Strategic Scrapbooks: 19th Century Activists Remake the Newspaper for African American History and Women's Rights

Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks -- the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Mark Twain to Susan B. Anthony, abolitionists to Confederates, African American janitors to farmwomen, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Ellen Gruber Garvey, author of "Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance" (Oxford, 2012) opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Her groundbreaking book reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where the proliferating cheap press touched the lives of activists and mourning parents, and all who yearned for a place in history.