Values of Studying the History of Literacy

The value of history has its own history, called historiodicy (Marrou, 1966). Because historical work is so often marginalized in the literacy community, we begin this article by sketeching briefly reasons why studying the history of literacy is of value (Moore, Monaghan, & Hartman, 1997).

The most time-honored rationale for knowing and doing history is that we can learn from the past. The challenge, however, is in knowing which lessons to draw on and how best to make use of them. Straightforward applications of the past to the present can distort events and lead to erroneous conclusions. At its best, history provides us with possible rather than probable understandings, and the ability to take precautions rather than control possible futures.

There are other reasons for undertaking historical work. One is that history provides yet another layer of context for understanding events by locating them in specific times and places. Understanding a particular reading method, for instance, requires more than simply knowing about it: it must be located in the milieu of its times. Moreover, historical research helps us to identify who we are as a community. History is a vital sign of any community’s maturity, vitality, and growing self-awareness, and it provides the basis for a collective sense of direction and purpose. By creating a set of connections between past and present, we see ourselves as part of a larger drama.

Historical research also promotes interdisciplinary inquiry and understanding. To answer the questions that matter in our past we must make contact with a wider circle of colleagues and their work, from librarians to antiquarians.

In addition, studying history is intellectually enriching and challenging. The most thought-provoking history asks the “why” questions. Why did the McGuffey Eclectic Readers become so popular in the 19th century? Why were women in colonial America taught to read, but less often to write? Answering questions like these moves us to think about literacy as no other form of inquiry can.

Finally, historical research is fun. What other discipline allows one to snoop into the concerns of others and to label the product serious scholarly work?

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A Short History of Historiography

The methods of doing history have a history as well, called historiography. The historical practices of early human beings were very different from those of today -- the legends, lists of warfare deeds, and registers of information offered no interpretation or analysis (Butterfield, 1981).

Historical work took on some measure of analytic detachment with the Jews of ancient Israel. Their reports in the books of the Old Testament displays a capacity for assembling information from many sources and making accurate appraisals, though they were shaped by religious experience more than any type of analytic inquiry (Momigliano, 1990).

The Greeks were the first to move toward an analytic approach that looked into the facts and determined their accuracy. Herodotus and Thucydides, for example, interpreted the affairs of governance and warfare as the product of human, not divine, will. They did so by checking information against participant and eyewitness reports, consulting archived documents, and thinking carefully about motivations and causations (Grant, 1970).

The Romans, influenced by the Greeks, further developed analytic practices for doing history. But a Christian view of history took hold within the Roman empire, melding religious and analytic historical practices. Early on, Christians compiled the Gospels in such a way that their beliefs could be defended against challenges and used to display the continuities of the New Testament with the Old (Gay & Cavanaugh, 1972). St. Augustine’s The City of God provided the most influential statement of the Christian interpretation of history (Barker, 1982). His method of using analytic tools (e.g., informing readers of information sources) within this religious framework was followed closely by medieval historians for 10 centuries (Dahmus, 1982).

Historical methods from the 14th through the l9th centuries entailed a shift away from supernatural explanations toward secular approaches (Breisach, 1983/1994). By the early 20th century, academic history had become completely secularized. The validity of historical knowledge itself came under public attack: Was Christopher Columbus the heroic seafarer of the older history or the purveyor of genocide of the new? Indeed, since the late 1950s, historians have moved through major reconceptualizations of their craft -- from the new social history of the 1960s and 1970s, through the intersections among history, language, and thought of the 1970s and 1980s, to the “postmodernism” of the 1990s, where culture was elevated to a level of importance once held by the supernatural. In response to these transformations of the field, Appleby (1998) urges, as do we, that historians of the new histories should continue to be “cultural translators,” interpreting our past for consumers of history while new questions lead to new answers “through the mediating filter of culture” (pp. 11, 12).

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An Analysis of Past Methodologies in Researching the History of Literacy

The historiography of literacy has a similar history. Drawing mostly on work done by scholars in the social sciences and literature, the first, and oldest, of these approaches to studying literacy did so within the larger framework of formal education (e.g., Cubberley, 1919/1934). The work of Bailyn (1960) and Cremin (1970, 1980, 1988) moved educational historians to include other educating agencies, such as churches, the community, and the family.

