Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America

For the most part, religious motives underlay reading instruction in colonial America, while secular motives led to writing instruction. Monaghan illuminates the history of these activities through a series of deeply researched and readable case studies. An Anglican missionary battles mosquitoes and loneliness to teach the New York Mohawks to write in their own tongue. Puritan fathers model scriptural reading for their children as they struggle with bereavement. Boys in writing schools, preparing for careers in counting houses, wield their quill pens in the difficult task of mastering a "good hand." Benjamin Franklin learns how to compose essays with no teacher but himself. Young orphans in Georgia write precocious letters to their benefactor, George Whitfield, while schools in South Carolina teach enslaved black children to read but never to write.

As she tells these stories, Monaghan clears new pathways in the analysis of colonial literacy. She pioneers in the exploration of the implications of the separation of reading and writing instruction, a topic that still resonates in today's classrooms. Her close examination of reading methodology yields fresh insights into the colonial mind. Her discussion of instructional texts, particularly spelling books, adds an important and previously neglected element to the study of colonial literacy.

Monaghan's wide-ranging study confirms a break with tradition that began in some circles around the 1750s. Thereafter, a gentler vision of childhood arose, portraying children as more malleable than sinful. It promoted and even commercialized a new kind of children's book designed to amuse instead of convert, laying the groundwork for the "reading revolution" of the new republic.

"This book fills a significant gap in the scholarship of early America as well as in the scholarship of the history of reading and writing . . . . It will become an essential reference text for any scholar or student of American book history, the history of pedagogy, and the history of literacy."— Patricia Crain, author of "The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter"

"Unique in its scope and in several of the questions being asked, this wide-ranging book will be important to early Americanists as well as to historians of reading."— David D. Hall, general editor of the five-volume "History of the Book in America"

E. JENNIFER MONAGHAN is professor emerita of English, Brooklyn College, The City University of New York.

A volume in the series Studie in Print Culture and the History of the Book.

Who learned to read in Colonial America? Who learned to write? Monaghan (English emerita, the City U. of New York) explains the distinctions (reading instruction was largely motivated by religion, while writing instruction generally had secular motives) and their applications (slaves and other marginalized people were allowed to learn to read but not to write) and the new attitudes of the mid- eighteenth century that allowed children to read for enjoyment, not only for purposes of conversion. She explains literacy in New England from 1620 to 1730, particularly in the case of the Indians of the Massachusetts Bay and the Mohawks. She examines the brief period following 1730 that contained startling changes in how children were taught and what they read, and concludes with commentary about the literary instruction of the enslaved the period just before the Revolution. Monaghan's case studies are particularly effective. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America is a very important book. Its publication is reason for celebration by all who have been awaiting a full monograph since E. Jennifer Monaghan's first essays appeared. Literacy specialists will especially be gratified, but all historians of early America will profit from this richly researched work."--(The Journal of American History, September 2006)