Hidden Literacies: An Introduction
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 Nov 202224min
Hidden in the Archives
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 Nov 202217min
Interview with Katy Chiles on “Phillis Wheatley, Amanuensis – a letter from Susanna"
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 Nov 202219min
Interview with Matt Cohen on “Walt Whitman’s Baby Talk”
"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 Nov 202225min
Interview with Andrew Newman on “Permit Us to Speak Plainly”
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 Nov 202215min
Interview with Karen Sanchez-Eppler on "Juvenile Journalism and Genocide"
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 Nov 202224min
Interview with Caroline Wigginton on “Visions, Versions, and Deeds”
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 Nov 202211min
