A Literate South

A Literate South PDF Author: Beth Barton Schweiger
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300245394
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
A provocative examination of literacy in the American South before emancipation, countering the long-standing stereotype of the South’s oral tradition Schweiger complicates our understanding of literacy in the American South in the decades just prior to the Civil War by showing that rural people had access to a remarkable variety of things to read. Drawing on the writings of four young women who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Schweiger shows how free and enslaved people learned to read, and that they wrote and spoke poems, songs, stories, and religious doctrines that were circulated by speech and in print. The assumption that slavery and reading are incompatible—which has its origins in the eighteenth century—has obscured the rich literate tradition at the heart of Southern and American culture.

A Literate South

A Literate South PDF Author: Beth Barton Schweiger
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300245394
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
A provocative examination of literacy in the American South before emancipation, countering the long-standing stereotype of the South’s oral tradition Schweiger complicates our understanding of literacy in the American South in the decades just prior to the Civil War by showing that rural people had access to a remarkable variety of things to read. Drawing on the writings of four young women who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Schweiger shows how free and enslaved people learned to read, and that they wrote and spoke poems, songs, stories, and religious doctrines that were circulated by speech and in print. The assumption that slavery and reading are incompatible—which has its origins in the eighteenth century—has obscured the rich literate tradition at the heart of Southern and American culture.

Self-Taught

Self-Taught PDF Author: Heather Andrea Williams
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807888974
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended. Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.

Xhosa Oral Poetry

Xhosa Oral Poetry PDF Author: Jeff Opland
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521241137
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
This book, first published in 1983, was the first detailed study of the Xhosa oral poetry tradition.

World Literacy

World Literacy PDF Author: John W. Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317437985
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 229

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Book Description
International literacy assessments have provided ample data for ranking nations, charting growth, and casting blame. Summarizing the findings of these assessments, which afford a useful vantage from which to view world literacy as it evolves, this book examines literate behavior worldwide, in terms of both the ability of populations from a wide variety of nations to read and the practice of literate behavior in those nations. Drawing on The World’s Most Literate Nations, author Jack Miller’s internationally released study, emerging trends in world literacy and their relationships to political, economic, and social factors are explored. Literacy, and in particular the practice of literate behaviors, is used as a lens through which to view countries’ economic development, gender equality, resource utilization, and ethnic discrimination. Above all, this book is about trajectories. It begins with historical contexts, described in terms of support for literate cultures. Based on a variety of data sources, these trends are traced to the present and then projected ahead. The literate futures of nations are discussed and how these relate to their economic and sociocultural development. This book is unique in providing a broader perspective on an intractable problem, a vantage point that offers useful insights to inform policy, and in bringing together an array of relevant data sources not typically associated with literacy status.

The Making of Literate Societies

The Making of Literate Societies PDF Author: David R. Olson
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631227434
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This volume provides a systematic analysis of the role of literacy in social development, and advances a set of directions that governments and other agencies should take in designing their literacy programmes.

Word by Word

Word by Word PDF Author: Christopher Hager
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674067487
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
One of the cruelest abuses of slavery in America was that slaves were forbidden to read and write. Consigned to illiteracy, they left no records of their thoughts and feelings apart from the few exceptional narratives of Frederick Douglass and others who escaped to the North—or so we have long believed. But as Christopher Hager reveals, a few enslaved African Americans managed to become literate in spite of all prohibitions, and during the halting years of emancipation thousands more seized the chance to learn. The letters and diaries of these novice writers, unpolished and hesitant yet rich with voice, show ordinary black men and women across the South using pen and paper to make sense of their experiences. Through an unprecedented gathering of these forgotten writings—from letters by individuals sold away from their families, to petitions from freedmen in the army to their new leaders, to a New Orleans man’s transcription of the Constitution—Word by Word rewrites the history of emancipation. The idiosyncrasies of these untutored authors, Hager argues, reveal the enormous difficulty of straddling the border between slave and free. These unusual texts, composed by people with a unique perspective on the written word, force us to rethink the relationship between literacy and freedom. For African Americans at the end of slavery, learning to write could be liberating and empowering, but putting their hard-won skill to use often proved arduous and daunting—a portent of the tenuousness of the freedom to come.

