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English 883: Studies in Literacy

ENG 883
Prof. Harvey J. Graff
Spring 2005
546 Denney Hall
T,Th 1:30-3:18 p.m. 292-5838
graff.40@osu.edu
Office hours:T,Th 3:30-4:30 & by appointment

In recent years our understanding of literacy and its relationships to ongoing societies and social change has been challenged and revised. The challenge came from many directions. The "new literacy studies," as they are often called, together attest to transformations of approaches and knowledge and a search for new understandings. Many traditional notions about literacy and its presumed importance no longer influence scholarly and critical conceptions. The gap that too often exists between scholarly and more popular and applied conceptions is one of the topics we will consider.

Among a number of important currents, historical scholarship and critical theories stand out, both by themselves and together. Historical research on literacy has been unusually important in encouraging a reconstruction of the fields that contribute to literacy studies, the design and conduct of research, the role of theory and generalization in efforts to comprehend literacy and, as we say increasingly, literacies (plural). It has insisted on new understandings of "literacy in context," including historical context, as a requirement for making general statements about literacy, and for testing them, and carries great implications for new critical theories relating to literacy.

This seminar investigates these and related changes. Taking a historical approach, we will seek a general understanding of the history of literacy primarily but not exclusively in the West since classical antiquity but with an emphasis on the early modern and modern eras. At the same time, we examine critically literacy's contributions to the shaping of the modern world and the impacts on literacy from fundamental historical social changes. Among many topics, we will explore communications, language, family and demographic behavior, economic development, urbanization, institutions, literacy campaigns, both political and personal changes, and the uses of reading and writing. A new understanding of the place of literacy and literacies in social development is our overarching goal.

This course meets one of the core course requirements for the GIS in Literacy Studies

Objectives
The seminar has a number of purposes:

• learning to analyze and critically evaluate ideas, arguments, and interpretations, and practicing analysis and critical evaluation
• developing and practicing skills in written and oral expression
• engaging in an interdisciplinary conversation about literacy studies, including but not limited to the historical study of literacy and critical approaches to literacy/cies followed in different disciplines and professions
• gaining familiarity with some of the major literature in literacy studies across disciplines
• expanding knowledge of and understanding the value of historical approaches to literacy
• developing new understandings of literacy's many and complicated roles and connections in the development of modern societies, cultures, polities, and economies
• comparing and critically evaluating different approaches, conceptualizations, theories, methods, and sources that relate to the study and understanding of literacy in its many contexts

Assignments & Evaluation
a. Regular reading, attendance, and preparation for each class meeting. Attendance is expected and taken into account in evaluation.
b. Preparation for class includes writing at least 4 2-page commentary papers offering critical perspectives and raising questions about the assigned reading in a particular week. Select any 4 class sessions from week 2 to week 10. In addition, I expect each student to come to all other sessions prepared and with written questions. Papers and questions are due at class at which that topic is discussed. None will be accepted late.
c. Leadership of one or more seminar sessions. There may also be opportunities to work on Graff's Literacy Studies at OSU "initiative."
a, b, & c together=40% of final grade
d. "Using history" projects: 2 4-5 page papers. Everyone will write one "literacy in context" paper and select one other project from the three areas listed. Each mini-essay is a kind of think-piece or intellectual exercise, in learning about literacy in history and from historical perspective.
1) Sketch: "literacy in context"—what does "literacy in context" mean for a particular time, place, people, and form of literacy?
2) Test a theory of literacy in historical context—a historical experiment
3) Probe critically and evaluate a recently proclaimed "new literacy"
4) Future of literacy—forecast, hypothesize, speculate, and judge "the future of literacy" from the perspectives of the history of literacy.

Each paper=30%; 2 papers=60% Due on weeks 5, and 10

Assigned reading. A seminar is pointless, and painful, unless the participants have read the assigned material with care. I expect you to read all the material assigned for each week's discussion. Some of the books are out-of-print (not because they have lost their importance or value but because publishers now take books out of circulation very quickly). However, copies of all of them are on reserve in the library. So plan ahead. I encourage you to think about useful questions for discussion, or issues that occur to you after the seminar is over

Leadership of one or more seminar sessions. One (or depending on the number of students in the class two) student is assigned to lead each seminar. The most important task of this assignment is to present questions and perspectives on the major topics and issues of that week, and on the reading specifically, that will generate good discussion. Think about how you will stimulate discussion. For most weeks, questions and tasks should be made available to all seminar members prior to class, no later than 11:00 a.m. on Tuesdays, at the instructor's office.

Suggestions: choose particularly important passages in the works for analysis, photocopy them, and spend some time on their explication. (Better yet, distribute them in advance, along with discussion questions.) Choose key ideas and terms for elucidation, or focusing on the questions the work asks, its answers, and its relation to larger issues or themes. Collect some reviews from academic journals and serious publications for nonspecialists and organize discussion around the assessment of these evaluations. Remember that the goal is not especially to find out what is wrong with the work, although that is important, but to understand its significance and contribution to large issues and questions. Think of ways of identifying themes and issues that include specific readings but may also look back to earlier weeks or look ahead to future weeks and topics. Depending on class size, the plan for the session might include breaking into small groups with specific tasks for part of the time. Seminar leaders are not expected to be responsible for the entire session.

Commentary papers. Students should write at least 4 2-page papers commenting on the week's reading. These should not summarize the book. Rather, the papers should present your reaction to the book: what strikes you as particularly interesting, important, outrageous, thought-provoking or worth thinking or talking about. They should include questions the reading raises for you and/or questions you wish to raise about the reading. Those questions as well as your comments will help you to prepare for seminar sessions. I will keep track of these papers, but they will not be given formal grades. They are very important. They prompt you to think about the reading before you come to the seminar, and they give me a good idea of how you are reading the material and how you write.

I expect one paper every two weeks, approximately, starting with the second week's reading assignment. These papers are due at the end of the session at which a book or articles are discussed. They are not acceptable later, and they are an integral part of the seminar. To receive credit for the seminar, you must turn them in on time. I may ask students with especially interesting papers to share with the whole seminar.

"Using history" projects: 2 4-5 page papers. Everyone will write one "literacy in context" paper and select one other projects from the three areas listed. Each mini-essay is a kind of think-piece or intellectual exercise in learning about literacy, including contemporary or possible future dimensions or aspects of literacy, by a careful use of historical approaches; historical evidence, findings, or conclusions; historical and other comparisons, historical perspectives or understanding; and historical criticism. Each paper should be based at least in part on required readings and relevant class discussions. The extensive bibliography that accompanies the syllabus will also be very useful in researching and drafting these exercises. Successful approaches to each of the four very general sets of relationships will define their specific tasks, including historical times, places, and persons, as precisely as possible and set limits to the scope of the paper. Use footnotes or endnotes and other scholarly apparatus as needed.

1) Sketch "literacy in context"—what does "literacy in context" mean for a particular time, place, people, and form of literacy? Cast your responses with reference to one (or perhaps two) specific historical time(s). Consider different approaches to "contextualization" including the historical. What is different about historical context? What are its advantages? Its limits? Why do scholars—especially but not only historians—fuss so much about "context(s)"?

2) Test a theory of literacy in historical context—a historical experiment in studying the relationships between the kind of statements that claim the status of "theories" and specific historical circumstances that might support, partially support, or contradict the usefulness of the particular theory. Identifying relevant theories associated with literacy—of which the literature and the discourse on literacy are overflowing, on the one hand, and the specific grounds or situations to test it fairly, on the other hand, are critical to this project. Theories with which we are familiar relate to economics, politics, culture, society, group and individual psychology, communications, etc.

3) Probe critically and evaluate a recently proclaimed "new literacy" The proliferation of "new literacies"—from critical literacy to historical literacy, cyber literacy, emotional literacy, physical literacy, and the like is endless. While we might need to expand the language and conception of literacy and literacy studies to include multiple or plural literacies beyond "traditional alphabetic literacy," is there no end to the roll call or hit parade? What are the particular attributes, characteristics, requirements, or definitions we employ when we refer to something as a "literacy"? What are its boundaries? What kinds of status or expectations come with labeling some quality or ability as "a literacy"? How does the history of literacy help in answering these kinds of questions?

