L'alphabétisation en Amérique, 1650-1800

This is a report on, the conclusions reached in monograph on Literacy in Colonial New England (1974), and a commentary on those conclusions in the perspective of recent research on literacy in early modern Europe. This presentation, and some final reflections, lead to the following conclusions. In the course of the 16th-18th centuries, millions of men and women in Europe and in America were led to pick up the potentially radical tool of literacy, often for reasons deeper than its ever and ever greater availability. But it could be wrong always to associate the motivating social forces with progress or with upward mobility. There is evidence for a more skeptical and pessimistic account of the social forces behing this new instrument. Moreover, until the 19th century not social forces alone but only religion and the availability it brought could push this mass literacy to universality. Both in the presence and in the absence of this push, a measure of attitudes so sensitive that even in a blassed sample it should show some attitudinal impact from literacy, shows virtually none. This is consistent with current skepticism concerning the degree of functional adequacy, and of attitudinal liberation, among the mass of modern literates. Literacy could be seen, in fact, as an epiphenomenon of a larger and more subtle struggle for individual adequacy in the face of social changes which we hardly understand and which might conform only loosely to the idea of modernizationLockridge Kenneth A. L'alphabétisation en Amérique, 1650-1800. In: Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilisations. 32ᵉ année, N. 3, 1977. pp. 503-518

The American Revolution, Modernization, and Man

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/50904/1/129.pd

A new England town : the first hundred years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636-1736

xv, 208 p. ; 21 cm

Coale and Trussel's "m" visits Sweden

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