Title: The story of A
Description: "Illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance.".

"Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as "A is for apple." The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for the "republic of ABC" a cultural potency equivalent to its high-culture counterpart, the "republic of letters," while shaping its child-readers into consumers.

As a central rite of socialization, alphabetization schooled children to conflicting expectations, as well as to changing models of authority, understandings of the world, and uses of literature."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Alphabet, Alphabetizing, Civilization, English language, History, Language arts, Literacy, New England primer, Study and teaching, Hawthorne, nathaniel, 1804-1864, English language, alphabet, study and teaching, United states, civilization
Places: United States
People: Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)