A few decades later another group, generally known as “literacy historians,” pursued a second and different approach by applying the quantitative methodologies of the social historians. For example, they estimated the number of literates by comparing the proportion of those who could sign their names to a document to those who could only make a mark. The signature was hailed as a proxy for literacy, a uniform and quantifiable measure that was constant over time. The signature-mark approach, however, had its problems: it seriously underestimated the number who could read even though they could not write (Monaghan, 1989), and it only identified the minimally literate without showing how or why literates used their literacy (Venezky, 1991).

A third major approach was to quantify not who was literate but what was read. For instance, the histoire de livre or “history of the book” movement sought to “discover the literary experience of ordinary readers” (Darnton, 1989, p. 28). Book historians have examined what people read, paying particular interest to “low-culture” reading interests as well as the many links among books and their readers, from the creative act of the author, through the physical process of editing, publishing, and selling, to the book’s reception (e.g., Amory & Hall, 2000).

The fourth and most recent trend, however, which represents a further evolution of the history of the book scholarship, has been an emphasis on a history of audiences (Rose, 1992). Scholars now search for readers and writers who have reported, in primary sources such as diaries, autobiographies, and letters, on the meanings of their literacy. For instance, Sicherman (1989) used family letters and published memoirs to evaluate the role played by reading in the lives of the daughters of an upper-middle-class family at Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the late 19th century.

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Literacy History and the Reading Research Community

Those in the reading professional community have used fewer and more limited approaches to the history of literacy (for examples, see works cited in Moore, Monaghan, & Hartman, 1997). The few reading researchers who have approached the history of literacy have traditionally done so through an examination of the textbooks used to teach reading (e.g., Hoffman & Roser, 1987; Reeder, 1900; Robinson, Faraone, Hittleman, & Unruh, 1990; Smith, 1965). The best known study of this kind remains that published by Nila Banton Smith in American Reading Instruction. Her study began as a dissertation and received successive updates (1934, 1965, 1986). Although of value even today, Smith’s work is inevitably a creature of its time. Her discussions of the contents of American reading instructional textbooks are innocent of any consideration of how literacy instruction has been mediated by gender, class, or race -- themes that preoccupy contemporary historians.

Courses in the history of literacy created by reading professionals within schools of education have been influenced by the history of the book scholarship (e.g., Cranney & Miller, 1987), but this scholarship has yet to make a major impact on researchers in the reading professional community, in spite of Venezky’s (1987a) call for a new history of reading instruction. There are, however, a few important exceptions. Gallegos’ (1992) work on the links between literacy and society in early New Mexico used both qualitative and quantitative data. Luke (1988) integrated content analysis into his history of the Canadian “Dick and Jane” experience. Other studies have also demonstrated broader approaches, especially in terms of sources and topics. They include biographical studies of well-known reading experts such as William S. Gray (Mavrogenes, 1985; Robinson, 1985) and Laura Zirbes (Moore, 1986); studies of the history of a particular reading methodology (Balmuth, 1982) or content area (Moore, Readence, & Rickelman, 1983); oral histories of teachers and students (Clegg, 1997); and studies of what literacy has meant to certain communities of readers (Weber, 1993). Moreover, Venezky’s (1987b) review of the history of American readers sets them in a broad historical context.

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Undertaking Historical Research in Literacy

Here we outline the process of identifying a topic, conducting the research, and communicating the results. We begin by clarifying some terminology regarding sources.

Primary, Secondary, and Original Sources

It is important to distinguish between primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are documents or artifacts generated by the persons actually involved in, or contemporary to, the events under investigation. Secondary sources are the products of those who try to make sense of primary sources -- historians. But a source may be primary or secondary, depending on what the researcher is looking for. Smith’s American Reading Instruction (1965), for instance, is obviously a secondary source, based mainly on the study of a large number of children’s readers. Her book could also, however, be used as a primary source if Smith herself and her views on reading instruction were the object of investigation.

The distinction also needs to be made between primary and original sources. It is not always necessary, and often not possible, to deal only with original sources. Printed copies of original sources, provided they have been undertaken with scrupulous care, are usually an acceptable substitute for their handwritten originals. Again, it depends on the researcher’s purpose. Primary sources, however, are the bedrock of historical research.