4) Future of literacy—forecast, hypothesize, speculate, judge "the future of literacy" from the perspectives of the history of literacy--drawing on your understanding of literacy in the past, its changes and continuities, and its significance. How can we use the history of literacy as a laboratory for studying literacy's futures at different times and places? What influences the development of literacy and literacies? How do those literacies become agents of change or continuity? How does history function as a laboratory for exploring multiple literacies and multiple media, and multiple languages or multilingualism? The task is to use an understanding of literacy, based at least in part on literacy's history, to help sharpen assumptions and expectations, and ponder the limits and possibilities for change and novelty in the future of literacy and literacies—if, that is, you think that literacy has a "future."

Turning in assignments
All work that is turned in for evaluation or grading should be typed, usually double-spaced, with margins of 1-1 ½ inches on all sides; printed in 12 point font, in a legible type face. No need for covers or folders. Be sure that your printer ribbon or toner allows you to produce clear copies. Follow page or word limits and meet deadlines. Follow any specific assignment requirements (formatting or endnotes or bibliography, for example). Use footnotes and endnotes as necessary and use them appropriately according to the style guide of your basic field. Commentary papers may be "semi-formal" and also use short titles (as long as they are clear) instead of footnotes. Your writing should be gender neutral as well as clear and to the point. If you have a problem, see me, if at all possible, in advance of due dates. Unacceptable work will be returned, ungraded, to you. There will be penalties for work submitted late without excuse.

Civility
Mutual respect and cooperation, during the time we spend together each week and the time you work on group assignments, are the basis for successful conduct of this course. The class is a learning community that depends on respect, cooperation, and communication among all of us. This includes coming to class on time, prepared for each day's work: reading and assignments complete, focusing on primary classroom activity, and participating. It also includes polite and respectful expression of agreement or disagreement—with support for your point of view and arguments--with other students and with the professor. It does not include arriving late or leaving early, or behavior or talking that distracts other students. Please turn off all telephones, beepers, electronic devices, etc.

Academic Honesty
Scholastic honesty is expected and required. It is a major part of university life, and contributes to the value of your university degree. All work submitted for this class must be your own. Copying or representing the work of anyone else (in print or from another student) is plagiarism and cheating. This includes the unacknowledged word for word use and/or paraphrasing of another person's work, and/or the inappropriate unacknowledged use of another person's ideas. This is unacceptable in this class and also prohibited by the University. All cases of suspected plagiarism, in accordance with university rules, may be reported to the Committee on Academic Misconduct. For information on plagiarism, see http://cstw.osu.edu/ especially http://cstw.osu.edu/writing_center/handouts/index.htm.

Writing Center
All members of the OSU community are invited to discuss their writing with a trained consultant at the Writing Center. The Center offers the following free services: Help with any assignment; One-to-one tutorials; one-to-one online tutorials via an Internet Messenger-like system (no ads or downloads); online appointment scheduling. Visit www.cstw.org or call 688-4291 to make an appointment.

Disabilities Services
The Office for Disability Services, located in 150 Pomerene Hall, offers services for students with documented disabilities. Contact the ODS at 2-3307

Class cancellation
In the unlikely event of class cancellation due to emergency, I will contact you via email and request that a note on department letterhead be placed on the classroom door. In addition, I will contact you as soon as possible following the cancellation to let you know what will be expected of you for our next class meeting.

Books
Suggested for purchase:
David Barton, Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. 2nd ed Blackwell, 2006 (1405111437)
Harvey J. Graff, ed. Literacy and Historical Development: A Reader. SIU Press, 2007 (0809327821) We will discuss its use
William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy Harvard 1989 (0-674-03380-9)
Michael T Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307:. 2nd ed Blackwell. 1993 (0-631-16857-5)
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. Johns Hopkins UP 1980 (0801843871)
Donald McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge UP, 1999) (0521-64495X)
Harvey J. Graff, The Literacy Myth: Cultural Integration and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City. Transaction, 1987 (1979) (0887388841)
Carl Kaestle, Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880. Yale UP 1991 (0300054300)
Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: The Intelligence of American Workers Viking, (2004) (0670-03282-4)
Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge, 2001 (0521003067)

Optional:
Harvey J. Graff, The Labyrinths of Literacy. exp. and rev. ed. Pittsburgh, 1995 (0-8229-5562-8)
____, The Legacies of Literacy. Indiana, 1987 (0253205980)
RA Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe. Longman, 2002 (0582368103)
David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe. Polity 2000 (0745614442)

On reserve--especially important
Robert F. Arnove and Harvey J. Graff, ed., National Literacy Campaigns in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Plenum, 1987 (0306424584)
Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, eds., Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook. Bedford/St. Martins, 2001 (0312250428)
Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling for the People. Holmes and Meier, 1985 (0841909660)

*Most books will be on Closed Reserve in the Library, esp. when marked with * Journal articles and book chapters available on carmen.osu.edu—indicated with *

Films (tentative list):
"The Return of Martin Guerre" (123) week 3
"The Wild Child" (85) week 4
"Children and Schools in 19th Century Canada" week 5
"My Brilliant Career" (101) week 6
"High School"(75) week 8

Mar. 29, 31 1. Introduction/Thinking About Literacy: Old and New

Note: suggestions for further reading listed at end of syllabus

David Barton, Literacy: An Introduction... 2nd ed. (Blackwell, 2006), chs. 1,2,3,5,8,11,13,14 (skim if you wish)

Harvey J. Graff, ed., Literacy and Historical Development [LHD] (SIU Press, 2007), Introduction and Ch. 1 by Graff

*Harvey J. Graff and John Duffy, "Literacy Myths," Encyclopedia of Language and Education, Vol. 2 Literacy, ed. Brian Street; Nancy Hornberger, general editor (Berlin and New York: Springer, 2007)

Background: Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Society and Culture. Indiana, 1987, Introduction

Rec.: Jack Goody and Ian Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy," in Literacy Traditional Societies, ed. Goody Cambridge UP 1968, 27-68 Ruth Finnegan, "Literacy versus Non-Literacy: The Great Divide," in Modes of Thought, ed. Robin Horton and Finnegan. Faber and Faber, 1973, 112-144

Issues to explore: what is literacy? how do we think about literacy? why? what differences it makes

Apr. 5, 7 2. Ancient Foundings, Ideas, Traditions & Practices

*William V, Harris, Ancient Literacy. Harvard 1989, Parts One & Two, ch. 8, & conclusion

Background: Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Society and Culture. Indiana, 1987, ch. 1

Issues to explore: literacy's origins and powers, including the powers of origins; literacy's history in theory and in fact [sic]: finding and probing narratives of literacy; ancient or classical literacy as foundation? peak? standard?

April 12, 14, 19 3. Transitions to Literacy

*Michael T Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307:. 2nd ed. Blackwell, 1993, Introduction; Part II; skim Part 1 for main points and examples See also LHD, Ch. 2 by Clanchy

Background: Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, chs. 2-3 RA Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe. Longman, 2002

Apr. 19, 21 4. From Script to Print, Oral to Written, Classical to Vernacular, and Other Misunderstood Transformations in the Passage from Tradition to Modern

LHD: chs. By Eisenstein, Grafton, Davis, Scribner Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. Johns Hopkins, 1980

*sample or skim if possible: Elizabeth Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of change. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1979; abridged edition, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. 1983

Background: Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, chs. 4-5 RA Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe

week 3-4: "The Return of Martin Guerre" (123) (tent.)

