"Hidden Histories in Nineteenth-Century Scrapbooks”
By Ellen Gruber Garvey

Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks --- the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Mark Twain to Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Their scrapbooks -- some of them at AAS -- left us a rarely examined record of what they read and how they read it. This talk, based on Ellen Gruber Garvey's new book, 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.

Ellen Gruber Garvey is a professor in the English Department of New Jersey City University, where she also teaches Women's and Gender Studies. Her book on American magazines, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture won the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing’s prize for the best book of 1996 on the history of the book. She has written and lectured in Europe and the U.S. on scrapbooks and on women’s bicycling, as well as on magazines, billboards, women editors, and stories about slave ships. She co-edits the journal Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. In 2009, Garvey researched Writing with Scissors at AAS as a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson fellow.