Rebecca F's List: literacy and memory

• Familial authorship in the Anglo-American cataloging tradition.
   Hider, Philip
   Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 65-82, 2007
• The grandmother's story: oral tradition, family memory, and a mysterious manuscript
   Fisher, Robert C
   Archivaria; (57) Spring 2004, pp.105-128
• Reading and everyday life in antebellum Boston: the diary of Daniel F and Mary D Child
   Zboray, R J; Zboray, M S
   Libraries and Culture; 32 (3) Summer 1997, p.285-323

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• Susan M. Stabile. Memory's Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xiii + 284 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $34.95.
• in 1830, Deborah Norris Logan wistfully remembered her family's house that had stood for nearly seventy years on a street corner in Philadelphia only to be razed and replaced by the Second Bank of the United States. Logan lamented that when the house was destroyed, she lost some of her memories of the house and of her life in it too. She needed the physical structure of the house, its architectural style, the recesses of place and memory hidden in the rooms and spaces she knew so well. This material culture sparked Logan's most intimate and loving memories of the life she lived in the house and among the goods that filled it. More than that, those goods sparked her life remembered, giving meaning to her life as she looked back at it across the plot of land on which her family's house had once stood.
• To that end, they compiled and preserved their anomalous histories in genealogical commonplace books both to teach their daughters the family history and to secure the family memory. To assemble appropriate commonplace books, to put together those events and material culture that shaped a life lived so they could preserve a life remembered
• The writers, however, knew that the process of compiling and of writing their commonplace books would always be incomplete. They hoped that their histories would be constantly added to, edited, changed, and indexed for future generations. Their histories, and how   [End Page 47]  they put them together, demonstrate how personal memory was "associative, recursive, and utterly incomplete" (p. 14). In short, memory was, and is, a lived practice.

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• I began to see other ways of 'doing history' – outside of the archive – where meaning is created in the everyday practices of remembering.
• It became clear to me that cemeteries invoked remembering in two senses.⁵ The most common and obvious meaning is that they are places of mourning, representing ruptures with the past, yet simultaneously they are places of continuity where the dead are remembered by the living. The second and less apparent understanding is that cemeteries dedicated to a particular group of people – the Icelandic settlers in this case – are a material way of reconnecting or re-membering a community, and not just individuals. These Icelandic cemeteries are sites of collective memory that have emerged out of the historical experience of immigration and settlement to which the gates of the Bildfell cemetery attest
• The Icelandic cemetery and Gudrun Goodman's tombstone are sites of material culture that also serve as an emblem for the links between collective memory and individual biography, between the local experience and national formations, between commemoration and recall.
• Women's role as creators of historical memory, a point overlooked by Nora, dates back to the nineteenth century in English Canada,¹⁴ Britain,¹⁵ and Europe.¹⁶ A few women were able to make their living as writers of history, particularly biographies of famous women, or historical fiction,  [End Page 297]  but the majority were engaged in the preservation of their oral and material heritage
• local sites of memory highlight the importance of vernacular culture for doing women's history. In the absence of an archive – the site for the authoritative storing and inscription of memory¹⁸ – local commemorative practices provide a way into recovering the stories of ordinary women and men. But through the process of doing this research, it became apparent that each site of memory generated a different account of this remarkable woman. These nuanced inflections of meaning reinforce Lambek and Antze's view of memory as a practice. 'Memories,' they argue, 'are never simply records of the past, but are interpretative reconstructions that bear the imprint of local narrative conventions, cultural assumptions, discursive formations and practices, and social contexts of recall and commemoration.'¹⁹
• My conversations with Stella are a reminder that professional historians (those trained in the academy) are not the only people who 'do history.' Individuals and communities are often engaged in a search for their roots, preserving their histories, and inserting them into the present.
• Because these texts are commemorative, they omit parts of their history that do not fit into the community and nation-building mythologies.
• remembering of settlement and the forgetting of colonization
• In effect, obituaries are mini heroic narratives designed to immortalize an individual. Since they are public documents – indeed, the last text of the self being written by the community – they tend to both valorize and sanitize an individual's life.
• My research with Stella was a reminder of the importance of local knowledge that resides in the anecdotal, in the everyday, and in cultural practices – the places and spaces where individuals and communities create identity.
• ot only do we, as historians, sometimes forget this fact as we burrow our way through 'the data,' but understanding the emotional attachment to these memory sources may provide insight into the construction of self, family, community, and ethnic identities, and the ways in which these are mediated through vernacular and official cultures.
• It would be tempting to privilege local knowledge as the authentic site of memory, particularly since it provides an avenue into the gendered nature of memory practices, and to the 'split memory' of women's experiences that contradict the social memory of a particular ethnic group. But, like other memory sources, the local needs to be interrogated. As this analysis shows, there are no easy distinctions between the local and the nation-state, between collective memory and individual biography, between vernacular and official cultures, between memory  [End Page 315]  and history, between les lieux de mémorie and les milieux de mémoire. In order then to understand the ways in which commemorative practices are constituted and constitutive of myth-making, we need to examine the ways in which vernacular and official cultures intersect, and under what circumstances they coincide or collide.
• For overviews of history and memory, see Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York and London: Routledge, 1996); Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1993); Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold; New York, Oxford University Press, 2000); Kerwin Lee Klein, 'On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse,' Representations 69 (Winter 2000): 127–49; Jacques LeGoff, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Jeffrey Olick and Joyce Robbins, 'Social Memory Studies: From 'Collective Memory' to the Historical Sociology,' Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40; Frits Pannekoek, 'Who Matters? Public History and the Invention of the Canadian Past,' Acadiensis 29, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 205–17; Susannah Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000); Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

