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12 books match the query 'Alphabet'
A Tallgrass Prairie Alphabet
Claudia McGehee
University of Iowa Press, 2004
BG's ABCs
Tackling Football and LifeWritten by Brandon Graham and Lesley Van Arsdall; Illustrated by Mr. Tom
Temple University Press, 2025
BG’s ABCs emphasizes a never give up mindset while also teaching lessons of kindness and respect. Using BG’s ABCs as a guide, young readers are sure to achieve victory while also developing a zest for life!
Becoming Beside Ourselves
The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human BeingBrian Rotman
Duke University Press, 2008
Alphabetic texts do not convey the bodily gestures of human speech: the hesitations, silences, and changes of pitch that infuse spoken language with affect. Rotman suggests that by removing the body from communication, alphabetic texts enable belief in singular, disembodied, authoritative forms of being such as God and the psyche. He argues that while disembodied agencies are credible and real to “lettered selves,” they are increasingly incompatible with selves and subjectivities formed in relation to new virtual technologies and networked media. Digital motion-capture technologies are restoring gesture and even touch to a prominent role in communication. Parallel computing is challenging the linear thought patterns and ideas of singularity facilitated by alphabetic language. Barriers between self and other are breaking down as the networked self is traversed by other selves to become multiple and distributed, formed through many actions and perceptions at once. The digital self is going plural, becoming beside itself.
Inventing the Alphabet
The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the PresentJohanna Drucker
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history.
Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography.
This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been “invented” as an object of scholarship.
Mother of Writing
The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic ScriptWilliam A. Smalley, Chia Koua Vang, and Gnia Yee Yang
University of Chicago Press, 1990
An anthropological linguist who has worked among the Hmong, William A. Smalley joins Shong Lue's chief disciple, Chia Koua Vang, and one of his associates, to tell the fascinating story of how the previously unschooled farmer developed his remarkable writing system through four stages of increasing sophistication. The uniqueness of Shong Lue's achievement is highlighted by a comparison of Shong Lue's writing system to other known Hmong systems and to the history of writing as a whole.
In addition to a nontechnical linguistic analysis of the script and a survey of its current use, Mother of Writing provides an intriguing cultural account of Shong Lue's life. The book traces the twenty-year-long struggle to disseminate the script after Shong Lue's death, first by handwriting, then by primitive moveable type, an abortive attempt to design a wooden typewriter, and finally by modern wordprocessing. In a moving concluding chapter, Smalley discusses his own complex feelings about his coauthors' story.
N Is for Nursery
Blossom Budney
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2017
The letters of the alphabet are brilliantly brought to life in a bright nursery school, where the children learn and play. B is for building blocks . . . but also for blowing out the candles on a birthday cake! C is for the colorful chairs the children take when the teacher rings a chime. Lively pictures designed around each letter show the children dancing, singing, listening to stories, tickling one another, and even engaging in an exciting game of tug-of-war. The fun rhymes and imaginative words for each letter make N is for Nursery a great book for children just learning to read and to recognize letters and letter sounds.
Originally published in 1956, N is for Nursery is the most recent addition to the Bodleian Library’s children’s book imprint and the perfect book for children to take with them on a new adventure like starting school.
Playful Letters
A Study in Early Modern AlphabeticsErika Mary Boeckeler
University of Iowa Press, 2017
Drawing on Shakespeare, anthropomorphic typography, figured letters, and Cyrillic pedagogy and politics, this book explores the ways in which alphabetic thinking and writing inform literature and the visual arts, and it develops reading strategies for the “letterature” that underwrites such cultural production. Playful Letters begins with early modern engagements with the alphabet and the human body—an intersection where letterature emerges with startling force. The linking of letters and typography with bodies produced a new kind of literacy. In turn, educational habits that shaped letter learning and writing permeated the interrelated practices of typography, orthography, and poetry. These mutually informing processes render visible the persistent crumbling of words into letters and their reconstitution into narrative, poetry, and image.
In addition to providing a rich history of literary and artistic alphabetic interrogation in early modern Western Europe and Russia, Playful Letters contributes to the continuous story of how people use new technologies and media to reflect on older forms, including the alphabet itself.
