be for middle to high school level and MP is said to be for elementary. Does anyone know if the reading level is that different or it is just the expectations in the questions? Because it does seem to make sense that MP would be more regurgitation then and Greenleaf more thought provoking based on grade level expectations.

 

Also I am wondering if the 'extremely Protestant worldview' provided by Greenleaf would be concerning for me as a Catholic?

 

I got a lot of my info off of Cathy Duffy's review site.

Brownie

 

...but I think the discussion questions in the Greenleaf Guides were more thought-provoking/higher-level/worldview-ish and the ones in MP were more straightforward/recalling facts.

 

Re. the protestant/catholic view....I never noticed anything either way in the Famous Men of Greece books (I have both the MP and Greenleaf ones), but I think there might be a difference between the Greenleaf Guide to Famous Men of the Middle Ages and MP's student & teacher's guides to the Famous Men of the Middle Ages, mainly because Greenleaf's questions are more rhetoric-style and worldview. If you're only getting the text to read, not any of the books with questions/answers, then my guess is that it probably doesn't matter much.

 

Except...since Greenleaf's Famous Men of the Renaissance is written by them (and is not an edit of an older version, as are the others in the series), it might be from a protestant perspective.

 

Sorry this isn't incredibly informative!

[MerryAtHope]

Thanks for the info!

[silliness7]

I found this thread in a search because I was wondering the same thing.

 

I own Famous Men of the Middle Ages from MP. I checked Greenleaf's version out of the library. I have 4 dc reading from these and thought 2 copies would be handy.

 

Last week I read the chapter on St. Francis and St. Dominic to my 3rd grader and she wrote a short summary on St. Dominic as we had already written a summary about St. Francis from another book. I read to her from the Greenleaf book. I had to return it to the library on Wed.

 

Today I read my 5th grader the same chapter from MP's book. The Dominic portion seemed quite different to me. I didn't like it. It read very textbooky to me. My 5th grader had this puzzled look on his face. And since it's Sat. and we were playing a little catch-up and I honestly HATED the reading I told him to just skip the summary. Maybe mommy brain is getting to me and the 2 editions are not that different. But I was seriously questioning that today.

 

I went to the mainlesson site just to see what their chapter looked like for Francis and Dominic and there isn't one. Where did it go? I guess I'll never be satisfied until I check the GL one back out of the library and compare them more closely.

 

Just throwing that out there to see if anyone can shed some more light on the subject. I prefer MP because of the beautiful pictures (and because I own both the Middle Ages and the Ancient Rome ones). Maybe I was just having a better day with my 3rd grader and words made more sense. Maybe I'm going crazy. :D

[silliness7]

I was able to re-check Greenleaf's version out of the library today.

 

What a relief! I am NOT going crazy. :hurray:

 

Here is the first paragraph from Greenleaf's version of St. Dominic.

 

"The second reformer was a Spaniard from a noble family named Dominic. He had become a priest and was serving as secretary to a bishop. While traveling with his bishop through southern France he was disturbed by several things. First, the clergy of the church were not living as they should. They were not respected by the people. Second, he learned that many Christians had no knowledge of the stories of the Bible or what they meant. Dominic decided that what was needed were a group of traveling teachers. Dominic began the movement himself and soon was joined by a number of companions. They went from town to town preaching and teaching the lay-people and called on the clergy to reform their lives. From the very beginning the Dominicans (as the followers of Dominic came to be called) were devoted to education, and today around the world, there are many schools which have been founded and are run by Dominicans."

 

There are two more paragraphs and my 3rd grader had no trouble composing a 3 sentence summary ala WWE from it after I read it out loud to her.

 

Here is the first paragraph from MP's version.

 

"St. Dominic, the founder of the Dominican Order, was born into a noble family of Castile (Spain). Many of his family members were distinguished by their sanctity. Through school and university, Dominic maintained an austerity of manner and seriousness of purpose. Within the serious exterior, however, was a warm heart. Dominic once sold his books to hlep the poor and even attempted to sell himself into slavery to raise money for the liberation of captives held by the Moors.

 

In recognition of his piety and skill, Dominic's bishop called him to join the cathedral chapter to assist in its reform. He accompanied the bishop on a mission into southern France where the Benedictines had been ineffective in combatting the Albigensian heresy and the ignorance of local Christians of the stories and principles of the Bible. From this experience, Dominic conceived the idea of founding an order for combatting heresy and putting an end to ignorance by improving Christian education."

 

There are 2 more paragraphs after these. But these 2 seemed to try to be telling the same info as the 1st chapter in Greenleaf.

