Hidden LiteraciesMain MenuHidden Literacies - An IntroductionPhillis Wheatley, Amanuensisa letter from Susanna Wheatley, likely dictated to the famous poet she enslaved — with commentary by Katy L. ChilesWalt Whitman’s Baby Talka Confederate veteran writes fan mail in the voice of his infant son — with commentary by Matt Cohen‘Permit Us to Speak Plainly’the 1849 Munsee Petition to Zachary Taylor — with commentary by Andrew NewmanJuvenile Journalism and Genocidea manuscript magazine by three young boys — with commentary by Karen Sánchez-EpplerVisions, Versions, and DeedsCreek Sovereignty in Coosaponakeesa’s Memorials — with commentary by Caroline WiggintonAccounting for Mary Fowler Occoma household inventory of Mary Occom — with commentary by Kelly WisecupLetters and Charactersletter from Walter Duncan to Dollie Duncan from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary — with commentary by Ellen CushmanWriting the Prisoncongregate literacy in the New York penitentiary — with commentary by Jodi Schorb‘Outlandish Characters’a Kickapoo prayer stick — with commentary by Phillip RoundCesar Lyndon Was Herethe account book of an enslaved man in colonial Rhode Island — with commentary by Tara A. BynumBirch-Bark Publications of Simon PokaganMargaret NoodinHidden Literacies - The PodcastAll podcast episodesHidden Literacies - CreditsIndexIndex of all pages
The Nelson Brothers' Archive of Rural Boyhood
12019-07-15T11:54:18+00:00Carlson Given13c557169bb9d07ac213dc352b3e613ee6aa4bc818Sanchez-Eppler Page 1plain2021-03-11T20:14:09+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141The handmade magazine Chit Chat displayed in The Hidden Literacies Projectis one item in a collection of small illustrated books and periodicals, accounts of family life, drawings, maps, and glass-plate photographs produced in the late nineteenth century by three brothers, young boys from a farm family in the town of Goshen, in the rural mountains of New Hampshire. All these materials can be accessed at “The Worlds and Works of the Nelson Brothers." My recent scholarship has been largely devoted to contesting the tendency to trivialize childhood, to discount children as sources of social meaning or cultural production. The Nelson family archive is “hidden” in the way that almost all childhood cultural production has been hidden: it has been hidden by disregard. It is also hidden because even the literacy narratives we do have about late nineteenth-century boyhood have tended to be structured by anxieties about boys’ affluent, urban, leisure – that is, they offer a model of literacy very different from the Nelsons’ mix of hunting, fishing, farming, and book-making. “Some folks think that writers have very easy lives,” the brothers write in one of their many home-made periodicals, “but this is wrong it is true they do not use their mossel [muscles] as much as farmers but it is all the time wareing on their mind and brains” (Horse Rase). While I am very much interested in making visible the hidden literacies of rural childhood, I also want to invert the goals of The Hidden Literacies Project, and think as well about the troubling things that literacy may naturalize and so hide. The ubiquity of cultural norms makes them hard to see.
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12019-07-16T10:15:28+00:00Carlson Given13c557169bb9d07ac213dc352b3e613ee6aa4bc8Commentary: Essay and PodcastJoelle Thomas12Karen Sánchez-Eppler Commentaryplain2022-09-06T14:56:18+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141