Emma Miller Bolenius

Emma Miller Bolenius (May 3, 1876 – July 25, 1968) was an American educator and textbook writer.

Bolenius was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Robert Miller Bolenius and Catherine Mathiot Carpenter Bolenius.^[1] Her father wrote Germans in Pennsylvania (1906).^[2] She graduated from Maryland College for Women in Lutherville in 1896,^[3] earned a bachelor's degree at Bucknell University, and a master's degree at Columbia University.^[4]

Bolenius taught at Maryland College, and at schools in Ohio and New Jersey, and was a professor of English and History at Roanoke Women's College.^[4][5] She was known for promoting the "project method" of teaching spoken English: assigning students a real-life situation of "socialized recitation", for example, presenting an award or campaigning for office, to focus and motivate their composition and speech.^[6][7] Her pedagogy blended language instruction with "wholesome moral lessons"^[8] and the Americanization goals common in public education at the time.^[9]

Bolenius was best known as a textbook author.^[7][10] One journal reviewed her first book, The Teaching of Oral English (1914) as "a delightfully unique textbook that reads like a novel".^[11] Bolenius wrote a monthly column on language for McCall's Magazine;^[12] she also wrote a monthly column titled "Where Girls May Meet" for the journal American Motherhood, responding to the letters she received from girls.^[13][14] Her publications included the following titles:

• "The Dear Friend from France" (1909, short story)^[15]
• The Teaching of Oral English (1914)^[16]
• Teaching Literature in the Grammar Grades and High School (1915)^[17]
• "The ph Group of Words: How to Enliven Your Work in Language" (1916)^[18]
• "Ingenious Devices Contrived by the Bride and the Handyman" (1916)^[19]
• "Words and How to Use Them" (1916)^[12]
• Everyday English composition (1917)^[20]
• Advanced Lessons in Everyday English (1921)^[21]
• First Grade Manual: A Help-Book for Teachers (1923)^[22]
• Second and Third Grade Manual: A Help-Book for Teachers (1923)^[23]
• Literature in the Junior High School (1926)^[24]
• Mother Goose Book: A Work and Play Book for Silent Reading (1928, with Marion George Kellogg and Gustaf Tenggren)^[25]
• American Literature (1933, co-edited with Thomas H. Briggs and Max J. Herzberg)^[26]
• New Frontiers (1940, co-edited with Thomas H. Briggs, Max J. Herzberg, and Lucile Prim Jackson)^[27]
• Romance (1941, co-edited with Thomas H. Briggs, Max J. Herzberg, and Lucile Prim Jackson)^[28]
• The boys' and girls' readers (a series, multiple dates, also known as The Bolenius Readers; illustrated by Mabel Betsy Hill and others)^[29]

Emma Bolenius married radio producer Edwin Morse Whitney in 1933.^[30] She lived in Pawling, New York, from 1945 to 1968, and died in 1968, aged 92 years, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.^[31][32]