Overview of Early American Literacy and The Emergence of Print Culture
In the late 18th century to the early 19th century, America saw a rise in literacy as well as an emergence of a new popular print culture. In 1790, “approximately 85 percent of adult men in New England and 60 percent of those in Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake could read and write,” (Murrin). The literacy rate for women was also on the rise, though much lower than the male literacy rate at “about 45 percent in New England” (Murrin).
As the literacy rates increased at this time, so did the supply and variety of publications and reading materials. Correspondence by mail became extremely popular, tying in with the style in which The Power of Sympathy was written in: letters.
While The Power of Sympathy was released in 1789, American novels were not a popular or common publication in the United States in the late 18th century. As a result, this novel was considered the first American novel. The most common type of publication at that time was the newspaper.
With the boom in literacy and publication taking place, so did a sort of democratization of print. No longer were publications limited to the wealthy and well-educated: books, bibles, and newspapers were becoming available to the masses.
Read more about this topic: The Power Of Sympathy
Famous quotes containing the words early, american, emergence, print and/or culture:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“If the new American father feels bewildered and even defeated, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does in any fathering situation has a fifty percent chance of being right.”
—Bill Cosby (b. 1937)
“Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“What do I care
that the stream is trampled,
the sand on the stream-bank
still holds the print of your foot:
the heel is cut deep.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)