Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks—ancient ancestors of Facebook and blogging. Both African American and women’s rights scrapbook-makers documented their experiences in the public realm and experimented with ways to present them. In this lecture, Ellen Gruber Garvey reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where activists collected and constructed new narratives by creating unwritten histories in books they “wrote” with scissors and paste. Ellen Gruber Garvey is professor of English at New Jersey City University. Co-sponsored by the Barnard English department and the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies.