Document Set E: Literacy
Document E1: Literacy in New Spain
“At a guess (there is no hard data that I know of) the literacy rate in New Spain in 1810 could not have been much higher than 10 percent overall, with much of the literate population compressed spatially into the cities, and socially into the upper reaches of the social hierarchy, so that rural literacy must have been considerably lower. In the area of Oaxaca, for example, reading and writing were limited to indigenous nobles and notaries throughout the colonial period…”
Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World
By Joseph Esherick, Hasan Kayalı, Eric Van Young
Empire to Nation: Historical Perspectives on the Making of the Modern World
By Joseph Esherick, Hasan Kayalı, Eric Van Young
Document E2: Literacy in the 13 Colonies/Early Republic
In 1974, University of Montana scholar Kenneth Lockridge’s groundbreaking book, Literacy in Colonial New England, surveyed evidence from legal records and offered provisional conclusions—“The exercise is bound to be tentative, as it uses a biased sample and an ambiguous measure”—but he made the case that, among white New England men, about 60 percent of the population was literate between 1650 and 1670, a figure that rose to 85 percent between 1758 and 1762, and to 90 percent between 1787 and 1795. In cities such as Boston, the rate had come close to 100 percent by century’s end.
Lockridge and his successors showed that literacy was higher in New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies than in the South, and higher in the cities than in the countryside. Traders and shopkeepers were more literate than farmers. They showed that American literacy was high by European standards. As the University of Delaware’s F. W. Grubb wrote in 1990:
Of all European countries perhaps only Scotland surpassed America in literacy by 1800. Not only had the European literacy revolution been transplanted to the American periphery during the colonial period, but colonial literacy had somehow leaped past that of northwestern Europe.
Such research confirmed a widespread belief in early America itself. In 1800, a magazine called The Columbian Phoenix and Boston Review reported that “no country on the face of the earth can boast of a larger proportion of inhabitants, versed in the rudiments of science, or fewer, who are not able to read and write their names, than the United States of America.”
“Every Man Able to Read: Literacy in Early America” by Jack Lynch
http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter11/literacy.cfm
Lockridge and his successors showed that literacy was higher in New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies than in the South, and higher in the cities than in the countryside. Traders and shopkeepers were more literate than farmers. They showed that American literacy was high by European standards. As the University of Delaware’s F. W. Grubb wrote in 1990:
Of all European countries perhaps only Scotland surpassed America in literacy by 1800. Not only had the European literacy revolution been transplanted to the American periphery during the colonial period, but colonial literacy had somehow leaped past that of northwestern Europe.
Such research confirmed a widespread belief in early America itself. In 1800, a magazine called The Columbian Phoenix and Boston Review reported that “no country on the face of the earth can boast of a larger proportion of inhabitants, versed in the rudiments of science, or fewer, who are not able to read and write their names, than the United States of America.”
“Every Man Able to Read: Literacy in Early America” by Jack Lynch
http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/winter11/literacy.cfm
Document E3: Population in the US 1790
Document E4: Population in Latin America
Discussion Questions:
1. What does document E1 say about literacy in New Spain?
2. Look at document E4; what does this document show about possible difficulties with promoting literacy in Latin America?
3. What does document E2 say about literacy in the 13 Colonies/new republic?
4. Look at document E3; why might the 13 Colonies/new republic have fewer difficulties promoting literacy?
5. How do these documents help us to answer the question: "Why were British North American colonists better prepared for Independence than their Latin American neighbors to the south?”
2. Look at document E4; what does this document show about possible difficulties with promoting literacy in Latin America?
3. What does document E2 say about literacy in the 13 Colonies/new republic?
4. Look at document E3; why might the 13 Colonies/new republic have fewer difficulties promoting literacy?
5. How do these documents help us to answer the question: "Why were British North American colonists better prepared for Independence than their Latin American neighbors to the south?”