2010 Civic Discourse Reading List

The following titles will remain on hold at the Circulation Desk throughout the Civic Discourse Series.  Titles will be lent for two weeks only.

General Histories of Literacy in America

Crain, Patricia.  The Story of A: the Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter. Stanford University Press, 2000.

Kaestle, Carl F. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1991.

Lockridge, Kenneth A. Literacy in Colonial New England; An Inquiry into the Social Context of   Literacy in the Early Modern West. New York: Norton, 1974.

Monaghan, E. Jennifer. Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press; Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, c2005.

Social Histories

Augst, Thomas. The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, c2003.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle. Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. Univ. of Illinois Press, 2009.

Gilmore, William. Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, c1989.

Logan, Shirley W. Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America. Carbondale: Southern Ill. Univ. Press, 2008.

Robbins, Sarah. Managing Literacy, Mothering America: Women’s Narratives on Reading and Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.

Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987.

Wyss, Hilary E. Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts, 2000.

Current Issues

Augst, Thomas & Kenneth E. Carpenter. Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, c2007.

Augst, Thomas & Wayne Wiegand. The Library as an Agency of Culture. Madison, WI: Univ.   of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Greene, Stuart, ed. Literacy as a Civil Right: Reclaiming Social Justice in Literacy Teaching and Learning. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, 2009.

Hirsch, E. D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Kozol, Jonathan. Illiterate America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1985.

Miller, D. Quentin, ed. Prose and Cons: Essays on Prison Literature in the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2005.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Prendergast, Catherine. Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education; with a foreword by Gloria Ladson-Billings. Carbondale: Southern Ill. Univ. Press, 2003.

Scientific Studies

Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York, NY: Harper, c2007.

Art/Anthropology

Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet and the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. NY, New York: Penguin/Compass, 1999.