“To Transcribe Them in a Fair and Legible Hand”: Hartford Female Seminary's Handwritten Newspapers

Abstract

The School Gazette (1824–26) and The Levee Gazette (1828), handwritten newspapers produced by students at Hartford Female Seminary, comprise a previously overlooked archive of texts worthy of serious scholarly consideration. The wide-ranging content of the gazettes, coupled with their insights into nineteenth-century women's education and early American periodical culture, suggests their broad appeal to scholars in multiple literary and historical fields. The gazettes, this article argues, represent a distinctive form of early nineteenth-century American authorship and literary production through their mixture of personal, academic, and public literacies. This article also highlights the potential value of the digital humanities, both as a tool for conducting research on the gazettes and as a way to make them accessible to a wider range of scholars, educators, and students by creating digital editions of all eighteen issues of The School Gazette and The Levee Gazette.