Sustaining literacy in Africa: developing a literate environment

Sustaining literacy in Africa: developing a literate environment PDF Author: Easton, Peter
Publisher: UNESCO
ISBN: 9230012300
Category : Literacy
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
This publication contributes, in the critical context of Africa, to the conceptual development of the notion of the literate environment--an essential element for the promotion of literacy. It brings knowledge and insights about literate environments, highlighting inter-related issues such as its definitions, previous undertakings, methods of assessment as well as interactions between the supply and demand sides of environments.--

Away Down South

Away Down South PDF Author: James C. Cobb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198025017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
From the seventeenth century Cavaliers and Uncle Tom's Cabin to Civil Rights museums and today's conflicts over the Confederate flag, here is a brilliant portrait of southern identity, served in an engaging blend of history, literature, and popular culture. In this insightful book, written with dry wit and sharp insight, James C. Cobb explains how the South first came to be seen--and then came to see itself--as a region apart from the rest of America. As Cobb demonstrates, the legend of the aristocratic Cavalier origins of southern planter society was nurtured by both northern and southern writers, only to be challenged by abolitionist critics, black and white. After the Civil War, defeated and embittered southern whites incorporated the Cavalier myth into the cult of the "Lost Cause," which supplied the emotional energy for their determined crusade to rejoin the Union on their own terms. After World War I, white writers like Ellen Glasgow, William Faulkner and other key figures of "Southern Renaissance" as well as their African American counterparts in the "Harlem Renaissance"--Cobb is the first to show the strong links between the two movements--challenged the New South creed by asking how the grandiose vision of the South's past could be reconciled with the dismal reality of its present. The Southern self-image underwent another sea change in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, when the end of white supremacy shook the old definition of the "Southern way of life"--but at the same time, African Americans began to examine their southern roots more openly and embrace their regional, as well as racial, identity. As the millennium turned, the South confronted a new identity crisis brought on by global homogenization: if Southern culture is everywhere, has the New South become the No South? Here then is a major work by one of America's finest Southern historians, a magisterial synthesis that combines rich scholarship with provocative new insights into what the South means to southerners and to America as well.

Race and Schooling in the South, 1880-1950

Race and Schooling in the South, 1880-1950 PDF Author: Robert A. Margo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226505107
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
Robert A. Margo mines a wealth of newly available census data and school district records to explore the experience of blacks in the American economy. Identifying the links between educational expenditures, racial discrimination, and occupational mobility, he clarifies the costs of segregation.

South Asian in the Mid-South

South Asian in the Mid-South PDF Author: Iswari P. Pandey
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 9780822963783
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Winner of the 2017 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award. In an age of global anxiety and suspicion, South Asian immigrants juggle multiple cultural and literate traditions in Mid-South America. In this study Iswari P. Pandey looks deeply into this community to track the migration of literacies, showing how different meaning-making practices are adapted and reconfigured for cross-language relations and cross-cultural understanding at sites as varied as a Hindu school, a Hindu women’s reading group, Muslim men’s and women’s discussion groups formed soon after 9/11, and cross-cultural presentations by these immigrants to the host communities and law enforcement agencies. Through more than seventy interviews, he reveals the migratory nature of literacies and the community work required to make these practices meaningful. Pandey addresses critical questions about language and cultural identity at a time of profound change. He examines how symbolic resources are invented and reinvented and circulated and recirculated within and across communities; the impact of English and new technologies on teaching, learning, and practicing ancestral languages; and how gender and religious identifications shape these practices. Overall, the book offers a thorough examination of the ways individuals use interpretive powers for agency within their own communities and for cross-cultural understanding in a globalizing world and what these practices mean for our understanding of that world.