CONCLUSION

The purpose of this book is to better understand literacy in what is now the United States by bringing together perspectives often missing from dominant narratives of educational history, particularly the history of literacy. We hope that better understanding these histories can help to contextualize the landscape of our current moment and perhaps to imagine other possibilities beyond the taken-for-granted contours of the present. Toward this end, this book offers an overview of some often-overlooked histories in the United States before and beyond its current political organization. In bringing together histories of literacy from widely different time periods and regions in the United States, we hope to highlight both the absence of some important histories from the canon and how the presence of these stories invites us to reconsider what we know (or think we know) about the history of literacy in what is now the United States. A decentralized system, spread across a huge territory, makes it hard to generalize about the education in the United States. Nevertheless, many scholars have attempted to explain large-scale patterns and themes in the history of literacy and find some commonalities (Banton Smith, 2002; Kaestle & Damon-Moore, 1991; Venezky, 1987). This volume has, in many ways, attempted just the opposite: to look at contexts which departed in significant ways from the “standard practice” of their era. In doing this, we hope to build from the canonical earlier contributions of scholars.