Historians have often assumed that the lives of the poor and illiterate can never be known because they have left little record of their existence. This book, however, will establish some of the main themes of a new field of historical study: that of 'ordinary writings' - the improvised writings of the poor and the young.

This book provides an alternative to the more conventional modes of qualitative and quantitative inquiry currently used in professional training programs, particularly in education. It features a very accessible presentation that combines application, rationale, critique, and inspiration—and is itself an example of this kind of writing. It teaches students how to use personal writing in order to analyze, explicate, and advance their ideas. And it encourages minority students, women, and others to find and express their authentic voices by teaching them to use their own lives as primary resources for their scholarship.

In this inspirational book, LaMay shows readers how to transform classrooms and schools into places where youth can explore the intersection between literacy and their lives. This book is the culmination of a literacy curriculum that the author and her high school students wrote dialogically, beginning with their attempts to define love. Through real-life classroom examples, they demonstrate how an innovative curriculum that intertwines personal and academic engagement can create space for students to explore their identities, connect to literary texts, and develop agency as writers and thinkers. In this important contribution to literacy educators, the author shows how personal narratives can help students rebuild their fractured relationships with school and envision writing and academic achievement as playing a role in their futures. Book Features: Evidence of how students’ social-emotional and academic growth may intertwine in the interest of school engagement. A re-conceptualization of the complex layers of the personal narrative genre and its role in the pedagogy of academic writing. A reinterpretation of the transformational role of revision in students’ academic and life texts. Examples of writing and interview data that illustrate the diversity of student responses.

This innovative study of poverty in Independent Ireland between 1920 and 1940 is the first to place the poor at its core by exploring their own words and letters. Written to the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, their correspondence represents one of the few traces in history of Irish experiences of poverty, and collectively they illuminate the lives of so many during the foundation decades of the Irish state. This book keeps the human element central, so often lost when the framework of history is policy, institutions and legislation. It explores how ideas of charity, faith, gender, character and social status were deployed in these poverty narratives and examines the impact of poverty on the lives of these writers and the survival strategies they employed. Finally, it considers the role of priests in vetting and vouching for the poor and, in so doing, perpetuating the discriminating culture of charity.

This collection brings much-needed focus to the vibrancy and vitality of minority and marginal writing about empire, and to their implications as expressions of embodied contact between imperial power and those negotiating its consequences from "below." The chapters explore how less powerful and less privileged actors in metropolitan and colonial societies within the British Empire have made use of the written word and of the power of speech, public performance, and street politics. This book breaks new ground by combining work about marginalized figures from within Britain as well as counterparts in the colonies, ranging from published sources such as indigenous newspapers to ordinary and everyday writings including diaries, letters, petitions, ballads, suicide notes, and more. Each chapter engages with the methodological implications of working with everyday scribblings and asks what these alternate modernities and histories mean for the larger critique of the "imperial archive" that has shaped much of the most interesting writing on empire in the past decade.

In the English language World War I has largely been analysed and understood through the lens of the Western Front. This book addresses this imbalance by examining the war in Eastern and Central Europe. The historiography of the war in the West has increasingly focused on the experience of ordinary soldiers and civilians, the relationships between them and the impact of war at the time and subsequently. This book takes up these themes and, engaging with the approaches and conclusions of historians of the Western front, examines wartime experiences and the memory of war in the East. Analysing soldiers' letters and diaries to discover the nature and impact of displacement and refugee status on memory, this volume offers a basis for comparison between experiences in these two areas. It also provides material for intra-regional comparisons that are still missing from the current research. Was the war in the East wholly 'other'? Were soldiers in this region as alienated as those in the West? Did they see themselves as citizens and was there continuity between their pre-war or civilian and military identities? And if, in the Eastern context, these identities were fundamentally challenged, was it the experience of war itself or its consequences (in the shape of imprisonment and displacement, and changing borders) that mattered most? How did soldiers and citizens in this region experience and react to the traumas and upheavals of war and with what consequences for the post-war era? In seeking to answer these questions and others, this volume significantly adds to our understanding of World War I as experienced in Central and Eastern Europe.

This book investigates the history of writing as a cultural practice in a variety of contexts and periods. It analyses the rituals and practices determining intimate or ‘ordinary’ writing as well as bureaucratic and religious writing. From the inscribed images of ‘pre-literate’ societies, to the democratization of writing in the modern era, access to writing technology and its public and private uses are examined. In ten studies, presented by leading historians of scribal culture from seven countries, the book investigates the uses of writing in non-alphabetical as well as alphabetical script, in societies ranging from Native America and ancient Korea to modern Europe. The authors emphasise the material characteristics of writing, and in so doing they pose questions about the definition of writing itself. Drawing on expertise in various disciplines, they give an up-to-date account of the current state of knowledge in a field at the forefront of ‘Book History’.