Hidden Literacies brings together leading scholars of historical literacy to investigate the surprising, often neglected roles reading and writing have played in the lives of marginalized Americans—from Indigenous and enslaved people to prisoners and young children. By presenting high-resolution images of archival texts and pairing them with expert commentary, Hidden Literacies aims to make these writers and texts—which too often lie below the radar of American literature curricula—more availabl...
Nov 01, 2022•2 min
The supposedly modern reformers who conceived New York state's Auburn Penitentiary forbade writing by inmates. But as the formerly incarcerated writer John Maroney made clear in his autobiography, there are other ways literacy could inform life in prison -- and there was a lot the literacy of the imprisoned could do. Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CdNwPpk7l4uWYRr0fsMwmoF5s6_n6Tkl/view?usp=sharing Explore Hidden Literacies at https://www.hiddenliteracies.org Learn more about Jo...
Nov 01, 2022•13 min•Ep. 10
A letter from a prosperous Boston matron may not seem a surprising or noteworthy exercise of literacy -- until it appears, as scholar Katy Chiles proposes, that the handwriting of the letter likely belongs to Phillis Wheatley. What does it mean if the forced labor of this enslaved poet, now acclaimed as one of the progenitors of African American literature, taking dictation from her elderly enslaver? On this episode, Katy describes how she found the letter, and why it’s important to consider Phi...
Nov 01, 2022•20 min•Ep. 3
On this episode, Margaret Noodin interprets stories by Simon Pokagon, a nineteenth-century author and member of the Pokogon band of the Potawatomi tribe. Rather than reading the texts for story or narrative, Margaret is interested in the ways these stories preserve knowledge about climate change. Specifically, Pokagon’s work describes how to live in a certain region along the Eastern Shore line of what is now known as Lake Michigan and reveals how people there were aware of the watershed and how...
Nov 01, 2022•17 min•Ep. 13
Members of the Munsee community had been displaced to present-day Kansas by the 1840s, but they well recalled their northeastern homelands and knew what befell their ancestors more than two centuries before. When they described their legacy of dispossession in a petition to the U.S. President in 1849, their "X-mark" signatures connoted illiteracy--but the history they recounted showed enduring and reliable knowledge. Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16vqXkYKH_ZMHWSUgS-Vg2Q_tOSECk...
Nov 01, 2022•16 min•Ep. 5
"In the spring of 1875, the poet Walt Whitman, then living in Camden, New Jersey, received an unusual piece of fan mail from the South..." With wry understatement, so begins Matt Cohen's commentary on this artifact, bizarre even by the standards of Weird Americana. With a commitment to a close examination of the original, unregularized text, Cohen connects Johnson's engagement with Whitman's poetics of Democracy to the revanchist Southern nationalism that emerged after the Civil War, our contemp...
Nov 01, 2022•26 min•Ep. 4
The Cherokee syllabary, created by Sequoyah in the early nineteenth century, is among the most remarkable inventions in the modern history of literacy. Ellen Cushman shows us what it made possible for a community of Cherokee men in an Oklahoma penitentiary during the 1950s. Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r41rDKqha4q8N7NZQCrN2wNDJ_3pvf5S/view?usp=sharing Explore Hidden Literacies at https://www.hiddenliteracies.org Learn more about Ellen Cushman’s work here: https://cssh.northe...
Nov 01, 2022•14 min•Ep. 9
Hidden Literacies is an archive of a sort that most people—even many students and teachers of American literature—have not seen. It includes texts created by people who weren’t formally educated or whose ways of reading and writing were not mainstream in their own time; texts that have been rarely or unevenly preserved, that are hard for non-specialists to make sense of. By making these kinds of texts newly accessible, Hidden Literacies makes the human lives and experiences behind them newly vis...
Nov 01, 2022•24 min•Ep. 1
An account of household purchases may seem trivial or banal, but in the case of the Indigenous woman Mary Fowler Occom--whose history lies in the shadow of her better-known husband, the Mohegan preacher Samson Occom, who himself labored in the shadow of his erstwhile mentor, the founder of Dartmouth College--the details of housekeeping shine a light on what's otherwise hidden. Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LdRacQYobq0HqSO6S2bfqOq-OAhMNxcd/view?usp=sharing Explore Hidden Liter...
Nov 01, 2022•14 min•Ep. 8
An enslaved man in eighteenth-century Rhode Island kept an account book in fine handwriting. But how much can a simple inventory of goods, in pounds and pence, really tell us? As Tara Bynum reveals, it actually documents a vibrant African American community enjoying each other's company at a pig roast. Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oNCTc1UpMDRMyON72AnEVG1XUzvuqoKD/view?usp=sharing Explore Hidden Literacies at https://www.hiddenliteracies.org Learn more about Tara Bynum’s work...
Nov 01, 2022•20 min•Ep. 12
At first glance, the archives show her to be Mary Bosomworth, wife of an English colonist, bereft of a voice or any rights separate from his. But a careful reading reveals Coosaponakeesa, a Creek "language bearer," whose multiple modes of literacy reflect multiple versions of a distinct self: a Native woman navigating the English social and political world. Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1InAInX8xYJAHGsJ5Aa0LBZKhOQuXC9Ur/view?usp=sharing Explore Hidden Literacies at https://www...
Nov 01, 2022•12 min•Ep. 7
However texts that survive are created, used, and preserved, it is invariably the case that archiving serves other interests than those of the creators. A whole host of people render judgments on a text’s purpose, meaning, and value: the historical actors who kept some papers and discarded others, who gave what they kept to a library or historical society (or didn’t); the professional archivists who catalog it in certain ways and make it accessible in certain contexts; the researchers and reader...
Nov 01, 2022•18 min•Ep. 2
The early 19th-century Kickapoo leader Kenekuk contrived a unique, non-alphabetic representation of a religious vision and inscribed it on ten-inch wooden boards. The "prayer stick" proliferated and helped galvanize a religious community. But what does it say, and for whose eyes is its message? Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W__9Z0Qj-LYm6bJy_YPmf6QZ2viiH-1_/view?usp=sharing Explore Hidden Literacies at https://www.hiddenliteracies.org Learn more about Phillip Round’s work here...
Nov 01, 2022•22 min•Ep. 11
A group of boys in 1890s New Hampshire played at writing, editing, and publishing a manuscript magazine about an elaborate fictional world based on their own back yard. Their writing deftly mimicked the real world of children's periodicals -- and unwittingly illuminated the violent social reality young white men were entering in the U.S. of the late nineteenth century. Transcript link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u3DNMi8N0XdcUdpKnbrCwgtfYEq_cLJX/view?usp=sharing Explore Hidden Literacies at...
Nov 01, 2022•25 min•Ep. 6