Issues to explore: lexicon and lesson in the narratives and theorizations of literacy--formulas for great changes—from oral to written, written to printed; classical to vernacular, sacred to secular; credo to ideology; elite to popular cultures; restricted to mass . . . among asserted transformations in the passages from traditional to modern; technologies; associations and correlates of literacy

Apr 19 , 21 5. Early Modernity (16-18th Centuries)

LHD Chs. by : Eisenstein, Grafton, Davis; Scribner, Houston, Spufford, Johansson
*Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling for the People. Holmes and Meier, 1985, Introduction, chs. 2, 6
*Robert Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?" and "First Steps Toward a History of Reading," in his The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (Norton 1990), 107-135; 154-190
Donald McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge UP, 1986, 1999)

Background: Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, ch. 6 R A Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe

week 5: "The Wild Child" (85) (tent.)

Issues to explore: new ideas, philosophies, theories, including prominently those associated with the Enlightenment and its precursors; aspirations for "science", psychology, and progress; competing assumptions about human nature and learning; dreams different worlds; social and economic change; challenges of tradition v. modern

Paper 1 due Week 5

Apr 26 , 28 6. The Literacy Myth: Toward Modern Ways

LHD: Chs. by Grubb, Schofield Harvey J. Graff, The Literacy Myth: Cultural Integration and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City. Transaction, 1987 (1979). Read Part I quickly if you wish

Background, 7. 8, 9: Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, chs. 6-7
David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe. Polity 2000
Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling for the People. Holmes and Meier, 1985

Rec: Mary Jo Maynes, Schooling for the People. Holmes and Meier, 1985
David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe. Polity 2000
Gabriel Tortella, ed., Education and Economic Development Since the Industrial Revolution. Generalitat Valencia, 1990

Readings on economic development and the Industrial Revolution—see Recommended
Reading below

Week 5 or 6 "Children and Schools in 19th Century Canada" (Canada's Visual History) (tent.)

Issues to explore: literacy & social, cultural, economic, and political change—theory v. experience; institutions & ideologies; relations and consequences: slavery, equality, democracy, citizenship, religion or belief, & literacy; class, race, gender, ethnicity, generation, geography, & literacy: literacy in the making of modern social relations, social structures, political systems

May 1 Heather Williams lecture—read ahead (see week 8)

May 3, 5 7. Reading and its Histories

Carl Kaestle, Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880. Yale UP 1991 skim ch. 3, read the rest See also *Robert Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?" and "First Steps Toward a History of Reading," in his The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (Norton 1990), 107-135; 154-190

Background: Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, chs. 6-7 David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy

Issues to explore Weeks 6 & 7: making and reforming people and cultures; gender, class, generation, race, ethnicity, and geography & literacy: reading, writing, culture/s: relationships, differences, and correlates; uses of literacy; making meaning; homogeneous v. difference, unity, uniformity v. fragmentation & hierarchy

May 10, 12, 17 8. Reading Women and African Americans

select: either Cornelius, When I Can Read or Williams, Self-Taught and at least one article on women reading/writing, or 3-4 articles by Nord, Horowitz, Sicherman, Kelley, Hunter, or books by Royster, McHenry

LHD: chs. by Cornelius, Sicherman

*Janet Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South. South Carolina, 1991 [if this book is not available, read her "We Slipped and Learned to Read: Slave Accounts of the Literacy Process, 1830-1860," Phylon 44 (1983) 171-186, and perhaps also E. Jennifer Monaghan, "Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy," Proceedings, American Antiquarian Society, 108 (1998), 308-341; or Daniel J. Royer, "The Process of Literacy as Communal Involvement in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass," African American Review 28 (1994), 363-374, or Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Educationin Slavery and Freedom. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2005, Williams,"'Clothing Themselves in Intelligence': The Freedpeople, Schooling, and Northern Teachers, 161-1871," Journal of African American History, (Sept., 2002)
*Barbara Sicherman, "Reading and Ambition: M. Carey Thomas and Female Heroism," American Quarterly, 45 (1993) 73-103
*_____, "Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text," in U.S. History as Women's History, ed. Linda K. Kerber et al (UNC, 1995) 245-266
*_____. "Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late-Nineteenth- Century America," in Reading in America, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (JHUP, 1989), 201-225
*Helen Horowitz, "Nous Autres: Reading, Passion, and the Creation of M. Carey Thomas," Journal of American History 79 (1992), 68-95
*Mary Kelley, "Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America," Journal of American History 83 (1996), 401-424
*David Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and their Readers. Illinois, 2001
_____, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America Oxford 2004
*Jane Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood. Yale UP 2002
Jaqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. Pittsburgh, 2000
Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Duke, 2002
*McHenry and Shirley Brice Heath, "The Literate and the Literary: African Americans as Writers and Readers—1830-1940," Written Communication, 11 (1994), 419-444 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture. North Carolina, [see Recommended below for her articles]

week 8 "My Brilliant Career" (101) (tent.)

May 17

Mike Rose Scheduled to visit OSU

May 17, 19 9. 20th C. Literacy Campaigns and their Precedents and Consequences

*Robert F. Arnove and Harvey J. Graff, ed., National Literacy Campaigns in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Plenum, 1987, Introduction and at least one or two other case study chapters, or choose from titles below, at least one of them from the twentieth century [introduction also included in Graff, Labyrinths, ch. 14]

*Paulo Freire, "The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom," in The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation (Bergin and Garvey, 1985), Chs 6, 43-65
See also:
*Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation (Bergin and Garvey, 1985), Chs 6,7,8, 43-65, 67-96, 99-108

Select from: Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, 1861-1914. California, 1986
Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861- 1917. Princeton, 1985
Evelyn Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch'ing China. Michigan 1979
Glen Peterson, The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution in South China 1949-95. UBC, 1997
Colin Lankshear with Moira Lawler, Literacy, Schooling and Revolution. Falmer, 1987
Robert Arnove, "The Nicaraguan National Literacy Crusade of 1980," Comparative Education Review, 25 (1981), 244-260
_____, Education and Revolution in Nicaragua. Praeger, 1986
_____, Education as Contested Terrain: Nicaragua, 1979-1993. Westview, 1994
Jonathan Kozol, "A New Look at the Literacy Campaign in Cuba," Harvard Educational Review, 48 (1978), 341-377
_____, Children of the Revolution. Delacorte, 1978

Issues to explore: the 20th century in the history of literacy: heir v. alien; continuities v. change; schools & other institutions; equality v. inequalities: race, ethnicity, class, gender, generations; families & the life course; democratization, social and economic opportunities; mass society & popular culture; literacy & literacies

May 31, June 2 10. The Twentieth Century in Historical Context/ The Myth of Decline & The Future of Literacy/ies

Deborah Brandt, Literacy in American Lives Cambridge, 2001

Optional: LHD: Chs. by Brandt, Dyson

Background: Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy, Epilogue
_____, The Labyrinths of Literacy, passim
David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy
Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook, Parts 5,6 & 7

"High School" (75) (tent.)

Paper 2 due Week 10

Issues to explore Weeks 9 & 10: rising or declining literacy levels or standards; threat or fear of illiteracy; technological imperatives; changing means of expression and modes of communication; keeping up, getting ahead, or falling behind; shifting needs and standards--how to tell & what differences it makes

Note: Recent writings on literacy in all its aspects including teaching and learning, the "condition of literacy," popular culture, "skills," literacy crises and responses, from a dizzying number of perspectives, are far too many to list. It's difficult not to trip over them! Caveat lector.

