Bennett: Merely the Caretaker…

It was… maybe 54 years ago – 1972…

Cover, Recollections and Letters, 1st Edition, 1903

February 13, 2020 ~ We had been married for about two years, and I was a sales representative at a Volkswagen dealership in Evanston, Illinois. The owners name was Herman Eberhardt. Older buildings, and the dealership was split, with the body and paint shop on the (appropriately) South side of the lot – and that is where the treasure was to be found…

I have told my story many times in the past, but will share the basis of it once more, so that you will understand the (personal) significance of my discovery.

It was 1958 and that year I attended the Crestwood Elementary School in Northbrook, Illinois. It was this one fortuitous year that I would receive the greatest gift of my ‘formal’ education – a year to remember for many reasons – chiefly among them was my teacher – Donald Adair. Continue reading →

Fluoride, Teeth, and the Atomic Bomb

Editor’s NOTE: Having been introduced to Dr. William D. Kelley in early 1998, amongst the first things he discussed with me, was the toxic nature of fluoride, and how he had become aware of its dangers. Following is among the most devastating health related issues of the past nearly 80 years – yet as recently witnessed in many communities around the nation, our elected “mis-representatives” continue to make decisions “for” us without benefit of the TRUTH!

The following article exposes the biggest on-going medical experiment ever carried out by the United States Government on an unsuspecting population.

Although commissioned by the Christian Science Monitor in early Spring of 1997, they chose not to publish the findings. I became aware of its existence sometime in 1999, and have provided it to our readers for all of these years. We welcomed in 2024, Robert Kennedy Jr. maked plans to try to once and for all – attack fluoride – and hopefully – take it out of our system! (Ed.) Continue reading →

100 RARE US History Facts You’ve Never Been Taught In School

What if everything you thought you knew about American history was just the surface?

In this video, we dive deep into 100 of the weirdest, wildest, and most surprising facts from U.S. history that never made it into your textbooks. From presidents with wrestling records to exploding battleships that launched wars, and from outlawed Christmas celebrations to the real story behind the Liberty Bell – this is the version of history class you wish you had. Continue reading →

R. Bennett: How Stay-at-Home Parents Can Go Back to School and Relaunch Careers

For stay-at-home parents thinking about returning to education, the hardest part is often the gap between being capable and feeling credible on paper. Workforce reentry challenges can show up as rusty confidence, unclear options, and the worry that care-giving years will be misunderstood by employers. A parent career transition gets easier when education becomes a bridge, one that turns experience into language hiring managers recognize and gives structure to next steps. With the right adult education motivation, school can feel less like starting over and more like getting back in motion. Continue reading →

R. Bennett: Building Lifelong Money Habits by Modeling Smart Choices at Home

For busy parents juggling work, school schedules, and household bills, parenting and money education can feel like one more thing to get right. The hard part is that children’s money habits aren’t shaped mainly by “money talks,” but by the quiet, repeated family financial behaviors kids watch at home. Every grocery decision, savings choice, and careful “we can’t afford that” moment turns parents into financial role models, whether or not it’s intentional. With a clearer view of home financial modeling, families can build a money culture kids absorb naturally.

Understanding Financial Socialization at Home

Financial socialization is the simple way kids learn what money “means” by observing how their family handles it day to day. They notice patterns, not speeches: how you plan, spend, save, and respond to surprises. Over time, those repeated cues shape their money attitudes, like whether money feels stressful, manageable, or worth planning for. Continue reading →

The Navajo Tribe Created a Code in World War II That the Enemy Never Broke and It Would Go On to Change the Course of History

World War II pushed the U.S. military to find faster, safer ways to send battlefield messages across the Pacific. On May 4, 1942, the U.S. Marine Corps launched one of its most effective answers by recruiting the first 29 Navajo men to create a code based on the Navajo language. Continue reading →

Abigail Adams on the True Foundation of American Independence

The Founding Mother believed the success of the United States depended on raising generations devoted to learning and virtue. 250 years later, her vision is still inspiring.

As we celebrate the Fourth of July, few women were more instrumental to America’s founding than Abigail Adams. Although she was not in Philadelphia when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, she played an essential role in shaping the new nation from her home in Braintree, Massachusetts. Continue reading →

Revolutionary America

Revolutionary America tells the story of the American Founding, the greatest political achievement in history. The American colonists had developed a unique way of life as they practiced self-government for 150 years.

In the struggles between the colonies and the mother country that followed the French and Indian War, Britain declared that Americans had no right to rule themselves. This went against everything the Americans knew. In response, our ancestors risked their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor” to fight the War for Independence. Against all odds, they won, and in victory formed a stable, lasting republic.

The Notebooks Marie Curie Used in Her Research Remain Radioactively Contaminated More Than a Hundred Years Later

The notebooks Marie Curie filled with her research are still dangerous to touch.

Representative image of a vintage notebook, not Marie Curie’s. Photo via Pexels.

Some Curie papers have been found contaminated with radium-226, an isotope with a half-life of about 1,600 years, and original volumes are kept under strict radiation-protection controls before anyone can handle them.

More than a century after she wrote in them, the pages remain radioactively contaminated, mostly with radium-226, and the original volumes are kept under strict radiation controls. To read them at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, where they are stored in lead-lined boxes, you sign a liability waiver and put on protective clothing first.

This is not a curiosity of preservation. It is a direct consequence of the physics Curie helped uncover. Continue reading →

This 500-Year-Old Painting Hides a Terrifying Secret

What secrets are buried inside this 15th-century masterpiece? Discover the hidden musical notes, the impossible anatomy, and the dark mystery of the negative space that shocked art historians.

