When cursive meets history
A recent New York Times article on the return of cursive clubs points to a problem that many archivists, librarians, teachers, and researchers know well: when students don’t learn cursive, they lose access to a huge part of the historical record.
At the Newberry, we think about this all the time. So much of our collective past is handwritten: letters, diaries, drafts, notes, recipes, ledgers, marginalia. Some of it is famous. Most of it is not. But all of it can tell us something about how people lived, worked, and wrote.
That’s where Newberry Transcribe comes in.
Every page transcribed by volunteers becomes easier to search, read, and use. A letter that once required patience, practice, and a good eye for nineteenth-century handwriting can become discoverable to a student, a teacher, a genealogist, a researcher, or a curious reader halfway across the world.
And we’ve just added a new batch: 700 pages from the Sherwood Anderson papers.
Anderson is best known for Winesburg, Ohio, his 1919 story cycle about small-town life, loneliness, ambition, and the ache of wanting something more. More than a century later, readers and writers are still finding themselves in it. In a recent Guardian interview, novelist Lily King remembered reading Winesburg, Ohio as a teenager and recognizing something of herself in Anderson’s young observer, George Willard. The book, she said, helped make her own desire to become a writer feel possible.
That’s one of the lovely things about manuscript collections: they let us see literature before, after, and around the finished book. We encounter drafts, correspondence, notes, revisions, friendships, professional networks, and the ordinary business of a writer’s life. A handwritten page can feel surprisingly close, even when it’s a century old.
But first, someone has to read it.
By transcribing the Sherwood Anderson papers, volunteers help make these materials available to everyone: students encountering Anderson for the first time, scholars studying American literature, teachers looking for primary sources, or readers curious about the life and work behind the books.