Sample from
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. Methuen, 1982
Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Word. Cambridge 1997
E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy. Houghton Mifflin; his followers; and their critics Henry Milner, Civic Literacy. University Press of New England, 2002
Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies. Fawcett, 1994
Peter L. Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts. Cambridge UP, 2006
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Routledge, 2000
Margaret A. Gallego and Sandra Hollingsworth, eds. What Counts as Literacy: Challenging the School Standard. Teachers College 2000
Colin Lankshear and Peter McLaren, eds, Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis, and the Postmodern. SUNY, 1993
James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear, The New Work Order Westview 1996
Ramona Fernandez, Imagining Literacy. Texas 2001
Sonja Lanehart, Sista Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy Texas 2002
Catherine Prendergast, Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education. Southern Illinois 2003
Morris Young, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric Of Citizenship. Southern Illinois 2004
Cynthia L. Selfe, Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century. Southern Illlinois, 1999
Kathleen E. Welch, Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. MIT, 1999
Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response JHUP 1994
Paul Messaris, Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality, Westview, 1994
Athur I. Miller, Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000 (1996)
Luc Pauwels, ed., Visual Cultures of Science. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2006
Mark Poster, What's the Matter with the Internet? Minnesota, 2001
Andrea A. diSessa, Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy. MIT 2000
Geoffrey Nunberg, ed.: The Future of the Book California 1996
R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds., Future Libraries. California, 1993

*Most books will be on Closed Reserve in the Library, esp. when marked with *
Journal articles and book chapters available on carmen.osu.edu—indicated with *

Recommended Reading

[Items on the course syllabus are not all repeated in these listings]

Thinking about Literacy: Old and New
D.F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. Cambridge 1999
_____, Making Meaning. Massachusetts 2002
Ellen Cushman, Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll, and Mike Rose, eds., Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook. Bedford/St. Martins, 2001, Parts 1, 2 & 4
Cambridge Histories of the Book: Great Britain
History of the Book in America
History of the Book in Canada
Albert Manguel, A History of Reading. Viking, 1996
Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds. A History of Reading in the West. Massachusetts, 1999
Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media. Polity 2002
Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media. Basic 2004
Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality. Blackwell 1998
Ronald J Diebert, Parchment, Priting, and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation. Columbia 1997
David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, eds., Book History Reader. Routledge 2002, 2nd ed. 2006
_____, An Introduction to Book History Routedge, 2005
Leslie Howsam, Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture. University of Toronto Press, 2006
Karin Littau, Theories of Reading Books, Bodies and Bibliomania. Polity Press, 2006
Andrew Elfenbein, "Cognitive Science and the History of Reading," PMLA, 121 (2006), 484-502
Kate Flint, "Women and Reading," Signs, 31 (2006), 511-536
"Minds, Bodies, Readers," New Literary History, 37 (Summer 2006)
Griswold, Wendy, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright (2005). "Reading and the reading class in the twenty-first century," Annual Reviews in Sociology, 31, 127-141.
"Studies in the Cultural History of Letter Writing," Huntington Library Quarterly, 66, 3 & 4 (2003)
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing Texas, 1992
_____, How Writing Came About. Texas, 1996

Ancient Foundings, Ideas, Traditions & Practices

Eric Havelock, The Origins of Western Literacy OISE 1976
_____, Preface to Plato. Harvard, 1963
_____, The Literate Revolution in Greece and its Consequences Princeton 1982
_____, "The Preliteracy of the Greeks," New Literary History 8 (1977), 369-392
_____, The Muse Learnings to Write. Yale, 1986
Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition & Written Record in Classical Athens. Cambridge 1989
_____, Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, 1992
Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia: An Anthropology of Reading in Ancient Greece. Cornell 1988
Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds. Cambridge 1998
Henry Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church. Yale 2003
Histories of writing: eg., H-J Martin, The History and Power of Writing. Chicago, 1994
Jean Bottero et al, Ancestors of the West. Chicago 1992
Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Bible: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea. Harvard, 2006

Transitions to Literacy

C.P. Wormald, "The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its Neighbours," Transactions, Royal Historical Society, 27 (1977). 95-111
Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word. Cambridge 1989
_____, ed. The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe. Cambridge 1990
_____, History and Memory in the Carolingian World Cambridge 2004 Matthew Innes, "Memory, Orality and Literacy in an Early Medieval Society," Past and Present. 158 (1998), 3-36
J.K. Hyde, "Some Uses of Literacy in Venice and Florence in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries," Transactions, Royal Historical Society, (1979), 109-129
Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. California, 1994
Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350-1400. Columbia 1981
____, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France. Cambridge, 1996
Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England. Cornell, 2002
Franz Bauml, "Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy," Speculum, 55 (1980), 237-265
Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy. Princeton, 1983
_____, Listening for the Text. JHUP 1990
_____, Augustine the Reader. Harvard 1996
_____, After Augustine. Penn 2001
Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Stanford, 1997
Armando Petrucci, Writers and Readers in Medieval Italy. Yale, 1995
_____, Public Lettering. Chicago, 1993
Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word. Simon and Schuster 1970 among his works
Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham, eds., The Uses of Script and Print. Cambridge 2004
Kathryn Starkey, Reading the Medieval Book. Notre Dame 2004
David Rollo, Glamorous Sorcery: Magic and Literacy in the High Middle Ages. Minnesota 2000
Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, eds., Heresy and Literacy, 1000-1530. Cambridge 1994
Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D Mignolo, eds., Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Meso-America and the Andes. Duke 2001
Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England, Yale, 2006

From Script to Print, Oral to Written, Classical to Vernacular, and . . . .

"How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution," American Historical Review 107 (2002) 84-128
Anthony T. Grafton, "The Importance of Being Printed," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11 (1980), 265-286
Michael Hunter, "The Impact of Print," The Book Collector, 28 (1979) 335-352
RA Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe. Longman, 2002
Nicholas Hudson, Writing and European Thought 1600-1830. Cambridge 1994
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Harper and Row, 1978
_____, Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy. Cambridge, 1987
_____, A Social History of Knowledge. Polity, 2000
_____, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge 2004
Burke and Roy Porter, eds., The Social History of Language. Cambridge, 1987
Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. Harvard, 1958
David Olson, The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge 1994
Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Michigan, 1995
Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago 1998
Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, eds. Books and the Sciences in History. Cambridge 2000
Mark C Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition. Notre Dame 2004
James Daybell, "Interpreting Letters and Reading Script: Evidence for Female Education and Literacy in Tudor England," History of Education, 34 (2005), 695-715
Lucien Febvre and H-J Martin, The Coming of the Book NLB 1976
H-J Martin, The History and Power of Writing. Chicago, 1994
Rudoph Hirsch, The Printed Word. Variorum Editions, 1978
Sandra L. Hindman, ed. Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books, circa 1450-1520. Cornell, 1991
David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order. Cambridge 2003
Istvan Gyorgy Toth, Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Europe. Central European University Press, 2000
Robert Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk. Cambridge UP 1981
_____, "Oral Culture and the Diffusion of Reformation Ideas," History of European Ideas, 5 (1984) 237-256
Gerald Strauss, Luther's House of Learning. JHUP 1979
Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge, 1994
Paul Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy. HUP, 1989
Susan Noakes, "The Development of the Book Market in Late Quattrocento Italy," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 11 (1981), 23-55
Anne Jacobson Schutte, "Printing, Piety, and the People in Italy," Archive for Renaissance History, 71 (1981), 5-19
Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Chicago, 2007
Stephen B. Dobranki, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms. JHUP 1980
Ginzburg's critics:
Keith Luria, "The Paradoxical Carlo Ginzburg," Radical History Review no.35 (1986) 80-87
Paola Zambelli, "From Menocchio to Piero Della Francesa: The Work of Carlo Ginzburg," Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 983-999
Dominick LaCapra, "The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Twentieth-Century Historian," in his History and Criticism (Cornell, 1985), 45-69
Anne Jacobson Schutte, "Carlo Ginzburg: Review Article," Journal of Modern History 48 (1976), 296-315
David Levine and Zubedeh Vahed, "Ginzburg's Menocchio: Refutations and Conjectures," Histoire sociale 34 (2001), 437-464
John Martin, "Journeys to the World of the Dead: The Work of Carlo Ginzburg," Journal of Social History 25 (1992), 613-626
Natalie Z Davis, Culture and Society in Early Modern France. Stanford, 1975
Keith Thomas, "The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England," in The Written Word, ed. Gerd Bauman (Oxford UP, 1986) 97-131
Margaret Aston, "Literacy and Lollardy," History, 62 (1977), 347-371
David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge 1980
Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety. Academic 1979
Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories. Methuen, 1981
Klaus-Joachim Lorenzen-Schmidt and Bjorn Poulsen, eds., Writing Peasants . . . Early Modern Northern Europe. Landbohistorisk Selskab 2002
Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700. Oxford, 2000
_____ and Daniel Woolf, eds., The Spoken Word . . . Britain 1500-1800. Manchester 2002
Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England Yale, 2000
Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Books and Readers in Early Modern England. Penn, 2002
William W E Slights, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia and English Renaissance Books. Michigan 2001
Lori Humphrey Newcomb. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. Columbia, 2002
William B Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading 1684-1750 California 1998
Margaret W Ferguson, Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France. Chicago 2003
Jane Donawerth, "Women's Reading Practices in Seventeenth-Century England: Margaret Fell's Women's Speaking Justified," Sixteenth-Century Journal, 37 (2006), 985-1005
Margaret J M Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print Johns Hopkins 1999
David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture. Princeton, 2000
Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640. Cambridge 1991
Nigel Wheale, Writing and Society . . . Britain 1590-1660. Routledge, 1999
Egil Johansson, The History of Literacy in Sweden Umea, 1977
_____, Alphabeta Varia. Orality, Reading and Writing in the History of Literacy.
Festschrift in honour of Egil Johansson on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Album Religionum Umense 1. Umea University, 1998