Historiographers generally use both primary and secondary sources, but much of the excitement of historical work lies in entering the world of the past through primary sources. Historical advances are made not only by using sources seldom used by others but by looking at familiar material in new ways -- ways made possible because the world view of the researcher has changed from that of earlier historians. We now appreciate, for example, as earlier historians did not, the importance of gender, race, and class as constructs influencing literacy instruction.

Four Approaches to the Past

The four approaches to the past detailed next all use primary sources as their chief database.

The first approach may be termed qualitative. This is what most laypersons think of as history: the search for a story inferred from a range of written or printed evidence. The resultant history is organized chronologically and presented as a factual tale: a tale of a person who created reading textbooks, such as a biography of William Holmes McGuffey (Sullivan, 1994) or the Lindley Murray family (Monaghan, 1998). The sources of qualitative history range from manuscripts such as account books, school records, marginalia, letters, diaries, and memoirs to imprints such as textbooks, children’s books, journals, and other books of the period under consideration.

The second approach is quantitative. Here, rather than relying on “history by quotation,” as the former approach has been pejoratively called, researchers deliberately look for evidence that lends itself to being counted and that is therefore presumed to have superior validity and generalizability. Researchers have sought to estimate the popularity of a particular textbook by tabulating the numbers printed, based on copyright records (e.g., Monaghan, 1983). The assumption is that broader questions such as the relationship between literacy and industrialization, or between textbooks and their influence on children, can then be addressed more authoritatively.

A third approach is content analysis. Here the text itself is the object of scrutiny. This approach takes as its data published works (in the case of literacy history, these might be readers, penmanship manuals, or examples of children’s literature) and subjects them to a careful analysis that usually includes both quantitative and qualitative aspects. Lindberg (1976), for example, used a qualitative approach to draw implications from the changing contents of the McGuffey Eclectic Readers in successive editions. Content analysis has been particularly useful in investigating constructs such as race (e.g., Larrick, 1965; MacCann, 1998) and gender (Women on Words and Images, 1972).

Qualitative, quantitative, and content approaches use written or printed text as their database. (For examples of all three, see Kaestle, Damon-Moore, Stedman, Tinsley, & Trollinger, 1991.) In contrast, the fourth approach, oral history, turns to living memory. For instance, oral historians interested in literacy have asked their respondents about their early learning or teaching experiences in one-room schools (Clegg, 1997).

These four approaches are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Indeed, historians avail themselves of as many of these as their question, topic, and time period permit. Barry (1992) and Spiker (1997), for example, both used all four approaches in their dissertations. This integration is made possible because the nature of historical research cuts across genres of approaches, all of which begin with the identification of a topic and the framing of a question.

Identifying the Topic, Framing the Question

As in experimental research, the investigator has a question or problem that he or she wishes to answer or solve. (The classic beginner’s mistake is to ask too large a question.) The complexity of the question and the breadth of the investigation are guided by the anticipated historiographical outcome -- the written report.

Questions will be proportionate in scope to the anticipated length of the answer. One study centered on the phonics versus whole-word debate restricted its time frame to 5 years. The result was a master’s thesis (Iversen, 1997). Another, probing more broadly, asked what had led to the creation, development, and discontinuance of an entire textbook series, the Cathedral Basic Readers, over a half century. It became a doctoral dissertation (Spiker, 1997). Other studies examined the professional life of a progressive reading educator, Laura Zirbes (Moore, 1986); the family literacy of a particular 18th-century Boston family (Monaghan, 1991); and the meaning reading held for American farmwives at the turn of the 20th century (Weber, 1993). These, focusing intently on a limited topic, all became articles in journals.

Identifying Undergirding Theories

Just as social science researchers do, historians proceed from a theoretical position, whether articulated or not. Today, literacy historians are much more likely than in the past to be explicit about their theoretical positions and invoke, say, modernization theory or their stances on gender, race, and class as the theories undergirding their approach.

A related issue is researcher stance. All of us are located within the particular perspectives of our own time and setting, and it might appear that if we are explicit about where we come from, this will militate against the possibility of observer bias. However, what we are looking for dictates what we will find. Some studies clearly have a particular perspective that may slant the conclusions drawn and even restrict the data considered worthy of investigation. Any study undertaken with a predetermined agenda runs the risk of slanting the evidence to its own needs and of failing to do justice to opposing points of view.

