Tell Her Not to Give Up Until She Has a Good Education

I have been enchanted with this letter from my Grandpa's Uncle Dow (his dad's brother, who was born in 1858, and was 18 years older than Grandpa's dad - another topic for another day there).  He mentions Liz, one of his sisters who was eight years younger than Dow, and Newt (full name: Isaac Newton - yet another next topic) and Joe are two of his brothers, 12 and 18 years younger, respectively.  Dow would have been 36, Liz 28, Newt 24 and Joe 18.  Phew.  Adding calculators to the long list of modern conveniences they didn't have then.

In the letter Dow mentions "Young Peoples Papers" as being something Liz should be reading.  I'm trying to figure out what those are, and google is telling me I'm going to have to dig deeper than a few pages of results, so I'll get back on that.  In the meantime, dear reader, do you happen to know?

The thing I love most about this letter, which I will put below with only this further ado, is his encouragement of Liz's education as well as the boys.  My gut tells me that it might be a bit less common for a woman to be urged to study, and less common for all of them as they were in rural Illinois on the farm, I believe.  I also don't know whether the book Dow mentions is the same thing as the Young Peoples Papers, or if they're different, and I really hope I can find out.  He mentions a book in another letter and urges his reader to read the book several times, so I wonder if he had one book that he tried to encourage everyone to read, or whether he just generally encouraged everyone to read books.

What do you think?

If you'd like my transcription, just take the jump.  Anything I'm uncertain of or my own comments at the end I put in [ ] or use a [?], so feel free to suggest what you think might be missing.