HIST 253 - History of Reading from Gutenberg to Chat GPT

”How shall you begin to read a book?” asked a nineteenth-century book on self-improvement, before laying out specific instructions to guide young boys in the proper reading of authoritative texts. This question reveals that a practice we often take for granted - reading itself - is actually the product of social and historical circumstances. Reading practices have been shaped by technologies and by social conditions that regulated access to education and to literature based on gender, class, and race; reading can also be political, as texts can facilitate the dissemination of controversial ideas and potentially spark revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) change. As a result, thinking critically about the practice of reading generates important methodological questions for historians, who are reliant on the texts produced in the past. How do our practices of reading differ from those of our historical subjects? How can we know who could read, what they read, or how they read? This course will allow students to learn about and reflect on what it means to think historically and make historical claims, and will serve as a thematic and methodological introduction to the histories of reading in western Europe from the printing press to the digital era. A portion of class time will be dedicated to a reading “lab,” in which we will experiment with reading and writing using the technologies of our historical subjects, and work closely with materials in Reed’s Special Collections.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Not offered: 2026-27
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.