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Nov 18, 2019

How did Mark Twain aka Samuel Clemons use scrapbooks to fight unscrupulous publishers who reprinted his work
without paying him? Why did celebrities like Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony keep
scrapbooks? How did abolitionists, suffragettes, and African Americans use scrapbooks to tell their story? Before the
era of google and Instagram, how did American use scrapbooks to curate printed stories that contained information
they wanted to save for the future?

In this episode, our guest, Dr. Ellen Gruber Garvey explores how Americans from all walks of life created
scrapbooks to document, store, critique, and participate in a rapidly changing world of information overload. This
episode was recorded as a lecture at the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. You’ll have to use your imagination a little to
picture some of the types of scrapbooks that Dr. Garvey refers to but you’ll be fascinated by impact scrapbooks had
on American history.

We wish to thank our guest Dr. Ellen Gruber Garvey, professor of English at the New Jersey City University and the
host for the lecture, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Read more in Dr. Garvey’s book Writing with Scissors
American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance published by Oxford University Press.
This episode was produced by Mary Donohue, Assistant Publisher of Connecticut Explored, and engineered by
Patrick O’Sullivan.

To hear more episodes of Grating the Nutmeg, subscribe on iTunes, IHeartRadio, GooglePlay, Spotify or at
gratingthenutmeg.libsyn.com. Subscribe to Connecticut Explored and get the upcoming Winter issue with
stories about events or inventions that disrupted history. Subscribe, buy back issues and collections—at
ctexplored.org