The History of Education Quarterly has done it again. Despite many scholars' previous attempts to summarize the state of the art in historical studies of literacy, this special issue will now be the best, up-to-date place for a novice to start. It should be required reading for everyone interested in this subfield. The editors have enlisted an impressive roster of prominent scholars in the field, and these authors have provided us with an excellent array of synthetic reviews, methodological and theoretical discussions, and exemplary research papers.

Efforts to teach native Americans to read and write were subsumed, in the colonial context, within the larger framework of religious proselytism. This, in turn, was set within the all-encompassing arena of the politics of Indian-white relations. How scholars view attempts to impart literacy has therefore been colored by historians' judgments of the virtues and vices of mission activity in general.

In the early nineteenth century educators interested in the mechanized basis for American manufacturing began to experiment with and institutionalize, in mechanics' institutes and the periodic press, an alternative form of literacy based on a knowledge of mechanics and the material culture of manufacturing. This technical literacy was built along three basic dimensions: the relationships between mechanical knowledge and manufacturing; the linkages among the schemata for technical, liberal, and scientific learning; and the dissemination of technical knowledge in various media.

The bulk of the work on the history of literacy in Britain in recent decades has been in the period after 1500, concentrated largely on England (sometimes embracing Wales) and to a lesser extent Scotland. This essay attempts to outline the main trends in such studies and to assess their achievements.

Compared to other European countries, one of the characteristic features of the expansion of literacy in Spain since 1500 has been the lack of firm and sustained religious, political, and ideological goals for its promotion and support. Also, the advancement of literacy in Spain has been much more dependent than elsewhere on schooling and on urbanization through migration from rural areas. Therefore, an analysis of literacy in Spain will be of special interest because of the contrast it provides to the countries of central and northern Europe and because of the opportunities it offers for an examination of the relative roles of central and local governments and of the Catholic church. Moreover, as Spain is a country with both a rich oral tradition and a significant written literature, we can investigate the complex and peculiar relationships between orality and literacy, between oral and written languages and cultures. And, in a region noted for its linguistic complexity, this analysis can be combined with a study of the clashes and interactions between two or more oral and/or written languages (Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Castilian, Catalan, Basque, Galician), the development of literacy in one or more of them, and their uses in the family, religious, administrative, and school domains. As this latter issue of linguistic conflict is much too complicated for a short article, it will not be discussed here.

In recent decades the history of literacy has engaged the interests of many Western scholars, particularly those concerned with applying the techniques and approaches of the social sciences to the broad issues of educational history. The simplistic notion that links higher rates of literacy with progress, rationality, modernity, and other benign abstractions, has been challenged by a group of Western historians intent on probing the complex social determinants of literacy in Europe and North America. Eschewing simple quantitative estimates of literacy, they have sought to analyze the quality and meaning of its possession, investigating the revealing problems of who was literate, what was the kind of literacy, when did literacy exist, and for what reasons. Their findings have been provocative, and their research continues to stimulate controversy as well as new insights.

In sharp contrast to the lively debates provoked by several articles and a major monograph in the 1970s, the history of literacy, narrowly conceived, has attracted relatively little attention from Canadian scholars in the 1980s. Much of the work which has been done is preoccupied with questions of sources and methodology.

“Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves; Britons, never, never, never, shall be slaves.” So ran the popular eighteenth-century, nationalistic, freedom song. The people of Britain were proud of their liberties and would fight to uphold them against the hated French enemy. But would slaves ever be Britons? Would slaves ever be free? These questions were very real because during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries hundreds of thousands of black, African slaves were transported to the British West Indian colonies, where the majority labored on sugar plantations.