Hidden Literacies

Hidden Literacies brings together leading scholars of historical literacy to investigate the surprising, often neglected roles reading and writing have played in the lives of marginalized Americans—fr...

1 Marras 20221min

Hidden Literacies is an archive of a sort that most people—even many students and teachers of American literature—have not seen. It includes texts created by people who weren’t formally educated or wh...

1 Marras 202224min

However texts that survive are created, used, and preserved, it is invariably the case that archiving serves other interests than those of the creators. A whole host of people render judgments on a te...

1 Marras 202217min

A letter from a prosperous Boston matron may not seem a surprising or noteworthy exercise of literacy -- until it appears, as scholar Katy Chiles proposes, that the handwriting of the letter likely be...

1 Marras 202219min

"In the spring of 1875, the poet Walt Whitman, then living in Camden, New Jersey, received an unusual piece of fan mail from the South..." With wry understatement, so begins Matt Cohen's commentary o...

1 Marras 202225min

Members of the Munsee community had been displaced to present-day Kansas by the 1840s, but they well recalled their northeastern homelands and knew what befell their ancestors more than two centuries ...

1 Marras 202215min

A group of boys in 1890s New Hampshire played at writing, editing, and publishing a manuscript magazine about an elaborate fictional world based on their own back yard. Their writing deftly mimicked ...

1 Marras 202224min

At first glance, the archives show her to be Mary Bosomworth, wife of an English colonist, bereft of a voice or any rights separate from his. But a careful reading reveals Coosaponakeesa, a Creek "la...

1 Marras 202211min