 

My 5th grader had a total look of confusion on his face after reading this to him which probably mirrored my own because when I had read this days earlier to little sister it was not difficult to pick out the main ideas. Obviously MP's version has more advanced vocabulary and complex sentence structure. But imo, there are too many references to things in the MP version that we didn't have any background knowledge and weren't well explained but just kind of glossed over. (The MP version does have a footnote to explain the Albigensian heresy.)

 

I'm sure the study guides add a whole 'nother layer of understanding to the differences especially if you want to use the books as a "program" and not just to read. We are using TruthQuest history right now and we jump around in different books gleaning information from a variety of sources. So we are just reading relevant chapters and writing summaries.

 

So there you go. Be an educated consumer.

[Sebastian (a lady)]

Interesting. I didn't find a chapter with Francis or Dominic on the Baldwin Project website either. I did find a blog review of the Greenleaf book, with the comment that it is an updated version with new chapters on "Benedict and Gregory, Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV, and Francis and Dominic."

 

So it may be that the books are the same where content reflects a republishing of the original texts, but then are different where new chapters are concerned.

 

I found an origional copy of the Greece volume a few months back. I'll try to dig it up and see if there are any differences with my GP copy.

[silliness7]

You're right. I'm comparing the chapters on Charlemagne and they are very nearly identical and lovely to read.

 

I'm very happy to know that as I own two of the MP books and none of the Greenleaf. I remember reading much of the Rome book with my oldest when he was a 4th grader and we enjoyed it very much.

 

That chapter on St. Dominic sure did throw me for a loop. I hated it and thought it very poorly written. It seems that is not characteristic of the entire series. Whew!

 

I think I need to make a list of the additional chapters for future reference. I wonder if other books have additional chapters. And from what I read on this thread or the other is that Ren & Ref is original to Greenleaf and Modern Ages is original to MP. Good to know.

 

ETA: The Ancient Rome book has one extra chapter in both Greenleaf and MP: Diocletian. Ancient Greece has the same chapters as the original. The original version is for sale at Rainbow Resource...interesting aside. It's interesting that Memoria Press added the same additional chapters to the original as Greenleaf did. And of course the Middle Ages has the 3 additional chapters as noted in the pp.

 

E(again)TA: The Famous Men of Modern Times is not original to MP as I had thought. It is written by the same original authors (Haaren & Poland) as the Greece, Rome, and Middle Ages books. It is also at mainlesson for free. It does look like Ren & Ref was written by Shearer.

Edited March 2, 2011 by silliness7

[Sebastian (a lady)]

I think I need to make a list of the additional chapters for future reference. I wonder if other books have additional chapters. And from what I read on this thread or the other is that Ren & Ref is original to Greenleaf and Modern Ages is original to MP. Good to know.

 

I think the following were originally written by Haaren and Poland and published around the turn of the century.

 

Famous Men of Greece (1904)

Famous Men of Rome (1904)

Famous Men of the Middle Ages (1904)

Famous Men of Modern Times (from Christopher Columbus to Bismark) (1909)

 

I've seen versions of the first three republished by both Greenleaf and Memoria Press. I am pretty sure that Greenleaf republished them first and Memoria second, but there may be newer editions of one or the other.

 

(Way back when, Greenleaf was one of the major literature based homeschool curriculum providers. Loved their catalog. Browsing those full color pages of enticing books was part of what hooked me on homeschooling. I always wanted to be able to order their huge set of every single book from each period of history, just to be able to wallow in all those good books. I probably have most of them by now, but it would have been fun to get the stack of boxes. But that's rather off topic.)

 

Rob Shearer of Greenleaf wrote study guides for the first three. He also wrote Famous Men of the Renaissance and Reformation and its study guide.

 

Memoria Press recently republished Famous Men of Modern Times. I haven't noticed if Greenleaf ever did a version of this one. It looks like there is an overlap of time period (if not of emphasis) between the Modern Times book and the Renaissance and Reformation book.

 

Memoria Press also has study guides for the four original books.

 

I think you mentioned this, but the original texts are also available on the Baldwin Project website. This is one of my favorite sites.

[Denise in NE]

It has been years since we've used the Famous Men books, but I believe that Rob at Greenleaf wrote the chapters not found in the originals. IF I remember correctly, he claimed in his blog that the Memoria Press publishers edited some his chapters and placed them in their reprint of the series without an acknowledgement.

 

Just an FYI: The Greenleaf guides are open ended - meaning that there is not an answer key. Some people may not like this. We have used and are still using the Greenleaf high school literature guides. Same thing - no answer keys.