According to our next guest, 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 farm-women, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading.
Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance 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.
Ellen Gruber Garvey writes about how scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events. Ellen Gruber Garvey is Professor of English at the New Jersey City University and the author of the award-winning The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture.