Talk:Father Goose: His Book

A fact from Father Goose: His Book appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 23 November 2008 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Father Goose: His Book, an 1899 collection of poetry for children and considered at the time a liberal portrayal of multi-cultural America, is now seen as stereotyped, racist and offensive?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2008/November.

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Quoting[edit]

I have a question about the following section in parentheses, from towards the end of the article:

(Yet standards change: within a comic context, Baum and Denslow attempted to portray a broad view of humanity and the American melting pot, with inclusion of Native Americans and African Americans, Italians and Irish and Chinese, instead of the uniformly Anglo-Saxon world of many children's books of their day. What was then a liberal gesture is now seen as stereotyped, racist, and offensive.)

Is that a quotation from the source given? Or is it your own writing? I was about to copyedit it, because if it's your own writing it needs to be cleaned up a bit for the article; if it's from the source, on the other hand, it needs to be put in quotes and either moved into the ref itself or better integrated into the flow of the sentence. —Politizer ^talk/_contribs 02:22, 20 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Reply[edit]

I replaced my paraphrase of Hearn's passage with a direct quote. Hearn's grammar is not perfect — "African American" and "Italian" should be plurals — but it's as printed in The Baum Bugle. Better, or not? Ugajin (talk) 00:17, 21 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]