Schedule of Events:

All events held at the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook (Humanities 1008)

Ellen Gruber Garvey (English, New Jersey City University)

Wednesday, February 17, 4-6pm: “Activists Repurpose Media: 19th Century Scrapbooks”

Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks – the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Mark Twain to Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, people cut out and pasted down their reading. They devised ways of articulating opinions and compiling data without writing a word.  Scrapbooks let activists who didn’t own the press engage with media. Women’s rights activists documented their pioneering activities in scrapbooks and experimented with how to present their political work to varied audiences. They asserted that the press was not a simple record, but a set of conversations to read critically.  African Americans created scrapbooks to hold communal history. In hundreds of volumes, only a few years after Emancipation, black people asserted that they owned news and culture and passed along their critical, oppositional reading of newspapers. In their scrapbooks, these nineteenth-century African American and women’s rights activists reveal their personal, passionate, often critical, and always dynamic relationship to media.

Thursday, February 18, 1-2:30pm: “Too Much to Read and How People Have Managed That Condition: From Our Ancestors to Today”

People in the 19th century faced a flood of printed matter. But were the material piles of newspaper valuable, or was it the information in them? The methods they developed to manage the flood of print — the work of an African American pioneer in the old newspaper business, clipping services — demonstrate changing ways of thinking about information, and point to how we think about information now.