Harvey J. Graff

The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society.

Preface Acknowledgments Part One: Setting the Stage Introduction: Literacys Legacies 1. The Origins of Western Literacy 1. From Writing to Literacy 2. Literacys First Legacies: From Athens 3. ...to Rome, and Beyond Part Two: Before the Printing Press: The Middle Ages 2. Th Light of Literacy in the oDark AgesO 1. Fifth-Seventh Centuries 2. Seventh Century 3. Eighth Century 4. Ninth-Tenth Centuries 3. New Lights of Literacy and Learning: From the Tenth-Eleventh to the Thirteenth Centuries 1. Italy and Commercial Revolution 2. The Church, Papacy, and Schools 3. Patterns of Literacy 4. Thought, Theory, and Practice 4. Ends and Beginnings: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 1. Humanism and the Italian Renaissance 2. Continental Conditions in Literacy 3. The English Example 5. Print, Protest, and the People 1. The Advent and Impact of Print 2. Renaissance(s) Revisited 3. Print, Reform, and Reformation 4. Reforming Literacy Provision 6. Toward Enlightenment/Toward Modernity: 1660-1780 1. Thinking about Literacy and Schooling 2. Patterns of Literacy: Paths to Literacy Part Four: Toward the Present and the Future 7. The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Our Times 1. The Setting 2. Literacys Paths and Patterns Epilogue: Today and Tomorrow: Revisioning Literacy 1. Twentieth-Century Trends in Literacy Levels 2. Imputed Impacts and Consequences or, Great and Other Dichotomies Revisited 3. A Crisis in Literacy? 4. Literacy, Culture, and Society: Communications and the Future of Literacy Notes Index

The Literacy Myth at Thirty

This article reviews the thirty year history of The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (1979). I reflect on The Literacy Myth and the critical concept of “the literacy myth” that it proposed on the occasion of the book’s thirtieth anniversary, a special and also a sobering moment. On the one hand, I speak to its broad influence in a number of fields of study; I also consider some of the criticisms encountered. On the other hand, I discuss what I think are its principal weaknesses and limits. The success of The Literacy Myth may be determined at least in part by the extent to which it stimulates new research and thinking that begin to supplant it. After considering the relevance and value of its general arguments for both persisting and newer questions and issues, I reframe my conclusions about social myths and in particular “the literacy myth.”

On literacy in the Renaissance: Review and reflectionst†

†This paper was originally presented as a contribution to the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicines Conference, ‘Medicine, Printing and Literacy in the European Renaissance’. It draws upon and is documented fully in my The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Society and Culture (2 vols, New York and London, forthcoming), ch. IV and V.

Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century: A New Look at the Criminal

Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century: A New Look at the Criminal Crime is a prominent feature in the social thought and social fears of modern society. It has been a motivating factor in the establishment of institutions, asylums, and educational systems, for both men and women, children and youth; and it has had a dramatic effect on the formulation of social policy in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years historians have begun to exhibit a new interest in the study of crime, evidenced perhaps most strongly in the work of Lane and Richardson in the United States and Tobias in Great Britain.1 Important and informative as this work has been in filling a great void in social historiography, it has been marked by several characteristic problems. The first concerns the denigration of the statistics of crime of the nineteenth century, resulting largely from the desire to establish rates of offense for entire populations. Caution of course remains the rule, for this task has yet to be solved or satisfactorily defined even in the application of present-day statistics.2 Secondly, and very directly a result of the preceding, there has been a general lack of interest in systematically describing the criminals, or the arrested, themselves: their social origins, demographic characteristics, their offenses, and their treatment by the judiciary. The product, not surprisingly,

The Shock of the "'New' (Histories)": Social Science Histories and Historical Literacies

At this meeting, we celebrate 25 years of the Social Science History Association, the SSHA. With appreciation from all of us, I acknowledge the achievements of our founders and our long-time members.We stand on their shoulders metaphorically and historically. We mark this anniversary with a plenary president’s ‘‘founder’s session,’’ a variety of retrospective and prospective panels, and the conference theme ‘‘looking backward and looking forward.’’ 1 We also commemorate more than 25 years of groundbreaking re-

Teaching [and] Historical Understanding: Disciplining Historical Imagination with Historical Context

The form, content, and practice of history has shifted including changes in conceptualization and practice that came in viewing history as social science, critiques and reconstructions of historical forms of knowledge, and debates about form, format, genre, and discourse. The central argument of this essay begins with the claim that history is a distinctive discipline. Its distinction lies not only, or even primarily, in its subject matter or materials. Rather, history is distinct as a form of inquiry and mode of understanding, with distinguishing characteristics of historical context and historical imagination. Important implications follow.

The Legacies of Literacy Studies

In typical formulations, literacy studies embrace two more-or-less opposing positions: that of “many literacies” and that of dangerously low levels of literacy, their causes and their consequences. When conceptualized complexly—not the most common practice—their contradictory relationships form part of our subject of inquiry and part of the challenge for explication and explanation.

Literacy, myths, and legacies: Lessons from the past/thoughts for the future

Sketching broadly to suggest the power of the past in shaping how we think about, use, and even abuse the skills of literacy, “Literacy: Myths and Lessons” draws practical and theoretical instruction from the history of literacy. Its goal is to suggest new perspectives on literacy and literacies today and tomorrow in part by probing the connections tying past to present and both to possible futures.

Youth, university, and Canadian society : essays in the social history of higher education

Focusing on the student experience from the last quarter of the nineteenth century through the troubled 1960s, this collection of fourteen essays examines university life as a part of social and intellectual history. It brings to light the work of a new generation of researchers who have moved away from the narrower concern with institutional growth that has typified most historical writing in this field. Contributors include Paul Axelrod, Michael Behiels, Judith Fingard, Chad Gaffield, Yves Gingras, Patricia Jasen, Nancy Kiefer, Susan Laskin, Malcolm MacLeod, Lynne Marks, A.B. McKillop, Barry M. Moody, Diana Pederson, Ruth Roach Pierson, James Pitsula, John G. Reid, and Keith Walden.

Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America.

Spanning more than two centuries, this book traces the many paths to adulthood that Americans have pursued over time. Conflicting Paths is an innovative history of growing up in America that includes analysis and five hundred first-person testimonials--autobiographies, diaries, and letters.