Understanding Colonial Handwriting
Understanding Colonial Handwriting

Author: Harriet Stryker-Rodda

Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 9780806311531

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"In genealogical research it is all very well to locate original records, but to read them correctly is another matter altogether. Few people know this better than Harriet Stryker-Rodda who, after years of experience searching through colonial records, has developed a simple technique for reading colonial handwriting. In this handy little book, Mrs. Stryker-Rodda presents examples of colonial letter forms and script, showing the letter forms in the process of development and marking the ways in which they differ from later letter forms. She also provides a comparison of English and American handwriting and examples of name forms and signatures all to bear out her central thesis, that the reader must find meaning in a group of symbols without needing to see each letter of which the whole is composed. This excellent guidebook is indispensable in dealing with the problems of reading and interpretation"--Publisher website (August 2007).

Reading Early American Handwriting
Reading Early American Handwriting

Author: Kip Sperry

Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780806308463

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This book is designed to teach you how to read and understand the handwriting found in documents commonly used in genealogical research. It explains techniques for reading early American documents, provides samples of alphabets and letter forms, and defines terms and abbreviations commonly used in early American documents such as wills, deeds, and church records.

The Devil's Handwriting
The Devil's Handwriting

Author: George Steinmetz

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 685

ISBN-13: 0226772446

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Germany’s overseas colonial empire was relatively short lived, lasting from 1884 to 1918. During this period, dramatically different policies were enacted in the colonies: in Southwest Africa, German troops carried out a brutal slaughter of the Herero people; in Samoa, authorities pursued a paternalistic defense of native culture; in Qingdao, China, policy veered between harsh racism and cultural exchange. Why did the same colonizing power act in such differing ways? In The Devil’s Handwriting, George Steinmetz tackles this question through a brilliant cross-cultural analysis of German colonialism, leading to a new conceptualization of the colonial state and postcolonial theory. Steinmetz uncovers the roots of colonial behavior in precolonial European ethnographies, where the Hereros were portrayed as cruel and inhuman, the Samoans were idealized as “noble savages,” and depictions of Chinese culture were mixed. The effects of status competition among colonial officials, colonizers’ identification with their subjects, and the different strategies of cooperation and resistance offered by the colonized are also scrutinized in this deeply nuanced and ambitious comparative history.

Handwriting in America
Handwriting in America

Author: Tamara Plakins Thornton

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1996-01-01

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9780300074413

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In this engaging history, the author demonstrates handwriting in America from colonial times to the present. Exploring such subjects as penmanship, pedagogy, handwriting analysis, autograph collecting, and calligraphy revivals, Thornton investigates the shifting functions and meanings of handwriting. 57 illustrations.

Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America
Authority and Female Authorship in Colonial America

Author: William J. Scheick

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2014-10-17

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 0813158591

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Should women concern themselves with reading other than the Bible? Should women attempt to write at all? Did these activities violate the hierarchy of the universe and men's and women's places in it? Colonial American women relied on the same authorities and traditions as did colonial men, but they encountered special difficulties validating themselves in writing. William Scheick explores logonomic conflict in the works of northeastern colonial women, whose writings often register anxiety not typical of their male contemporaries. This study features the poetry of Mary English and Anne Bradstreet, the letter-journals of Esther Edwards Burr and Sarah Prince, the autobiographical prose of Elizabeth Hanson and Elizabeth Ashbridge, and the political verse of Phyllis Wheatley. These works, along with the writings of other colonial women, provide especially noteworthy instances of bifurcations emanating from American colonial women's conflicted confiscation of male authority. Scheick reveals subtle authorial uneasiness and subtextual tensions caused by the attempt to draw legitimacy from male authorities and traditions.

Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America
Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America

Author: E. Jennifer Monaghan

Publisher: Studies in Print Culture and t

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781558495814

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An experienced teacher of reading and writing and an award-winning historian, E. Jennifer Monaghan brings to vibrant life the process of learning to read and write in colonial America. Ranging throughout the colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia, she examines the instruction of girls and boys, Native Americans and enslaved Africans, the privileged and the poor, revealing the sometimes wrenching impact of literacy acquisition on the lives of learners. 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 Whitefield, 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 exploring the implications of the separation of reading and writing instruction, a topic that still resonates in today's classrooms. Monaghan argues that major improvements occurred in literacy instruction and acquisition after about 1750, visible in rising rates of signature literacy. Spelling books were widely adopted as they key text for teaching young children to read; prosperity, commercialism, and a parental urge for gentility aided writing instruction, benefiting girls in particular. And 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.

"Return" in Post-colonial Writing

Author: Vera Mihailovich-Dickman

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 9789051836486

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For writers and academics prominent in the field of the New Literatures in English today, the notion of return explodes into rich semantic difference to reveal the diversity of preoccupations underlying the use of the common tongue. From the Caribbean to Australia, Guyana to South Africa, India to Great Britain, literary, political and personal history collaborate in the poetic metamorphosis of an otherwise everyday experience. Now a state of being, now a reading rich with cross-cultural age, return draws from the collective memory, invokes revenants, digs up forgotten history, quests for roots. Just as it creates a dialogue with the past, textual or real, it negotiates turning points and perpetuates reversals. It reclaims territory, tradition and language in its yearning for home. Fraught with the tensions arising from awareness of the impossibility of return, from the exhilarations of imaginary, fictional return - even from the glimmering hope of a possible return - its contemplation can also lead to appreciation of the infinite re-turn, re-newal and re-creation that is the beauty of human experience. Discussion ranges from revenant supernaturalism in West Indian literature and the exploration of return in Australian, African and Indo-Anglian fiction to Caribbean poetry, South African praise poets, and West African drama. Writers treated include Ama Ata Aidoo, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Jean D'Costa, Bessie Head, Matsemela Manaka, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, and Patrick White. The personal, biographical dimension of physical return is encompassed via the examination of the life and works of such writers as Es'kia Mphahlele and Wole Soyinka, and through autobiographical reflections. The essays, stories and poetry in this collection challenge patterns of conditioned reading and call for a multilayered polylogue with reality.

Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future
Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future

Author: Nancy K. Florida

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780822316220

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Located at the juncture of literature, history, and anthropology, Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future charts a strategy of how one might read a traditional text of non-Western historical literature in order to generate, with it, an opening for the future. This book does so by taking seriously a haunting work of historical prophecy inscribed in the nineteenth century by a royal Javanese exile--working through this writing of a colonized past to suggest the reconfiguration of the postcolonial future that this history itself apparently intends. After introducing the colonial and postcolonial orientalist projects that would fix the meaning of traditional writing in Java, Nancy K. Florida provides a nuanced translation of this particular traditional history, a history composed in poetry as the dream of a mysterious exile. She then undertakes a richly textured reading of the poem that discloses how it manages to escape the fixing of "tradition." Adopting a dialogic strategy of reading, Florida writes to extend--as the work's Javanese author demands--this history's prophetic potential into a more global register. Babad Jaka Tingkir, the historical prophecy that Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future translates and reads, is uniquely suited for such a study. Composing an engaging history of the emergence of Islamic power in central Java around the turn of the sixteenth century, Babad Jaka Tingkir was written from the vantage of colonial exile to contest the more dominant dynastic historical traditions of nineteenth-century court literature. Florida reveals how this history's episodic form and focus on characters at the margins of the social order work to disrupt the genealogical claims of conventional royal historiography--thus prophetically to open the possibility of an alternative future.

Writing Women and Space
Writing Women and Space

Author: Alison Blunt

Publisher: Guilford Press

Published: 1994-08-19

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780898624984

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Drawing lessons from the complex and often contradictory position of white women writing in the colonial period, This unique book explores how feminism and poststructuralism can bring new types of understanding to the production of geographical knowledge. Through a series of colonial and postcolonial case studies, essays address the ways in which white women have written and mapped different geographies, in both the late nineteenth century and today, illustrating the diverse objects (landscapes, spaces, views), the variety of media (letters, travel writing, paintings, sculpture, cartographic maps, political discourse), and the different understandings and representations of people and place.