Identifying and Locating Potential Sources

Although, for convenience, we have discussed the issue of the researcher’s question or problem first, there are strictly practical decisions that affect the choice of topic from the outset -- namely, where are the sources to be found? Most historical research takes place in the manuscript and rare book rooms of public, private, and university libraries or at state and town historical societies, so the researcher has to have the time and money to get there. Considerations like these may -- and should -- guide the researcher to one approach rather than another. (See the History of Literacy Web site for a list of archives relating to the history of literacy.)

As researchers evaluate the merits of potential topics, they need to consider all the possible relevant primary sources, both manuscript and printed. Are there any letters, diaries, or journals related to the target topic? What about school records at the local, town, or state level? Are there schoolbooks, children’s books, contemporary educational journals or books? Where are they, and how can access be obtained? Are there still people alive who would remember the topic to be investigated?

Fortunately, problems of access to the written or printed word are diminishing as time passes. Access to materials housed in distant libraries is increasingly being provided by interlibrary loan, photocopies, microfilm, microfiche (e.g., American Primers, 1990; Venezky, 1990) and the World Wide Web. The other side of this coin is, sadly, a loss of access to the original manuscripts, and with it some of the pleasures of the research.

The ease of finding sources once again depends on the topic. The names of persons are by far the easiest to research because they are almost always indexed by libraries. Subjects such as “adult reading” are far harder to research, for they may not be listed under the rubric one expects -- or they may not be catalogued at all. This is where a reference librarian is indispensable. In addition, posting a request for help on an Internet listserv (such as the one sponsored by the History of Reading Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association or the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing’s SHARP-L) can recruit informed others in the search for relevant sources. (For sources on American reading education 1900-1970, see Robinson, 2000).

Once the topic has been pinned down, the equivalent to the literature review of experimental research should begin. Dissertations are a key resource here, along with articles and books. Secondary sources will normally provide clues that will lead back to more primary sources. Although the question of authenticity is certainly important, in general the authentication of sources has already been undertaken by experts at the libraries where the documents are housed. And in most cases, triangulation is neither possible nor desirable.

Collecting and Recording the Data

Now, armed with a wish list of what you want to explore, precise information on where it is, and your professional identification for easy library admission, comes the time for data collection. Although the old method was to record the relevant material in pencil (because all manuscript and rare book rooms prohibit the use of pens) by copying selected passages for later analysis, the advances in computerization of libraries -- and the computer skills of scholars -- over the past few years are making this obsolete. Data collected electronically has the great advantage of needing to be entered only once. Notetaking, filing, and organizing are all made easier by the word processor. Scanning an original text into your own computer with a hand scanner may be the next technological leap.

Here are some practical hints. First, it can be helpful to alert the librarian ahead of time to your research interests, so that he or she can be thinking about sources for you (and can confirm whether you can use your laptop in the rare book room). Second, always bring with you to the library all the equipment that you need on the spot: you may have great trouble obtaining any of it close to the library. Manuscript rooms may provide you with the occasional pencil, but not paper.

Third, treat every entry as if this is the last time you will ever set eyes on it. Before you hand in your request slip, record all the identifying material on something that will not be surrendered to the librarian. Fourth, pay lavishly for photocopying or, for pages too fragile for copying, computer scanning. Better yet, see if you can borrow the text itself through interlibrary loan, or purchase a contemporary reproduction. Nothing is more helpful than having the text in your possession at your own workspace.

The collection of oral histories deserves an article to itself. Here we can only note that there are particular challenges, as well as joys, for the researcher who relies on the memories of the living as his or her source. For detailed information, including legal caveats, we suggest joining the Oral History Society. There are also tips and bibliographies on oral history that have been prepared by reading researchers (e.g., King & Stahl, 1991; Stahl, Hynd, & Henk, 1986; Stahl, King, Dillon, & Walker, 1994).

Interpreting the Data

Once the work of data collection is completed, the work of analysis begins. Two kinds of analysis are necessary. The first is an analysis of internal aspects of the data. This is the point at which one detects bias within the sources themselves. Given the self-serving nature of our species, autobiographies and diaries need particular scrutiny. Oral histories, too, pose unusual problems of verification, because the data provided are filtered through fallible and limited human memory.

