Just the Facts, Please

Abstract

This volume consists of ten essays, of which Kaestle is the sole author of three and coauthor of the remainder. In the first two chapters (part 1), Kaestle surveys the historiography of literacy and reading, a field that resembles a gigantic railroad station. Arriving on trains from various origination pointsancient, medieval, early-modern, and modern history-some historians have stayed in the station only long enough for a quick tour, during which they have expected to find answers to interpretive questions in their luggage. But others have found the station itself interesting. Forgetting the questions in their luggage, 'they discover new ones, prolong their visit, check into the local hotel, and even become permanent residents. Until the last few decades, most of the interpretive issues in the history of literacy and reading were drawn from European history, especially the earlymodern period. Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century had themselves insisted on a relationship between literacy and the Reformation, so it was natural for historians to pursue the issue and hardly surprising that they tossed the relationship between the Reformation and the commercial revolution of the sixteenth century into the interpretive pot. Many of the interpretive issues that generated interest in the history of literacy in Europe, however, seemed to be of only tangential concern to Americanists. Protestant, commercial, and seemingly literate, Puritan New England bore little apparent resemblance to early-modern Europe. Only in the late 1960s, when Kenneth Lockridge and others began to emphasize the premodernness of Puritan villagers, did literacy come on the colonialists' agenda; Lockridge himself followed his study of Puritan Dedham with an investigation of colonial literacy. More recently, Gordon Wood and others have investigated the diffusion of print culture in their effort to assess the radicalness of the American Revolution. As Kaestle makes clear in chapter 2, The History of Readers, the field