'The Bank of Industry’: Rewards of Merit and the ‘Emotional Capitalism’ of Nineteenth-Century Schoolroom Ephemera

AAS member Patricia Crain (elected 2002) returns to the AAS reading room to discuss her latest book, Reading Children: Literacy, Property, and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century America. This work explores what it meant for a child to be a "reader" and how American culture came to place such a high value on this identity. Crain conducted the research for Reading Children at AAS when she was an AAS-NEH fellow in the 2005-06 academic year.