Appendix.

Suggestions to Teachers.

The citizens of America are one and all the descendants of immigrants, and they must never lose their sympathy with the things that are best in foreign lands. Italy has sent us hundreds of thousands of new citizens; and these people and their children are among the most loyal Americans. Between the United States and Italy there has been a long friendship, without mistrust and without strife. This is because the national ideals of the United States and of Italy are so much alike, and because each country possesses a great, industrious, peace-loving population. In America, the Italians “find an opportunity to go forward in those paths which most warmly appeal to them, and which they can follow with no breach of tradition, no break of affections, no sundering of ancient and beloved ties.” Italy, like us, has her great national heroes—Garibaldi, Mazzini, and Cavour, to mention only a few—whose deeds may well inspire our people. Italy’s music, art, and literature are priceless possessions which are adding richness to our American civilisation.

“Americanisation” in its best sense is the need of the hour; but this word means not alone the converting of the foreign-born into voters in this country, but also the fusing of their highest ideals into our own. Teachers can use The Italian Twins as the earliest introduction to Italian homes and ways, and can build up from the impression it makes upon children, a full appreciation of the sterling qualities of the Italian people.

The Italian Twins can also be correlated with American government through the use by teachers of Webster’s Americanisation and Citizenship; pupils can read Bryant’s I Am an American. History can be correlated through the reading, either to the pupils or by them, of Tappan’s Story of the Roman People, Our European Ancestors, and American Hero Stories; also Moores’s Christopher Columbus and Stevenson’s Poems of American History. Italian art is well illustrated by several volumes in the Riverside Art Series, and in Hurll’s How to Show Pictures to Children.

For a background of Italian history teachers are referred to Davis’s History of Mediaeval and Modern Europe and to Sedgwick’s Short History of Italy. Certain aspects of Italian literature are introduced through Kuhns’s Great Poets of Italy and Crane’s Italian Popular Tales. Numerous books interpret Italian life and manners; for example, Hawthorne’s French and Italian Note-Books, Forman’s The Ideal Italian Tour, Potter’s A Little Pilgrimage in Italy, James’s Italian Hours, and Howells’s Italian Journeys.

Pupils will delight in reading “The Buried Treasure,” in the Riverside Fourth Reader; “An Italian Boy at School” (De Amicis), in Bolenius’s Sixth Reader (The Boys’ and Girls’ Readers); and the play, “Christopher Columbus,” in Stevenson’s Children’s Classics in Dramatic Form, Book III.

Earlier books in the Twins Series contain many other specific suggestions which teachers can readily adapt to the present story.