Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America

Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America PDF Author: E. Jennifer Monaghan
Publisher: Studies in Print Culture and t
ISBN: 9781558495814
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
An experienced teacher of reading and writing and an award-winning historian, E. Jennifer Monaghan brings to vibrant life the process of learning to read and write in colonial America. Ranging throughout the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia, she examines the instruction of girls and boys, Native Americans and enslaved Africans, the privileged and the poor, revealing the sometimes wrenching impact of literacy acquisition on the lives of learners. For the most part, religious motives underlay reading instruction in colonial America, while secular motives led to writing instruction. Monaghan illuminates the history of these activities through a series of deeply researched and readable case studies. An Anglican missionary battles mosquitoes and loneliness to teach the New York Mohawks to write in their own tongue. Puritan fathers model scriptural reading for their children as they struggle with bereavement. Boys in writing schools, preparing for careers in counting houses, wield their quill pens in the difficult task of mastering a "good hand." Benjamin Franklin learns how to compose essays with no teacher but himself. Young orphans in Georgia write precocious letters to their benefactor, George Whitefield, while schools in South Carolina teach enslaved black children to read but never to write. As she tells these stories, Monaghan clears new pathways in the analysis of colonial literacy. She pioneers in exploring the implications of the separation of reading and writing instruction, a topic that still resonates in today's classrooms. Monaghan argues that major improvements occurred in literacy instruction and acquisition after about 1750, visible in rising rates of signature literacy. Spelling books were widely adopted as they key text for teaching young children to read; prosperity, commercialism, and a parental urge for gentility aided writing instruction, benefiting girls in particular. And a gentler vision of childhood arose, portraying children as more malleable than sinful. It promoted and even commercialized a new kind of children's book designed to amuse instead of convert, laying the groundwork for the "reading revolution" of the new republic.

Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America

Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America PDF Author: E. Jennifer Monaghan
Publisher: Studies in Print Culture and t
ISBN: 9781558495814
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
An experienced teacher of reading and writing and an award-winning historian, E. Jennifer Monaghan brings to vibrant life the process of learning to read and write in colonial America. Ranging throughout the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia, she examines the instruction of girls and boys, Native Americans and enslaved Africans, the privileged and the poor, revealing the sometimes wrenching impact of literacy acquisition on the lives of learners. For the most part, religious motives underlay reading instruction in colonial America, while secular motives led to writing instruction. Monaghan illuminates the history of these activities through a series of deeply researched and readable case studies. An Anglican missionary battles mosquitoes and loneliness to teach the New York Mohawks to write in their own tongue. Puritan fathers model scriptural reading for their children as they struggle with bereavement. Boys in writing schools, preparing for careers in counting houses, wield their quill pens in the difficult task of mastering a "good hand." Benjamin Franklin learns how to compose essays with no teacher but himself. Young orphans in Georgia write precocious letters to their benefactor, George Whitefield, while schools in South Carolina teach enslaved black children to read but never to write. As she tells these stories, Monaghan clears new pathways in the analysis of colonial literacy. She pioneers in exploring the implications of the separation of reading and writing instruction, a topic that still resonates in today's classrooms. Monaghan argues that major improvements occurred in literacy instruction and acquisition after about 1750, visible in rising rates of signature literacy. Spelling books were widely adopted as they key text for teaching young children to read; prosperity, commercialism, and a parental urge for gentility aided writing instruction, benefiting girls in particular. And a gentler vision of childhood arose, portraying children as more malleable than sinful. It promoted and even commercialized a new kind of children's book designed to amuse instead of convert, laying the groundwork for the "reading revolution" of the new republic.

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism

Critical Perspectives on Colonialism PDF Author: Fiona Paisley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136274618
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
This collection brings much-needed focus to the vibrancy and vitality of minority and marginal writing about empire, and to their implications as expressions of embodied contact between imperial power and those negotiating its consequences from "below." The chapters explore how less powerful and less privileged actors in metropolitan and colonial societies within the British Empire have made use of the written word and of the power of speech, public performance, and street politics. This book breaks new ground by combining work about marginalized figures from within Britain as well as counterparts in the colonies, ranging from published sources such as indigenous newspapers to ordinary and everyday writings including diaries, letters, petitions, ballads, suicide notes, and more. Each chapter engages with the methodological implications of working with everyday scribblings and asks what these alternate modernities and histories mean for the larger critique of the "imperial archive" that has shaped much of the most interesting writing on empire in the past decade.

Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future

Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future PDF Author: Nancy K. Florida
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822316220
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
Located at the juncture of literature, history, and anthropology, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future charts a strategy of how one might read a traditional text of non-Western historical literature in order to generate, with it, an opening for the future. This book does so by taking seriously a haunting work of historical prophecy inscribed in the nineteenth century by a royal Javanese exile--working through this writing of a colonized past to suggest the reconfiguration of the postcolonial future that this history itself apparently intends. After introducing the colonial and postcolonial orientalist projects that would fix the meaning of traditional writing in Java, Nancy K. Florida provides a nuanced translation of this particular traditional history, a history composed in poetry as the dream of a mysterious exile. She then undertakes a richly textured reading of the poem that discloses how it manages to escape the fixing of "tradition." Adopting a dialogic strategy of reading, Florida writes to extend--as the work's Javanese author demands--this history's prophetic potential into a more global register. Babad Jaka Tingkir, the historical prophecy that Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future translates and reads, is uniquely suited for such a study. Composing an engaging history of the emergence of Islamic power in central Java around the turn of the sixteenth century, Babad Jaka Tingkir was written from the vantage of colonial exile to contest the more dominant dynastic historical traditions of nineteenth-century court literature. Florida reveals how this history's episodic form and focus on characters at the margins of the social order work to disrupt the genealogical claims of conventional royal historiography--thus prophetically to open the possibility of an alternative future.

Colonial America

Colonial America PDF Author: Richard Middleton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444396285
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 579

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Book Description
Colonial America: A History to 1763, 4th Edition provides updated and revised coverage of the background, founding, and development of the thirteen English North American colonies. Fully revised and expanded fourth edition, with updated bibliography Includes new coverage of the simultaneous development of French, Spanish, and Dutch colonies in North America, and extensively re-written and updated chapters on families and women Features enhanced coverage of the English colony of Barbados and trans-Atlantic influences on colonial development Provides a greater focus on the perspectives of Native Americans and their influences in shaping the development of the colonies

Written Culture in a Colonial Context

Written Culture in a Colonial Context PDF Author: Adrien Delmas
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004223894
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Exploring the extent to which the control over the materiality of writing has shaped the numerous and complex processes of cultural exchange from the 16th century onwards, this book introduces the specifities of written culture anchored in colonial contexts.

Dwelling in the Archive

Dwelling in the Archive PDF Author: Antoinette M. Burton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195144253
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Through an analysis of the writings of three 20th century Indian women, this book explores how the memoirs, fictions, and histories written by women can be read as counter-narratives of colonial modernity.

Webs of Empire

Webs of Empire PDF Author: Tony Ballantyne
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774827718
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
Breaking open colonization to reveal tangled cultural and economic networks, Webs of Empire offers new paths into colonial history. Linking Gore and Chicago, Maori and Asia, India and newspapers, whalers and writing, Ballantyne presents empire building as a spreading web of connected places, people, ideas, and trade. These links question narrow, national stories, while broadening perspectives on the past and the legacies of colonialism that persist today. Bringing together essays from two decades of prolific publishing on international colonial history, Webs of Empire establishes Tony Ballantyne as one of the leading historians of the British Empire.

African History: A Very Short Introduction

African History: A Very Short Introduction PDF Author: John Parker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192802488
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
Intended for those interested in the African continent and the diversity of human history, this work looks at Africa's past and reflects on the changing ways it has been imagined and represented. It illustrates key themes in modern thinking about Africa's history with a range of historical examples.

History's Imprint

History's Imprint PDF Author: Lindsay Erin Marks DiCuirci
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation is divided into three parts and each analyzes the nineteenth-century construction of a particular epoch of colonial history: Columbus's discovery of the Caribbean, England's settlement of Virginia, and the Puritans' landing in New England. This organization reflects both the regional variations evident in nineteenth-century historical writing and the ideological underpinnings of these vastly different colonial narratives. My analysis reveals that colonial history became contested territory in the nineteenth century as writers and readers grappled with the notion of American exceptionalism---a belief in America's unique role in modern history---and as they sought to locate the roots of democracy. Using the methodologies of book history and literary criticism, my dissertation enriches studies of American literary history, print culture, regionalism, and transnationalism.

Writing Postcolonial History

Writing Postcolonial History PDF Author: Rochona Majumdar
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9780340949993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Writing Postcolonial History addresses the relationship between postcolonial theory and history. It provides students with critical analyses of postcolonial histories from around the world. In addition, it discusses the benefits and shortcomings of this form of writing by situating postcolonial history amid other modes of historical inquiry. The field of postcolonial history is complex. Even though many scholars share a set of commonalities, there are still important differences in emphasis. Through discussion of key texts, Writing Postcolonial History provides students with an accessible analysis and overview of the key areas of debate. This book is an effort to address the relationship between postcolonial theory and history; a regional critique of postcolonial theory; a consideration of the relative merits and drawbacks of postcolonial historical writing.