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Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance

According to our next guest, men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks - the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farm-women, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading.

Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance

opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Like us, nineteenth-century readers spoke back to the media, and treasured what mattered to them.

Ellen Gruber Garvey writes about how scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events. Ellen Gruber Garvey is Professor of English at the New Jersey City University and the author of the award-winning The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture.

In a radio career that has spanned nearly 35 years, Ray Graf has done it all. At one time or another he worked as an overnight board operator, a commercial copywriter, a reporter and a voiceover announcer. For several years - a lifetime ago - he was a morning drive disc jockey. Graf has been a member of the WAMC News team for 16 years. These days, he finds himself as The Roundtable's news anchor, panelist- and occasional guest host for Joe Donahue. "Radio news is not always easy," said Graf of his most recent radio vocation, "but it's not nearly as difficult as spinning a Michael Bolton record at 5:45 in the morning and pretending you're happy about it."