Notable Historians, Posters & Prints “D...-E...-”
educational posters for social studies classrooms, home schools, and theme decor for office.

Will & Ariel Durant
Alice Morse Earle

Mircea Eliade

Will Durant
b. 11-5-1885; North Adams, MA
d. 11-7-1981; Los Angeles, CA

Historian and teacher Will Durant is best remembered for his 11 volume The Story of Civilization written in collaboration with his wife Ariel. They were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the Presidental Medal of Freedom.

Will Durant quotes ~
• “To be one's 'deliberate self is to rise above the impulse to 'become the slaves of our passions' and instead to act with 'courageous devotion' to a moral cause.”
• “Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece,” and conversely “there is nothing in Greek civilization that doesn't illuminate our own.”
• “The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.”
• “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
• “Education is the transmission of civilization.”
• “So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.”
• “Never mind your happiness; do your duty.”
• “When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.”
• “Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.”

• Will Durant Books

FYI- Will Durant was principal of the Ferrer Modern School, modeled after the Escuela Moderna of Francesc Ferre. Also on the faculty were Emma Goldman, and artists Robert Henri and George Bellows; guest lecturers included Margaret Sanger (who sent her son to the school), and authors Jack London and Upton Sinclair. Also notable was the use of Montessori methods and equipment.

Alice Morse Earle
b. 4-27-1851; Worcester, MA
d. 2-16-1911; Hempstead, Long Island

Historian Alice Morse Earle wrote about Colonial America, especially New England.

Mircea Eliade
b. 3-13-1907; Bucharest, Romania
b. 4-22-1986; Chicago

Mircea Eliade, best known as a historian of religion, philosopher, interpreter of religious experience, and professor, also wrote fiction.

Eliade understood religion as the manifestations of the Sacred (hierophany) and his “Eternal Return” described religious behavior as both an imitation of, and paricipation in, sacred event restoring the “mythical time of origins” evident in cross-cultural parallels.

Eliade was influenced by Rudolf Otto, worked with Carl Gustav Jung, and participated in the Eranos group.

Mircea Eliade quotes ~
• “The crude product of nature, the object fashioned by the industry of man, acquire their reality, their identity, only to the extent of their participation in a transcendent reality.”
• “The Experience of Sacred Space makes possible the ‘founding of the world’: where the sacred Manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.”
• “Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality, which can be approached and interpreted from various and complementary viewpoints.”
• “In short, myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary.”
• “The great cosmic illusion is a hierophany.... One is devoured by Time, not because one lives in Time, but because one believes in its reality, and therefore forgets or despises eternity.”

• Mircea Eliade at Amazon.com

Eratosthenes
b. 276 BC; Cyrene (Libya)
d. 194 BC; Alexandria

Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek mathematician, poet, athlete, geographer, astronomer and historian who worked to establish dates of events since the conquest of Troy. He studied and worked at Alexandria, the capitol of Hellenized Ptolemaic Egypt, becoming the second librarian of the famed Alexandrian Library.

Eratosthenes created a map of the world based on the available geographical knowledge, is the first known person to have calculated the circumference of the Earth, and devised a system of latitude and longitude.

• The Librarian Who Measured the Earth