The second kind of analysis is external to the sources themselves: it is the work of interpretation and organization. Historical research can be considered a kind of anthropology of the past. The historian looks for patterns and themes, and compares, combines, and selects material that will support generalizations and answer the questions or problems that motivated the study.

Communicating Interpretations

What historians discover as they pore over their data commits them to one kind of organization over another. Organization can be a function of the source’s chronology, as is the case in a biography; or it may be both chronological and conceptual, with the topics that emerged later in time also appearing later in the book; or it could be largely topical.

Once the organization is in place and writing begun, the social science researcher must confront issues of documentation. Reading researchers are comfortable and familiar with the American Psychological Association (APA) style, but in the writing of history, APA has several disadvantages. Although it does reference quotations, it does not cite page numbers for paraphrased sources, referring instead to the entire book. In these cases a reader wishing to verify a source has to search through the whole book to find the few relevant pages. There is also no short way, in APA, to cite manuscripts. There are aesthetic and cognitive objections as well. The within-text citations required by APA encumber the text greatly. Some paragraphs in a historical text are based not on one source but on many; citing them in APA style produces a visual clutter that distracts greatly from the meaning and stylistic integrity of the writing.

This explains why historians use numbered notes, which appear as superscripts in the body of the text and are fully referenced in footnotes or endnotes. Most historians use The Chicago Manual of Style or some variation of it. Nonetheless, the APA habit is so strong that the great majority of theses and dissertations sponsored by schools of education are required to follow it. We recommend that dissertation chairs advocate historical referencing for historical writing and support their students in doing battle with the establishment on its behalf.

The final objective of historical research is, as in behavioral research, publication. Although historical research is still a fledgling enterprise among reading researchers, several studies that began as theses or dissertations within the reading community have reached the pages of literacy journals (e.g., Barry, 1994) or have become books (e.g., Gallegos, 1992). There is unquestionably a market out there for historical work.

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A Final Word

The time for historical research in reading to take its rightful place with other methodologies is, in our opinion, long overdue. There is a need to site reading history within the larger contexts of its times. But it is not easy to become a good historian, and it cannot be done overnight. Those who wish to pursue this genre of research should consider sitting in on a course on historical methods given at their own institution and joining appropriate historical societies. We particularly recommend the History of Reading Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association, whose Web site offers many research resources.

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About the Authors

		Jennifer Monaghan is a professor of English at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. She is the author of numerous publications in the history of literacy, including A Common Heritage: Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller (1983) and Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy (2000), and has spoken frequently on the topic and national and international meetings. She is a contributor to A History of the Book in America, Volume One, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (2000) and has won “best article” awards from the American Studies Association (1989) and the History of Education Society (1992). In 1983 her dissertation, Noah Webster’s Speller, 1783-1843: Causes of Its Success as Reading Text, was awarded the biennial Outstanding Dissertation Award by the Society for the Study of Curriculum. In 1975 Monaghan founded the History of Reading Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association, and she has been editor or coeditor of its newsletter, History of Reading News, ever since. Both her teaching and her research focus on the relationships between reading and writing, particularly written language acquisition. Her courses include an undergraduate course on the history of literacy.
		Douglas Hartman is an associate professor of language and literacy in the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, USA). He has authored several dozen journal articles, books, book chapters, technical reports, and book reviews. His recent publications include an edited book titled Stories Teachers Tell and a chapter on “From Writing to Reading” in Theoretical Models and Processes in Writing. Dr. Hartman’s research interests center on literacy learning from historical, sociocultural, and cognitive perspectives. His dissertation was awarded the International Reading Association’s Outstanding Dissertation Award, the National Reading Conference’s Student Research Award, and finalist recognition for the National Council of Teachers of English’s Promising Researcher Award. He teaches methods courses on reading and writing in the elementary and middle grades, supervises interns, and delivers graduate courses focusing on the history of literacy, social bases for reading and writing, and language development. Back to top

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Citation: Monagahn, E.J., & Hartman, D.K. (2001, June). Historical research in literacy. Reading Online, 4(11). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/handbook/monaghan/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted June 2001
© 2001 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232