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• This essay attempts to show that many antebellum Americans imbued their books with a richness of meaning despite the commodification process. As consumer items, books often transcended commercial value and performed varied functions as multivalent objects: they could entertain and educate and their very costliness could convey owners' status, but they also offered solace, kindled memories, and, in general, helped maintain ties to loved ones
• s they contended with the often dolorous by-products of abundance and capital accumulation--upheaval, mobility, and estrangement from friends and family--they turned to letter writing and diary keeping.  ⁹   Such literary efforts helped them maintain their past connections and to preserve memories of their unfolding lives. "What a world of meetings and partings this is!" one women wrote in 1841 to her parents as she journeyed from her childhood home to a new one on the frontier. "May all who love each other meet in a better world never to be separated!" ¹⁰   Her personal papers, and those of many other "Yankee family" members,  ¹¹   reveal within their sometimes strained but often eloquent gestures toward preservation of emotional ties, the essential role of books and reading in the social "meaning of things."
• she is what Grant McCracken has called a "curatorial consumer," in that her collection of items represents "different versions of the family" which "converts ancestors into objects and objects into descendants."
• Books promise her, as death approaches, some continuance of worldly connection to friends and neighbors. The very mutability of the meaning of things obscures whatever specific significance she had assigned these books when she initially acquired and used them. Yet, obviously, they had now become precious items, not for their intrinsic worth or original meaning, but as part of an assemblage of personally charged mementos that she in turn wished to be remembered by.
• The multi-level and complex interplay of gift giving, social ties, memory, and mortality is echoed by Sarah Edes, a young Charlestown widow. Shortly after her twenty-ninth birthday, she received a Bible that was itself once a gift to her recently deceased husband. "A Testament . . . that belonged to my darling Henry" would help her keep his memory alive whenever she used it, as she explains: "Uncle Charles gave it to him 16 years ago. [H]ave heard [H]enry speak of this very book some time ago. I find several passages marked in it which I shall often read." In this case the book immediately links Sarah and her Uncle Charles through shared remembrance of Henry, but it also transcends time and space. It not only reflects a legacy of exchange within past and current relations, it acts as a medium of communication
• For a consideration of letterwriting and the maintenance of family ties, see Marilyn Ferris Motz,  True Sisterhood: Michigan Women and Their Kin, 1820-1920   (Albany, N.Y., 1983), chap. 3. Elizabeth Hampsten's  Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880-1910   (Bloomington, Ind., 1982), vii-28, discusses the scholarly literature based upon the personal diaries of common people. Jane H. Hunter, "Inscribing the Self in the Heart of the Family: Diaries and Girlhood in Late-Victorian America,"  American Quarterly   44 (1992): 51-81. Letters and diaries, of course, represent meaning but do not of themselves constitute it. The specific social relations from which these representations arise may obscure some ascriptions of personal meaning inappropriate to a family setting. Nevertheless, since family relations embed the participant in mutually-constructed meanings, the extensions of these meanings to imprints and objects within this family system reflect an important center of personal meaning that historians can capture and analyze.

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• • "The same identity that anchored readers in the present also connected them w/ their counterparts in the past. books served as legacies, as inheritances, that linked generations of reading women to each other. ... The preservation, by female kin, of the commonplace book that is the only extant document of [the lady who produced it] testifies to identification with a mother and grandmother who had been devoted to reading. [Her] legacy, the inheritance left to later generations, was both the object itself and the devotion to reading that was encoded in it."

• • Hofstader -- difference between intelligence and intellect is that "the latter 'has a certain spontaneous character and inner determination' that sets it apart" + "a peculiar poise of its own... established by a balance btwn 2 basic qualities in the intellectual's attitude toward ideas": playfulness & piety.
    
    "The carefully chosen passages that fill the pages of commonplace books & autograph albums illustrate... piety" - as opposed to diaries that may be more playful. entries reflect the highly purposeful engagment w/ books.

• • "The world of reading reconstructed from women's letters, commonplace books, diaries, autograph albums, and journals challenges the still familiar idea of female reading as passive consumption of textually determined meanings. it shows..."

• • engagement with books a collective practice