Spellbound
Rethinking the AlphabetCraig McDaniel and Jean Robertson
Intellect Books, 2016
The ABCs of Wisconsin Cheese
Susan Apps-Bodilly
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2026
A fun A-to-Z journey through the delicious world of Wisconsin cheese! In The ABCs of Wisconsin Cheese, explore the wonderful world of cheese and the stories and makers behind the food that has made Wisconsin famous—one letter at a time! From the milk that comes from family-owned farms to the award-winning varieties produced across the state, this charming picture book introduces children to the state’s cheese-making traditions in a fun and accessible way.
Written by retired elementary and middle school teacher Susan Apps-Bodilly and beautifully illustrated by Renée Graef, an award-winning artist best known for her work on American Girl books and the My First Little House series, this book pairs playful, engaging artwork with an alphabet of cheese-related facts that educate and entertain. Learn how cheese is made, why curds squeak, and what makes Wisconsin cheeses so special.
Designed for readers ages 5–9 (grades K–3), The ABCs of Wisconsin Cheese is a perfect blend of education and entertainment that will delight children, families, and anyone curious about the state’s cheese-making heritage. The book is a tasty celebration of a beloved food tradition and the Dairy State’s most famous product—cheese!
The Alphabet in My Hands
A Writing LifeAgosín, Marjorie
Rutgers University Press, 1999
Marjorie Agosín writes of a beloved childhood nanny: "Since I was Jewish she baptized me with holy water brought forth from the fonts of nearby churches. She told me to stay very still so I wouldn't sprout horns. . . . I was somewhere between taciturn and happy gazing into the mirror as if approaching the edge of a cliff . . . and I watched myself in the deep, transparent veil of this night of all nights." Many of the themes expressed in this vignette—cultural dissonance, family, and community—are poetically intertwined throughout The Alphabet in My Hands. Agosín takes us on a personal journey of discovery that is as much internal reflection as it is an exodus across continents and decades.
Agosín's childhood and early adolescence were spent with her Jewish family in Chile. While her family raised her to regard her Jewish heritage with loving awareness, they also participated in the dominant Catholic culture—an aunt organized Easter egg hunts and her mother admired the beauty of Chile's Catholic churches. The young Agosín became keenly aware of her dual identity in her country, both as a participant and an outsider.
The second half of The Alphabet in My Hands recounts the events that forced her family to emigrate to America: the overthrow of Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet. Agosín writes of her new life in Athens, Georgia, of the sudden loss of all that was familiar. Ostracized as an emigrant—a "non-white" with a strange foreign accent—her high school years were made even more painful by the news from Chile: prisoners taken and classmates disappearing or shot.
Years later, Agosín goes back to Chile and she travels there with her own children. As she stares down at her old homeland from the plane, she writes: "Why do I love this place that forced us into exile, that punished my father for being a Jew?" And in the final chapter of The Alphabet in My Hands, this award-winning poet addresses two important topics: her current residence in New England and the central role of writing and literature in her life.
The Violence of the Letter
Toward a Theory of WritingMelanie McMahon
University of Michigan Press, 2023
Co-Winner of the 2024 ACLA Renè Wellek Prize for Monograph
The emergence of the alphabet in ancient Greece, usually heralded as the first step in the inexorable march toward reason and progress, in fact signaled the introduction of a chance technology that hijacked the future, with devastating consequences for humanity. By investigating an array of cultural artifacts, ranging from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey to the Oracle at Delphi to Luther's challenge to the Church, this book demonstrates how the apparently benign emergence of writing made possible far-ranging systems of organized domination and unprecedented levels of violence. The Violence of the Letter considers how a twenty-six-letter code changed the face of the world, and not always for the better.
When You Learn the Alphabet
Kendra Allen
University of Iowa Press, 2019
These dynamics strive for some semblance of accountability, and the essays within this collection are used as displays of deep unlearning and restoring—balancing trauma and humor, poetics and reality, forgiveness and resentment.
When You Learn the Alphabet allots space for large moments of tenderness and empathy for all black bodies—but especially all black woman bodies—space for the underrepresented humanity and uncared for pain of black girls, and space to have the opportunity to be listened to in order to evolve past it.