Abstract
When Samuel Goodrich, using the pseudonym “Peter Parley,” looked back at his boyhood town of Ridgefield, Connecticut in 1790, he recalled a time when books were “scarce, [when they] were read respectfully, and [were read] as if they were grave matters, demanding thought and attention.” “They were not,” he continued, “toys and pastimes, taken up every day, and by everybody, in the short intervals of labor, and then, hastily dismissed, like waste paper.” In the mid-nineteenth century, observed Goodrich, books and papers are “diffused even among country towns, so as to be in the hands of all, young and old.”1
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Notes
Samuel Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, Vol. I (New York, 1857) cited in David D. Hall, “Introduction: The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600-1850,” in William L. Joyce, David D. Hall, Richard D. Brown, and John B. Hench, eds., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1983), p. 21.
This problem of disassociating the effects of literacy from the effect of schooling is dealt with at length in Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole, The Psychology of Literacy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
See Johan Galtung, “Literacy, Education and Schooling—For What?,” in Literacy and Social Development in the West, A Reader (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 271.
The seminal work on social reproduction theory remains Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
For recent adaptations to curriculum theory see Michael Apple and L. Weiss, Ideology and Practice in Schooling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).
Jean Anyon, “Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of work,” Journal of Education 162 (Winter 1980), 67–92.
Henry Giroux and David Purpel, eds., The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education: Deception or Discovery (Berkeley, Ca.: McCutchan, 1983).
Robert L. Church and Michael Sedlak, Education in the United States, an Interpretive History (New York: The Free Press, 1976), pp. 79–80.
Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 112.
Lee Soltow and Edward Stevens, The Rise of Literacy and the Common School in the United States: A Socioeconomic Analysis to 1870 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 35, 39, 50, 52, 208n.
Edward Stevens, “Literacy and the Worth of Liberty,” Historical Social Research 34 (April 1985), pp. 65–81.
Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: W. Norton, 1974), passim; Soltow and Stevens, Rise of Literacy, pp. 55-56, 167-171, 175-176, 194-195.
See Graff, The Literacy Myth, Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England, David Cressy, Education in Tudor and Stuart England (New York and London: St. Martin, 1976).
William Gilmore, Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: Trends in Rural New England, 1760-1830 (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1982).
Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Histoncal Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, trans. June Barraclough (New York: Noonday, 1955), pp. 99–100.
Josiah Holbrook, “Scientific Epoch,” Journal of the United States Agricultural Society 1 (July 1853), p. 84.
A. Fothergill, “On the Application of Chemistry to Agricultural and Rural Economy,” Agricultural Museum 2 (1811), p. 119.
Estimates for the circulation of these periodicals are difficult to make. Jesse Buel optimistically estimated that in 1838, the thirty journals then in existence reached 100,000 (20%) of the farm families in the country. Demaree has estimated a total circulation of 350,000 in 1860. The great majority probably had less than 4,000 subscribers. The American Agriculturist, a leader in its field, printed 80,000 copies of its November, 1859 issue. (See Albert Lowther Demaree, The American Agricultural Press, 1819-1860 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1941], pp. 18, 56-57.)
Lucius Davis, Improving the Farm, or Methods of Culture that Shall Afford a Profit and at the Same Time Increase Fertility of the Soil (New York: Rural Publishing Co., 1867), p. 12.
B. Edward McClellan, “Public Education and Social Harmony: The Roots of an American Dream,” Educational Theory 35 (Winter 1985), p. 34.
Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) p. 79.
Thomas Jefferson, “A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” in Wilson Smith, ed., Theories of Education in Early America, 1655-1819 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), p. 233.
Thomas Cooper, “Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy,” in Rush Welter, ed., American Writings on Popular Education, The Nineteenth Century (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), p. 15.
Timothy L. Smith, “Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800-1850,” Journal of American History 53 (March 1967), p. 680.
Cedric B. Cowing, The Great Awakening and the American Revolution: Colonial Thought in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971), p. 203.
Daniel P. Resnick and Lauren Resnick, “The Nature of Literacy: An Historical Explanation,” Harvard Educational Review 47 (1977), p. 383.
John McLeish, Evangelical Religion and Popular Education (London: Methuen & Co. 1969), pp. 19–20, 55-56.
Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800-1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 73–76.
T. Scott Miyakawa, Protestants and Pioneers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p. 110.
Ibid., p. 63. Joseph Story, “A Discourse Pronounced at Cambridge, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Aug., 1826,” in E. B. Williston, ed., Eloquence of the United States 5 (Middletown, Conn.: E. and H. Clark, 1827), pp. 419–420.
Jennifer E. Monaghan, A Common Heritage, Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1983), pp. 38–39.
Jennifer E. Monaghan, A Common Heritage, Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1983), p. 73.
Jennifer E. Monaghan, A Common Heritage, Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller (Hamden, Conn.: Shoe String Press, 1983), pp. 97–99.
John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, Vol. I (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1972), pp. 217, 533, 552.
David Paul Nord, “The Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America, 1815-1835,” Journalism Monographs 98 (May 1984), p. 3.
Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1955), p. 236.
William G. Lewis, Biography of Samuel Lewis (Cincinnati: R. P. Thompson, 1857), pp. 179, 212, 244-245.
Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Boston; Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 130–131.
Ruth M. Elson, Guardians of Tradition, American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, Neb.: Nebraska University Press, 1964), p. 222.
Maris A. Vinovskis, “Horace Mann on The Economic Productivity of Education,” New England Quarterly 43 (Dec, 1970), pp. 569–571.
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Stevens, E. (1987). The Anatomy of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century United States. In: Arnove, R.F., Graff, H.J. (eds) National Literacy Campaigns. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0505-5_5
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