Nonverbal

Eugene Ferguson, "The Mind's Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology," Science, 197 (1977), 827-836
Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy. Batsford, 1972
William Ivins, Prints and Visual Communications. MIT Press 1969
Hayett Mayor, Prints and People. Princeton 1981
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: A Kitchen Sink Book for Harper Perennial, 1994 (1993).
Athur I. Miller, Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000 (1996)
Luc Pauwels, ed., Visual Cultures of Science. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2006

Early Modernity (16-18th Centuries)

John Bossy, "The Counter Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe," Past and Present no. 47 (1970), 51-70
Harvey Chisick, The Limits of Reform in the Enlightenment. Princeton, 1980
James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge, 2001
_____, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria. Cambridge, 1988
James Leith, "Introduction: Unity and Diversity in Education During the Eighteenth Century," in "Facets of Education in the Eighteenth Century," ed. Leith, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, CLXVII (1977), 13-28
_____, "TheHope for Moral Regeneration in French Educational Thought," in City and Society in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Paul Fritz and David Williams (Hakkert, 1983), 215-229
_____. "Modernization, Mass Education, and Social Mobility in French Thought," Eighteenth Century Studies, 2 (1973), 223-238
Daniel R Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge 1700- 1850
Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Oxford, 2006
Thomas Munck, "Literacy, Educational Reform and the Uses of Print in Eigthteenh -Century Denmark," European History Quarterly, 34 (2004), 275-303
Ian F. McNeely, The Emancipation of Writing: German Civil Society in the Making. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003
David M. Luebke, "Signatures and Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century Germany," Journal of Modern History, 76 (2004), 497-530

Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing: Literacy from Calvin to Jules Ferry. Cambridge 1982
Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment (Harvard 1979)
_____, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Harvard, 1982)
_____, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in Cultural History. Basic Books, 1984
_____, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections on Cultural History (Norton, 1990)
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books. Stanford 1994, ch 1
_____, Forms and Meanings Penn 1995 ch 1, 4,
_____, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century Penn, 2007
_____, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Princeton 1987
_____, On the Edge of the Cliff. JHUP, 1997 ch 6.7
_____, ed., The Culture of Print Princeton 1989
Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern. Princeton 2001
H-J Martin, "The biblioteque bleue," Publishing History, 3 (1978), 70-102
Carol Armbruster, ed. Publishing and Readership in Revolutionary France and America. Greenwood, 1993
Keith Thomas, "The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England," in The Written Word, ed. Gerd Bauman (Oxford UP, 1986) 97-131
T.W. Laqueur,"Cultural Origins of Literacy in England, 1600-1800," Oxford Review of Education, 2 (1976) 255-275
Lawrence Stone, "Literacy and Education in England, 1640-1800," Past and Present no 42 (1969), 61-139
R A Houston, Literacy in Early Modern Europe. Longman, 2002
_____, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600-1800. Cambridge 1985
_____, "The Literacy Myth? Illiteracy in Scotland, 1630-1760," Past and Present, no. 96 (1982), 81-102
_____, "The Development of Literacy: Northern England, 1640-1750," Economic History Review, 35 (1982) 199-216
Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press. Faber and Faber, 1979
Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005
James Raven, Helen small, and Naomi Tadmor, eds., The Practice and Representation of Reading in England. Cambridge, 1996
William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004
Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century England, Ireland and America. Chicago, 2006
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain 1700-1830 JHUP 1998
William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750. California 1998
Ian Hayword, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, and the People 1790- 1860. Cambridge 2004
H.J. Jackson, Romantic Readers: The Evidence of Marginalia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005
Jacqueline Pearson, Women's Reading in Britain 1750-1835. Cambridge 1999
R.M. Wiles, "Middle Class Literacy in Eighteenth Century England," in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R.F. Brissenden (Australian National UP, 1968), 49-66
_____, "Provincial Culture in Early Georgian England," in The Triumph of Culture, ed. Paul Fritz and David Williams (Hakkert, 1972), 49-68 J.H. Plumb, "The Public Literature and the Arts in the 18th Century," in ibid., 27-48
_____, "The New World of Children in Eighteenth Century England," Past and Present, no. 67 (1975), 64-95
John Feather, "Cross-Channel Currents: Historical Bibliography and L'histoire du livre," The Library, 2 (1980), 1-15
_____, The Provincial Book Trade in Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge 1985
Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience. Harper and Row, 1970
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America. Harvard 1990
Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865. Oxford UP 1989
_____, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650-1870. UNC, 1996
Robert E. Gallman, "Changes in the Level of Literacy in a New Community of Early America," Journal of Economic History, 48 (1988), 567¬82;
Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England. Norton, 1974
E. Jennifer Monaghan,. "Literacy instruction and gender in colonial New England," American Quarterly, 40 (1988) 18-41
_____. "Family literacy in early 18th-century Boston: Cotton Mather and his children," Reading Research Quarterly, 26 (1991), 342-370
_____, "'She loved to read in Good Books': Literacy and the Indians of Martha's Vinyard," History of Education Quarterly, 30 (1990),

* Joel Perlmann and Dennis Shirley, "When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?" William and Mary Quarterly, 48 (1991), 18-41

* Joel Perlmann, Silvana R. Siddali, and Keith Whitescarver, "Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching Among New England Women, 1730-1820,' History of Education Quarterly
Gloria L Main, "An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England," Journal of Social History 24 (1991)
David D Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. Harvard, 1992
David D Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book. Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1996
Hugh Amory and David D Hall, eds. A History of the Book in America. Vol I The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. American Antiquarian Society/Cambridge 2000
David D. Hall and William Joyce, eds., Needs and Opportunities in the History of the Book: America, 1639-1876. AAS, 1987
William Joyce, et al; ed., Printing and Society in Early America. AAS, 1983
Bernard Bailyn and John B Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution. AAS 1980
Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles, eds. Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America. Massachusetts, 1996
Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity. Chapel Hill; University of North Carolina Press, 2006
E. Jennifer Monaghan, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press in Association with the American Antiquarian Society, 2005
Edward G. Gray, New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America. Princeton, 1999
Albert Furtwangler, Bringing Indians to the Book. The Emil and Kathleen Sick Lecture Book Series in Western History and Biography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005
Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America. UNC 2000
Hilary E. Wyss, Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Masaschusetts, 2000
Gillian Brown, The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. Harvard 2001
Harry Stout, "Religion, Communications, and the Ideological Origins of the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 34 (1977)
Rhys Issacs, The Transformation of Virginia. 1740-1790. UNC 1982, chs. 5-6 [also WMQ 33 1976)
Richard D Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865. Oxford UP 1989
_____, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America 1650-1870. UNC Pr 1996
Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, Literacy and the rise of the common School. Chicago 1982
Bernardo P. Gallegos, Literacy, Education, and Society in New Mexico, 1693- 1821. New Mexico, 1992
Eugene Ferguson, "The Mind's Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology," Science, 197 (1977), 827-836

