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Reviews of Books
Hilary E. Wyss, Auburn University
| Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. By E. Jennifer Monaghan. Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Published in association with the American Antiquarian Society. 508 pages. $49.95 (cloth).
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Some of us have been waiting for this book for quite a while. Ever since E. Jennifer Monaghan's groundbreaking article, "Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England," appeared in a special issue of the American Quarterly in 1988 devoted to reading practices (and was reprinted a year later as chapter 2 of Cathy Davidson's collection, Reading in America), scholars of early American literacy have been hoping for more. This broad-ranging, utterly engaging, and carefully researched book is most welcome and well worth the wait.1Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America offers a detailed examination of literacy practices throughout the colonial period in the North American English colonies. The central argument is that "the definitions of the two literacy skills implied in so many colonial sources—of reading as a receptive and passive skill, of writing as the repetitious copying of the work of others—were in fact undermined and contradicted by actual practice ... [and] by the time of Thomas Paine, both reading and writing had emerged as potentially revolutionary practices, challenging every kind of religious and political orthodoxy" (8). |
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Despite the seventeen-year gap between the early publication of Monaghan's article and this book, no overview of the literacy practices of colonial Americans has emerged. Though it is perhaps surprising that it has taken so long for a book as comprehensive as Monaghan's to appear, a great deal of exciting work in recent years relates to colonial reading and writing. Monaghan's book is a wonderful companion to Hugh Amory and David D. Hall's The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, a major collection of essays on key aspects of book history in the colonial world. Monaghan's contribution to this collection is a section cowritten with Ross W. Beales on literacy and schoolbooks; other contributors discuss topics such as the economics of the book trade, printing supplies, bookselling in various regions, and periodicals, libraries, and literary culture. Other work on literacy that focuses on discrete topics includes Patricia Crain's extraordinary Story of A, Tamara Plakins Thornton's Handwriting in America, and Margaret Connell Szasz's Indian Education in the American Colonies.2 Several other scholars of colonial American education, some of whose works were written over a generation ago, paved the way for a study such as Monaghan's, most notably Walter Small, Lawrence Cremin, and Carl Kaestle. Indeed Monaghan is careful to note her debt to these scholars, and they are well represented in her footnotes and citations. |
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Yet Monaghan's project is different. Uniting insights from the history of the book with earlier scholarship on education as well as her own experience and training in education and reading methodology, Monaghan has created an entirely new kind of study. She is adept at close, analytic readings of journals, diaries, and other documentary sources, and she is a shrewd archival researcher, gleaning information about reading and writing practices from newspaper advertisements, account books, and shipping records. At the same time, she uses her extensive knowledge of the history of education and theoretical approaches to literacy acquisition to enrich this text enormously. |
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