Home
A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation
Barnes and Noble
A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation
Current price: $39.00
![A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation](https://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9780300112535_p0_v3_s600x595.jpg)
![A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation](https://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9780300112535_p0_v3_s600x595.jpg)
Barnes and Noble
A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation
Current price: $39.00
Size: Hardcover
Loading Inventory...
*Product information may vary - to confirm product availability, pricing, shipping and return information please contact Barnes and Noble
Schweiger complicates our understanding of literacy in the American South in the decades just prior to the Civil War by showing that rural people had access to a remarkable variety of things to read. Drawing on the writings of four young women who lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Schweiger shows how free and enslaved people learned to read, and that they wrote and spoke poems, songs, stories, and religious doctrines that were circulated by speech and in print. The assumption that slavery and reading are incompatible—which has its origins in the eighteenth century—has obscured the rich literate tradition at the heart of Southern and American culture.