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

Examines the far-reaching cultural implications of a kind of writing not usually deemed culturally significant--school assignments. Studies 44 papers written in 1898 by senior class members of the Platteville Normal School in southwestern Wisconsin assigned to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Wisconsin’s statehood. Examines the cultural work accomplished by these student writers in their own time and place.