In World History as the History of Foundations, 3000 BCE to 1500 CE, Michael Borgolte investigates the origins and development of foundations from Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages. In his survey foundations emerge not as mere legal institutions, but rather as “total social phenomena” which touch upon manifold aspects, including politics, the economy, art and religion of the cultures in which they emerged. Cross-cultural in its approach and the result of decades of research, this work represents by far the most comprehensive account of the history of foundations that has hitherto been published.

The puzzling adoption in 1930 of a deaf-mute method for teaching beginning reading to hearing children in America can only be understood when the long history of teaching beginning reading is known. The deaf-mute method adopted almost immediately after 1930 from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans and from Canada to Mexico was the "meaning" approach to teach the reading of alphabetic print instead of the "sound" approach. "Dick and Jane" primers and their clones, which teach beginning reading by meaning instead of by sound are, indeed, the disgraceful source for America's functional illiteracy problem. The history is an attempt to bring together most historical sources on those primers and on the long teaching of beginning reading itself so that functional illiteracy can be properly understood and successfully corrected.