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The Nelson Brothers
12019-07-15T11:54:18+00:00Carlson Given13c557169bb9d07ac213dc352b3e613ee6aa4bc817Sanchez-Eppler Page 1plain2019-07-16T10:47:21+00:00Carlson Given13c557169bb9d07ac213dc352b3e613ee6aa4bc8The 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 Thomas9Karen Sánchez-Eppler Commentaryplain2021-01-15T17:41:40+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141
12021-02-16T20:07:58+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141IndexJoelle Thomas10Index of all pagesvispath2021-02-16T21:23:12+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141