Title Writing with scissors : American scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem renaissance / Ellen Gruber Garvey

Published Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2013

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Description 1 online resource (x, 304 pages) : illustrations Contents Reuse, recycle, recirculate : scrapbooks remake value -- Mark Twain's scrapbook innovations -- Civil War scrapbooks : newspaper and nation -- Alternative histories in African American scrapbooks -- Strategic scrapbooks : activist women's clipping and self-creation -- Scrapbook as archive, scrapbooks in archives -- The afterlife of the nineteenth-century scrapbook : managing data and information Summary Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks-the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Writing with Scissors opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Like us, nineteenth-century readers spoke back to the media, and treasured what mattered to them. In this groundbreaking book, Ellen Gruber Garvey reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where the proliferating cheap press touched the lives of activists and mourning parents, and all who yearned for a place in history. Scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events such as living through the Civil War, mediated through the newspapers. African Americans and women's rights activists collected, concentrated, and critiqued accounts from a press that they did not control to create "unwritten histories" in books they wrote with scissors. Whether scrapbook makers pasted their clippings into blank books, sermon collections, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark Twain invented, they claimed ownership of their reading. They created their own democratic archives. Writing with Scissors argues that people have long had a strong personal relationship to media. Like newspaper editors who enthusiastically "scissorized" and reprinted attractive items from other newspapers, scrapbook makers passed their reading along to family and community. This book explains how their scrapbooks underlie our present-day ways of thinking about information, news, and what we do with it Notes Includes index Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes English Subject Scrapbooking -- United States -- History Cut-out craft -- United States -- History CRAFTS & HOBBIES -- Scrapbooking. Cut-out craft Manners and customs Scrapbooking Scrapbooking Crafts. -- United States -- History. SUBJECT United States -- Social life and customs. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140527 United States -- History -- Sources. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140327 Subject United States Genre/Form History Sources Form Electronic book ISBN 9780199986354 0199986355 9780199979240 0199979243 1283656752 9781283656757

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