From cuneiform to computer keystrokes. Thus when digital technologies of reading and writing arose, soon thereafter people became intensely reflective about what had preceded them: books, paper, pens ...

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. By Martin Puchner THE GREATEST INVENTION A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts By Silvia ...

In “The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting” (Bloomsbury, 192 pp., $26), Anne Trubek gives a compelling and entertaining history of humanity’s relationship to the physical act of writing, and ...

Would you recognize your friend’s handwriting? As technology becomes ubiquitous in communication culture, handwritten letters and notes are less and less common, replaced instead by emails and text ...

On the surface, it's just a form. Nothing extraordinary â just name, address, date. But as the 25-year-old sits down, and the pen touches paper, their wrist stiffens. A dull ache creeps up the thumb, ...

Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but the calligraphy belongs to Timothy Matlack, a beer-bottler from Pennsylvania. Source: Public Domain Image Sometimes modest subjects resound ...

THE witty remark of Dumas, that Lamartine had raised history to the dignity of romance, would have appealed to Thomas Buckle, who was much occupied with reducing it to the level of a science. Critics ...

Herodotos (c.490–c.425 BCE) and Thucydides (c.460– c.399 BCE) were great Hellenic / Greek historians. They wrote during the fifth century BCE, about 700 years after Homer. The time of Herodotos and ...

Harvard professor Drew Gilpin Faust was teaching one of her undergraduate history seminars when she made a surprising discovery: Her students could not read cursive. "I just stopped in my tracks, I ...