The Literacy Myth: Toward Modern Ways

Readings on economic development and the Industrial Revolution

Colonial period
David W. Galenson, "The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis," in Trade and the industrial revolution, 1700-1850, ed. Stanley L. Engerman Vol 2. Elgar Reference Collection. Growth of the World Economy series, vol. 2. (Elgar,1996): 331-56
_____, "The Rise of Free Labor: Economic Change and the Enforcement of Service Contracts in England, 1351-1875," Capitalism in context: Essays on economic development and cultural change in honor of R. M. Hartwell, ed. John A. James and Mark Thomas: (Chicago 1994), 114-37
_____, "Labor Market Behavior in Colonial America: Servitude, Slavery, and Free Labor," Markets in history: Economic studies of the past Cambridge, 1989, 52-96
_____, "The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis," Journal of Economic History 44 (1984) 1-26
_____, ""The Market Evaluation of Human Capital: The Case of Indentured Servitude," Journal of Political Economy 89 (1981), 446-67
_____, "Literacy and Age in Preindustrial England: Quantitative Evidence and Implications." Economic Development and Cultural Change, 29 (1981) 813-29
_____, "Immigration and the Colonial Labor System: An Analysis of the Length of Indenture," Explorations in Economic History 14 (1977), 360-77 Farley Grubb, "Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research," Social Science History, 14 (1990), 451-481
_____, "Colonial Immigrant Literacy: An Economic Analysis of Pennsylvania German Evidence, 1727 1775," Explorations in Economic History, 24 (1987), 63 76
_____, "Educational Choice in the Era Before Free Public Schooling: Evidence from German Immigrant Children in Pennsylvania, 1771-1817," Journal of Economic History, 52 (1992), 363-375

Agricultural development

Anders Nilsson, "What Do Literacy Rates Really Signify? New Light on an Old Problem from Unique Swedish Data," Paedagogica Historica, 35 (1999)
_____ and Birgitta Svard, "Writing Ability and Agrarian Change in Early Nineteenth Century Rural Scania," Scandinavian Journal of History, 19 (1994)
Anders Nilsson, et al, "Agrarian Transition and Literacy: The case of Nineteenth Century Sweden," European Review of Economic History, 1 (1999)

Industrialization

Francois Furet and Jacques Ozouf, "Literacy and Industrialization: The Case of the Department du Nord," Journal of European Economic History, 5 (1976), 5-44
Levine, David. "Illiteracy and Family Life During the First Industrial Revolution." Journal of Social History, 14 (1980), 25-44
____, "Education and Family Life in Early Industrial England," Journal of Family History, 4 (1979), 368-380
David Mitch, "The Role of Skill and Human Capital in the British Industrial Revolution," in The British Industrial Revolution. An Economic Perspective. 2nd edition. ed. Joel Mokyr (Westview, 1999), 241-279
_____, "The Rise of Popular Literacy in Europe," in The Political Construction of Education, ed. Bruce Fuller and Richard Rubinson (Praeger, 1992), 31-46
Stephen J Nicholas and Nicholas, Jacqueline M. "Male Literacy, 'Deskilling', and the Industrial Revolution." Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 23 (1992), 1-18
Stephen Nicholas and Deborah Oxley, 'The Living Standards of Women during the Industrial Revolution, 1795 - 1820," Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 46 (1993), 723-49
Stephen Nicholas and Deborah Oxley,"Living Standards of Women in England and Wales, 1785–1815: New Evidence from Newgate Prison Records," Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 49 (1996), 591-99
Stephen Nicholas and Richard H. Steckel, "Heights and Living Standards of English Workers During the Early Years of Industrialization, 1770 - 1815," Journal of Economic History, 51 (1991), 937-57
Stephen Nicholas, ed., Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia's Past. Cambridge, 1988)
Michael Sanderson, "Literacy and Social Mobility in the Industrial Revolution in England," Past and Present, 56 (1972): 75-104
E.G. West, Education and the Industrial Revolution. London & Sydney: Batsford/ Toronto: Copp Clark, 1975
E.G. West, "Literacy and the Industrial Revolution." Economic History Review, 31 (1978), 369-83
John Murray, "Literacy and industrialization in modern Germany,". in The Industrial Revolution in Comparative Perspective, ed. Christine Rider and Michéal Thompson. (Krieger Publishing, 2000), 17-32

Other economic

John Murray, "Generation(s) of human capital: Literacy in American families, 1830-1875," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 27 (1997), :413-435
_____, "Human capital in religious communes: Literacy and selection of nineteenth century Shakers," Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995),:217-235
_____, "Fates of Orphans: Poor Children in Antebellum Charleston," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 33 (2003), 519-545
_____, "Literacy Acquisition in an Orphanage: A Historical-Longitudinal Case Study," American Journal of Education, 110 (2004), 172-195
John F. Murray, "Family, Literacy, and Skill Training in the Antebellum South: Historical-Longitudinal Evidence from Charleston," Journal of Economic History, 64 (2004), 773-
David W. Galenson, "Educational Opportunity on the Urban Frontier: Nativity, Wealth, and School Attendance in Early Chicago," Economic Development and Cultural Change, 43(1995): 551-63.
_____, "Ethnicity, neighborhood, and the school attendance of boys in antebellum Boston," Journal of Urban History, 24 (1998): 603-26.
_____, "Ethnic differences in neighborhood effects on the school attendance of boys in early Chicago," History of Education Quarterly, 38 (1998), 17-35
_____,"Neighborhood effects on the school attendance of Irish immigrants' sons in Boston and Chicago in 1860," American Journal of Education, 105 (1997), 261-93

Other recommended

David Vincent, Bread, Freedom and Knowledge (Europa 1981)
____, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750-1914. Cambridge 1989
____, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe. Polity 2000
David Mitch, The Rise of Popular Vernacular Literacy in Victorian England. Penn, 1992
W B Stephens, Education, Literacy and Society, 1830-70 . . . Provincial England. Manchester, 1987
Richard Johnson, "Notes on the Schooling of the English Working Class," in Schooling and Capitalism, ed. R Dale, G Esland, and M MacDonald (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 44-55
Thomas Laqueur, "Working-Class Demand and the Growth of English Elementary Education," in Schooling and Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Johns Hopkins 1976), 192-205
Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Indiana, 1998
K C Phillipps, Language and Class in Victorian England. Blackwell, 1984
John O Jordan and Robert L Patten, eds., Literature in the Marketplace Cambridge 1995
William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835. Tennessee, 1989
Edward Stevens, Literacy, Law and Social Order. Northern Illinois 1988
Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, Literacy and the rise of the common School. Chicago 1982
_____,"Economic Aspects of School Participation in the U.S., " Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 8 (1977), 221-244
Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1865. Oxford UP 1989
_____, The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America 1650-1870. UNC Pr 1996
Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth -Century Britain and the United States. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006
David A. Gerber, Authors of their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America. New York: New York University Press, 2006
Carl F. Kaestle, "Between the Scylla of Brutal Ignorance and the Charybdis of a Literary Education: Elite Attitudes Toward Mass Schooling . . .," in Schooling and Society, ed. Lawrence Stone (Johns Hopkins, 1976) 177-191
_____, Pillars of the Republic. Hill & Wang, 1983
Kaestle and Maris Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth Century Massachusetts. Cambridge, 1980
Michael B. Katz, "The Origins of Public Education," History of Education Quarterly, 16 (1976). 381-4-8
_____, Reconstructing American Education. Harvard, 198_
Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen (Stanford 1976)
M.J. Maynes, Schooling
_____, "The Virtues of Archaism," Comparative Studies in Society and History 21 (1979), 611-625
_____, "Work or School?" in "The Making of Frenchmen," Historical Reflections, 7 (1980), 115-134
_____, Taking the Hard Road: The Life Course in French and German Workers' Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization. North Carolina, 1995
Furet and Ozouf, Reading and Writing

