The Platteville Papers: Inscribing Frontier Ideology and Culture in a Nineteenth-Century Writing Assignment

• DOI: 10.2307/3250735
• Publication Date: 2006-04-25T20:32:13Z
• Authors: Kathryn Fitzgerald
• Keywords: Frontier

n this essay I examine the far-reaching cultural implications of a kind writing not usually deemed culturally significant-school assignments. The forty-four papers under study here were written in 1898 by senior class members Platteville Normal School southwestern Wisconsin, and assigned to commemorate fiftieth anniversary Wisconsin's statehood. My purposes examining these might be visualized concentric circles. At center are student themselves, embedded sociohistorical moment at which they written. level, work accomplished writers their own time place. For papers, is circumscribed rhetorical demands school assignment particular historical occasion for it was assigned, note various consequences institutional contexts kinds can accomplish. Finally, complex intersections among context, constraints promptings material community whose story being told return us present, outermost contextual Here, critical perspectives twentieth century provide lens viewing political ideological effects