Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem RenaissanceMen and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooksthe ancestors of Google and blogging. From Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Writing with Scissors opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Like us, nineteenth-century readers spoke back to the media, and treasured what mattered to them. In this groundbreaking book, Ellen Gruber Garvey reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where the proliferating cheap press touched the lives of activists and mourning parents, and all who yearned for a place in history. Scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events such as living through the Civil War, mediated through the newspapers. African Americans and women's rights activists collected, concentrated, and critiqued accounts from a press that they did not control to create "unwritten histories" in books they wrote with scissors. Whether scrapbook makers pasted their clippings into blank books, sermon collections, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark Twain invented, they claimed ownership of their reading. They created their own democratic archives. Writing with Scissors argues that people have long had a strong personal relationship to media. Like newspaper editors who enthusiastically "scissorized" and reprinted attractive items from other newspapers, scrapbook makers passed their reading along to family and community. This book explains how their scrapbooks underlie our present-day ways of thinking about information, news, and what we do with it. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Scrapbooks Remake Value | 25 |
2 Mark Twains Scrapbook Innovations | 60 |
Newspaper and Nation | 87 |
4 Alternative Histories in African American Scrapbooks | 131 |
Activist Womens Clipping and SelfCreation | 172 |
Other editions - View all
Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem ... Ellen Gruber Garvey No preview available - 2012 |
Common terms and phrases
abolitionist activists advertising African American African American scrapbook alternative histories anonymous archive asserted authorship Back Number Boston Bowditch Budd Carolina Cathcart century circulation Civil War scrapbooks Clemens clipping bureau clipping scrapbooks Colored Centenarians column commonplace book Confederate copies created documents Dorsey Dorsey’s Dunbar editor Elizabeth Boynton Harbert exchange Figure Frederick Douglass Gumby Harbert horsecar Ida Husted Harper lecture letter Library of Congress Lillie Devereux Blake literary lynching magazine Mark Twain Mark Twain's Scrap Mary Massachusetts Historical Society material Matilda Joslyn Gage memory nation Negro newspaper clippings newspaper reading nineteenth nineteenth-century Northern notes papers pasted Philadelphia poem poetry political popular preserve printed published readers recirculation record reports reprinted saved Schlesinger Library scrapbook makers slavery slaves soldiers South Southern speakers Special Collections story suffrage suffragists tion Twain's Scrap Book white press William woman women women's rights Writing with Scissors wrote York