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Ruth Wallis Herndon, Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America, Journal of American History, Volume 93, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 496–497, https://doi.org/10.2307/4486250
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Learning to Read and Write in Colonial America is a very important book. Its publication is reason for celebration by all who have been awaiting a full monograph since E. Jennifer Monaghan's first essays appeared. Literacy specialists will especially be gratified, but all historians of early America will profit from this richly researched work by a scholar with an exceptionally deep grasp of both the primary sources and the secondary literature.
Monaghan argues that literacy acquisition was transformed in the second half of the eighteenth century, as divergent seventeenth-century colonial attitudes toward children and literacy rapidly converged. The sources of that transformation were three-fold: an emerging ideology of children that emphasized their trainability rather than their innate sinfulness; the rising availability of texts specifically designed for children (a result of the consumer revolution in the American colonies); and the growing appeal of spelling books (rather than religious texts) as the principal means of literacy instruction. By 1776, literacy acquisition no longer served religious orthodoxy; reading and writing had become “potentially revolutionary practices, challenging every kind of religious and political orthodoxy” (p. 8). Monaghan supports that argument well, and she might have extended it by explicitly connecting literacy transformation to the ideological ferment of the revolutionary era.