Reading and its Histories:

*Robert Darnton, "What Is the History of Books?" and "First Steps Toward a History of Reading," in his The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (Norton 1990), 107-135; 154-190
See also his The Great Cat Massacre (Basic 1984), and the critical response:
Roger Chartier, "Text, Symbols, Frenchness," Journal of Modern History 57 (1985), 682-695
Darnton, "The Symbolic Element in History," Journal of Modern History 58 (1986), 218-234
Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Cornell 1985) 87-94
_____, "Chartier, Darnton, and the Great Symbol Massacre," Journal of Modern History, 60 (1988), 95-112
Mark Poster, "Darnton's Historiography," The Eighteenth Century, 27 (1986), 87-92
James Fernandez, "Historians Tell Tales," Journal of Modern History 60 (1988), 113-127
Harold Mah, "Suppressing the Text: The Metaphysics of Ethnographic History in Darnton's Great Cat Massacre," History Workshop no. 31 (1998), 1-20
Jonathan Rose, "Rereading the English Common Reader," Journal of the History of Ideas, 53 (1992) 47-70
James Smith Allen, "History and the Novel," History & Theory 22 (1983), 233-252
Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America. JHUP, 1989
James L Machor, ed., Readers in History: Nineteenth Century American Literature and the Context of Response JHUP 1993
David Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and their Readers. Illinois, 2001
____, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America. Oxford 2004
Barbara Ryan and Amy M Thomas, eds., Reading Acts: U.S. Readers' Interactions with Literature 1800-1950. Tennessee 2002
Karin Littau, Theories of Reading Books, Bodies and Bibliomania. Polity Press, 2006
Andrew Elfenbein, "Cognitive Science and the History of Reading," PMLA, 121 (2006), 484-502
Kate Flint, "Women and Reading," Signs, 31 (2006), 511-536

Writing

Carolyn Steedman, The Tidy House. Virago, 1982
Susan Miller, Assuming the Position: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing. Pittsburgh, 1998
Catherine Hobbs, Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write. Virginia, 1995
Michele Moylan and Lane Stiles, eds., Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in America. Masschusetts 1996
Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen. Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh, 2002
Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. Yale 1996
Dena Goodman, "L'ortografe des dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime," French Historical Studies, 25 (2002), 191-223

Nonverbal

Daniel Calhoun, The Intelligence of a People. Princeton, 1973
Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America. Chicago, 1982
Edward Stevens, The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States. Yale, 1995
Eugene Ferguson, "The Mind's Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology," Science, 197 (1977), 827-836
_____, Engineering and the Mind's Eye. MIT, 1992
Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era. Stanford, 1999
Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Communications in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford, 1988

18-19th Centuries

Scott Casper et al, eds., Perspectives on American Book History. Massachusetts 2002
Carl Kaestle, Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley, and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880. Yale UP 1991
James P Danky and Wayne A Wiegand, eds. Print Culture in a Diverse America. Illinois, 1998
Robert A. Gross, Much Instruction from Little Reading: Books and Libraries in Thoreau's Concord. Virginia, 1988
_____, "Printing, Politics, and the People," Proceedings of the AAS 99 (1989) 375-397
____, "Reading Culture, Reading books," Proc, AAS 106 (1996)
Joseph F. Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge Under Difficulties: From Self- Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1759-1990. Stanford 1994
Joseph F. Kett and Patricia A McClung, Book Culture in Post-Revolutionary Virginia. American Antiquarian Society 1984
Mary Kupiec Cayton, "The Making of An American Prophet: Emerson, his Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth-Century America," American Historical Review 92 (1987)
Michael Schudson, Discovering the News. Basic, 1978
Thomas Leonard, News for All: America's Coming of Age with the Press. Oxford, 1995
David Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and their Readers. Illinois, 2002
David Henkin, City Reading: Written Works and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York. Columbia, 1998
James L. Machor, ed., Readers in History JHUP 1993
Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America JHUP 1989
____, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in Amerce. Oxford 1986, 2nd ed. 2004
Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture. Knopf, 1977
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. Oxford, 1985
Susan S. Williams, "Widening the World: Susan Warner, Her Readers, and the Assumption of Authorship," American Quarterly, 42 (1990), 565-586
Nina Baym, Novels, Readers and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Cornell, 1984
Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth Century America. Chicago, 1993
Michael Newbury, Figuring Authorship in Antebellum America. Stanford 1997
Michael Hackenberg, ed., Getting the Books Out. Papers of the Chicago Conference on the Book in 19th-Century America. Library of Congress, 1987
Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006
Louise L. Stevenson, "Prescripton and Reality: Reading Advisors and Reading Practice, 1860-1880," Book Research Q, 6 (1990-1991), 43-61
Isabel Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America. UNC 2000
Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public. Oxford, 1993, and many articles
Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracin Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A Peoples History of the Mass Market Book. New York: Routledge, 2005
_____, Everyday Ideas: Socioliteracy Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006
Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. Verso, 1987
Christine Pawley, Reading on the Middle Border. Massachusetts 2001
Lawrence W Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Oxford 1978
Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption Chicago, 2006
Thomas Augst, The Clerk's Tale Chicago 2003
Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women's Clubs, 1880-1920. Illinois, 1997
Daphne Desser, "Fraught-Looking: Competing Desires for Connection and Separation in the Writings of American Missionary Women in Nighteenth-Century Hawai'I," College English, 69 (2007), 443-469
Richard Ohmann, Selling Markets: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. Verso, 1996
Abigail A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture 1890-1920 Chicago 1995
Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1910. SUNY, 1994
Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1889s to 1910. Oxford, 1996
Eddy Jacalyn, Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children's Book Publishing 1919- 1939. Wisconsin, 2006
Morris Young, Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship. Southern Illinois 2004
Catherine Prendergast, "The Economy of Literacy: How the Supreme Court Stalled the Civil Rights Movement," Harvard Educational Review 72 (2002) 206-229
_____, Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education. Southern Illinois 2003
Robert Darnton (see above)
James Smith Allen, In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France 1800-1940. Princeton, 1991
_____, "Toward a Social History of French Romanticism," Journal of Social History, 13 (1979), 253-276
Martyn Lyons, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women, Peasants. Palgrave 2001
Ronald Fullerton, "Creating a Mass Book Markets in Germany," Journal of Social History 10 (1977), 265-283
_____, "Toward a Popular Culture in Germany," ibid., 12 (1979),
R.K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader. Allen & Unwin, 1955
Richard Altick, The English Common Reader Chicago 1957
Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837-1914. Oxford 1993
Jacqueline Pearson, Women's Reading in Britain, 1750-1835: A Dangerous Recreation Cambridge 1999
Carolyn Steedman, "Poetical Maids and Cooks Who Write," Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39 (2005), 1-27
Sally Mitchell, "Sentiment and Suffering: Women's Recreational Reading," Victorian Studies 21 (1977), 29-45
Sian K. Pooley and Colin G. Pooley, "'Such a Splendid Tale': The Late Nineteeth- Century World of a Young Female Reader," Cultural and Social History 2 (2005), 329-351
Victor Neuberg, Popular Literature. Penguin 1977
_____, "The Literature of the Streets," in The Victorian City, ed. H.J. Dyos and
Michael Wolff (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973) I: 191-210
James Walvin, Leisure and Society. Longman, 1978
G.A. Cranfield, The Press and Society. Longman, 1978
Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man. Oxford UP, 1963
A.J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press. Croom Helm, 1974
Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England. Toronto, 1978
Jane Mace, Playing With Time: Mothers and the Meaning of Literacy. UCL 1988
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Yale, 2001

20th Century

Gideon Reuveni, Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933. Berghan, 2006
Jane Mace, Playing With Time: Mothers and the Meaning of Literacy. UCL 1988
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. Yale, 2001
Dorothy Sheridan, Brian Street, and David Bloome, eds., Writing Ourselves: Mass-Observation and Literacy Practices. Hampton, 2000
Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy. 1957
Raymond Williams--works
Joan Shelly Rubin, The Making of Middle Brow Culture. UNC 1992
_____, "Self, Culture and Self-Culture in Modern American: The Early History of the Book-of-the-Month Club," Journal of American History 71 (1985), 782-806
_____, "'Information, Please!' Culture and Expertise in the Interwar Period," American Quarterly, 35 (1983) 499-517
Joan Shelley Rubin, Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. Harvard University Press, 2007
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture. UNC
_____, A Feeling for Books: The Book-Of-The-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire UNC 1997
_____, "The Book of the Month Club and the General Reader: On the Uses of Serious Fiction," in Reading, ed. Davidson 259-284
_____, "Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies," Daedalus 113 ( Summer 1984), 49-73
_____, "Reading is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor," Book Research Quarterly 2 (1986) 7-29
_____, "Women read the romance," Feminist Studies, 9 (1983) 53-78

Reading Women and African Americans

African American

*Janet Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South. South Carolina, 1991
_____, "We Slipped and Learned to Read: Slave Accounts of the Literacy Process, 1830-1860," Phylon 44 (1983) 171-186
E. Jennifer Monaghan, "Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy," Proceedings, American Antiquarian Society, 108 (1998), 308-341
Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005
Thomas Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community. Norton 1978
Robert C Morris, Reading, Riting, and Reconstruction: The Education of Freedmen in the South, 1861-1871. Chicago 1976
Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. Pittsburgh, 2000
Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Duke, 2002
David Freedman, "African-American Schooling in the South Prior to 1861," Journal of Negro History, 84 (1999), 1¬47
Daniel J. Royer, "The Process of Literacy as Communal Involvement in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass," African American Review 28 (1994), 363-374
Allen Dwight Callahan, The Talking Book: African Americans and the Bible. Yale, 2006

Women Reading

Kate Flint, "Women and Reading," Signs, 31 (2006), 511-536
James L. Machor, ed., Readers in History Johns Hopkins 1993
Cathy N. Davidson, ed., Reading in America Johns Hopkins 1989
James P. Danky and Wayne A. Wiegand, eds., Women in Print: Essays on the Print Culture of American Women from the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006
Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas, eds., Reading Acts: U.S. Readers' Interactions with Literature, 1800-1950. Tennessee, 2002
David Nord, Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and their Readers. Illinois, 200
Helen Horowitz, "Nous Autres: Reading, Passion, and the Creation of M."
Carey Thomas," Journal of American History 79 (1992), 68-95
Barbara Sicherman, "Reading and Ambition: M. Carey Thomas and Female Heroism," American Quarterly, 45 (1993) 73-103
_____, "Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text," in U.S. History as Women's History, ed. Linda K. Kerber et al (UNC, 1995) 245-266
_____. "Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women's Reading in Late- Nineteenth-Century America," in Reading in America, ed. Davison, 201-225
Mary Kelley, "Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum America," Journal of American History 83 (1996), 401-424
Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006
Jane Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood. Yale UP 2002
Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. Oxford 1986
Linda J. Docherty, "Women as Readers: Visual Representations," Proceedings of the AAS, 107 (1997), 335-388
Anne Ruggles Gere, Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women's Clubs, 1880-1920. Illinois, 1997
Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1910. SUNY, 1994
Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1889s to 1910. Oxford, 1996
Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarch, and Popular Culture. UNC
Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs. Chicago 2002
Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837-1914. Oxford 1993
Sally Mitchell, "Sentiment and Suffering: Women's Recreational Reading," Victorian Studies 21 (1977), 29-45
Jane Mace, Playing With Time: Mothers and the Meaning of Literacy. UCL 1988

Writing

Dena Goodman, "L'ortografe des dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime," French Historical Studies, 25 (2002), 191-223
Carolyn Steedman, The Tidy House. Virago, 1982
Susan Miller, Assuming the Position: Cultural Pedagogy and the Politics of Commonplace Writing. Pittsburgh, 1998
Catherine Hobbs, Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write. Virginia, 1995
Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen. Imagining Rhetoric: Composing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh, 2002
Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History. Yale 1996
Jane Hunter, How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood. Yale UP 2002
Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univerdity Press, 2006

20th C. Literacy Campaigns and their Precedents and Consequences

Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools, 1861-1914. California, 1986
Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917. Princeton, 1985
Evelyn Rawski, Education and Popular Literacy in Ch'ing China. Michigan 1979
Glen Peterson, The Power of Words: Literacy and Revolution in South China 1949-95. UBC, 1997
Colin Lankshear with Moira Lawler, Literacy, Schooling and Revolution. Falmer, 1987
Robert Arnove, "The Nicaraguan National Literacy Crusade of 1980," Comparative Education Review, 25 (1981), 244-260
_____, Education and Revolution in Nicaragua. Praeger, 1986
_____, Education as Contested Terrain: Nicaragua, 1979-1993. Westview, 1994 Jonathan Kozol, "A New Look at the Literacy Campaign in Cuba," Harvard Educational Review, 48 (1978), 341-377
_____, Children of the Revolution. Delacorte, 1978

Literacies and Lives

Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared. Free Press, 1989
Mike Rose, The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker. New York: Viking, 2004
Ralph Cintron, Angels' Towns: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and Rhetorics of the Everyday. Beacon, 1997
Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. Crown, 1965
_____, Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope. Crown, 2000
Shirley Brice Heath, Ways With Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Class Rooms. Cambridge, 1983
David Barton and Mary Hamilton. Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community. Routledge, 1998
David Barton, Mary Hamilton, and Roz Ivanic, eds. Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. Routledge, 2000
Eve Gregory and Ann Williams, City Literacies: Learning to Read Across Generations and Cultures. 2000

The Twentieth Century in Historical Context/ The Myth of Decline & The Future of Literacy/ies [a very selective listing]

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy. Methuen, 1982
Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Word. Cambridge 1997
E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy. Houghton Mifflin; his followers; and their critics
Henry Milner, Civic Literacy. University Press of New England, 2002
Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies. Fawcett, 1994
New London Group, "A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies designing Social Futures," in Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures, ed. Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (Routledge, 2000), 9-37 (also Harvard Educational Review, 1996)
Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. Multiliteracies: Literacy Learning and the Design of Social Futures. Routledge, 2000
Margaret A. Gallego and Sandra Hollingsworth, eds. What Counts as Literacy: Challenging the School Standard. Teachers College 2000
Colin Lankshear and Peter McLaren, eds, Critical Literacy: Politics, Praxis, and the Postmodern. SUNY, 1993
James Paul Gee, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear, The New Work Order Westview 1996
Ramona Fernandez, Imagining Literacy. Texas 2001
Sonja Lanehart, Sista Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talke about Language and Literacy Texas 2002
Susan Kates, "Literacy, Voting Rights, and the Citizenship Schools in the South, 1957 -1970," CCC 57 (2006), 479-502
David P. Levine, "The Birth of the Citizenship Schools: Entwining the Struggles for Literacy and Freedom," History of Education Quyarterly, 44 (2005), 388-414
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: A Kitchen Sink Book for Harper Perennial, 1994 (1993).
Athur I. Miller, Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000 (1996)
Luc Pauwels, ed., Visual Cultures of Science. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2006
Cynthia L. Selfe, Technology and Literacy in the 21st Century. Southern Illlinois, 1999
Kathleen E. Welch, Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. MIT, 1999
Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader's Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response JHUP 1994
Mark Poster, What's the Matter with the Internet? Minnesota, 2001
Andrea A. diSessa, Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy. MIT 2000
Geoffrey Nunberg, ed.: The Future of the Book California 1996
R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds., Future Libraries. California, 1993
Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin, eds., The Right to Literacy MLA, 1990
Ira Shor, Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for Social Change Chicago 1992
Griswold, Wendy, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright (2005). "Reading and the reading class in the twenty-first century," Annual Reviews in Sociology, 31, 127-141.