Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders
Ronald J. Zboray
and Mary Saracino Zboray
University of Tennessee Press 2006
Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders (University of Tennessee Press 2006) by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, presents the most comprehensive analysis of literate communicative practices within a major American region ever attempted. Accumulating a data set of over 2.5 million words from visits to thirty-five archives over twelve years, the Zborays recorded every reference to print media use appearing in nearly 4,000 unpublished personal letters, diaries, and other documents produced by common folk of all sorts who lived in New England during the three decades before the Civil War. Farmers, seamen, factory workers, domestic servants, and housewives alike testify to the role that literature played in everyday life, and the way it helped them forge and maintain interpersonal relationships. Everyday Ideas was awarded a prize for being the best book in journalism and mass communication history published in 2006 by the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.