We Analyzed Paper Money Printed by Ben Franklin to Uncover His Anti‑Counterfeiting Techniques and Materials Innovations

Ben Franklin played a key role in America’s founding, which included helping to design its paper currency. Kristina Davis

Benjamin Franklin understood something fundamental about money that still shapes modern economies: Money only works when people believe it is real.

In the early 18th century, the British colonies suffered from a chronic shortage of gold and silver coins, forcing local governments to rely on paper bills for trade and everyday commerce. But paper currency created a dangerous new problem: Unlike metallic coins, paper money could be easily copied, altered and faked.

Long before his experiments with electricity or his role in the American founding now 250 years ago, Franklin spent years working with paper, ink and printing. In the process, he developed a practical understanding of materials and manufacturing. Continue reading →

**How Thomas Paine’s Common Sense Shaped a New World**

On January 9th, 1776, the pamphlet “Common Sense” is published in Philadelphia. The pamphlet immediately becomes a bestseller, selling tens of thousands of copies across America. In “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine, the author and violent foe of aristocracy and monarchy, attacks the King and Parliament and offers Americans an alternative to British rule: true independence.

The Original Order of the Alphabet Before 1700 — They Rearranged It and No One Asks Why

This investigation explores how the alphabet evolved before 1700, why certain letters shifted or vanished from common use, and how the process of standardization shaped one of the most familiar systems humans use every day without ever questioning its origins.

A Jewish merchant from Market Street mailed a copy of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago… It’s back in Philly

The copy of the Declaration of Independence Jonas Phillips mailed to his relative Gumpel in July 1776 represents one of the 26 surviving original broadsides of the founding document.

The Dunlap Broadside on display at the Museum of the American Revolution. Courtesy of the National Archives of the United Kingdom

Jonas Phillips had been living with the Declaration of Independence for a little more than three weeks by late July 1776, when one scorching Philadelphia day he decided he should go ahead and send a copy to his relative Gumpel.

Gumpel Samson, a cousin and business partner who lived in Amsterdam, must have had a lively curiosity in such things as rebellion and independence. Enough so, anyway, that Phillips, a Jewish immigrant patriot and civil rights leader, folded a broadside of the declaration that he likely had torn from the window of a Market Street shop, stuffed it into an envelope, and sent it on the next tall ship out of Philly.

This copy of the declaration then took its own trip — one beginning in those feverish Philly days in 1776 when independence was still new, and spanning nearly two and a half centuries and a continent and an ocean, before finding its way back to Philadelphia. Continue reading →

Among All the Great Things Benjamin Franklin Invented or Discovered, His Alter Egos Gave Him the Most Freedom

Silence Dogood. Richard Saunders. Benevolus. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. All were pen names that allowed Franklin to say things he couldn’t have otherwise said.

Image by Victoria Maxfield

Benjamin Franklin’s fertile mind constantly spun off inventive and useful ideas. His lightning rod saved buildings and lives. His energy-saving improvement of the wood-burning fireplace kept families warm and forests from being leveled. His lending library extended literacy to those who couldn’t afford books. His map of the Gulf Stream made travel faster and commerce more efficient.

But Franklin’s ingenuity showed most clearly in his invention, or rather recurrent reinvention, of himself. In the course of his life, Franklin devised dozens of authorial personas in print, which allowed him to challenge authority, identify folly and promote human progress with an unsparing vigor he never could have achieved under his own name. Continue reading →

Why 1913 Changed America Forever

The year 1913 quietly transformed the United States forever. In just a few months, America introduced changes that reshaped money, taxes, politics, and the power of the federal government — and most people today have no idea how much of modern life traces back to that single year.

Continue reading →

**7 Things American Schools Stopped Teaching That Kids Still Need!**

The following piece is not one that I would usually publish as it relates more to Public Schools – however – there are lessons included that should still relate to Homeschooling. ~ Editor

“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children”. ~ Mr. Thomas Sowell

School used to come with a little more survival built into the walls. Kids learned how to read a long chapter without checking their phones, balance a checkbook without panicking, and cook something beyond noodles.

Write a thank-you note, debate without melting down, and maybe even fix a wobbly chair before declaring it “broken forever.” Continue reading →

I Retired at 75 and Became My Grandson’s Homeschool Teacher

Annie Nicol is homeschooling her grandson, who lives with her son in a tiny home on her property. Annie Nicol

It’s a trend in our family that we take care of our own.

My parents, who both lived into their 90s, were retired educators and played a big role in caring for my kids. My son and I shared caregiving responsibilities for them. My husband is 80 and works part-time as a therapist, and he takes care of his grandkids every Friday and on some Tuesdays.

My grandson, who lives with me, lost his mother when he was an infant. He has an auntie he’s very close to, but it took some time because she lives out of town. Continue reading →

**Bennett: How to Balance Kids’ Busy Schedules for More Family Calm and Fun!**

For working parents managing busy children’s schedules, the week can feel like an endless relay of pickups, practices, late homework, and forgotten gear. The core tension is real: supporting kids’ interests and tackling children’s productivity challenges can quietly squeeze out dinners, downtime, and simple connection, until balancing family time becomes another task to juggle. When child activity management is unclear, the whole household runs on urgency instead of rhythm. A calmer, more intentional pace is possible. Continue reading →

Day: How Parents Can Secure Care and Support for Their Special Needs Child

COTTONBRO STUDIO/PEXELS

Parents and caregivers raising a child with disabilities often carry the emotional challenges of caregiving alongside constant decisions about safety, schooling, and services. The core tension is simple and heavy: parental incapacity or death can transfer responsibility overnight, and without special needs child care planning, critical supports can be delayed, disputed, or lost. Long-term care provisions and future legal planning are not about expecting the worst; they are about reducing uncertainty and protecting a child’s day-to-day stability.

Understanding the special needs guardianship importance is a first step toward making care enforceable rather than informal. Continue reading →