In 1923, in the center of Wisconsin's dairy region, Sidney Vopat's father turned his blacksmith shop into a car dealership. A few years later, he convinced his son, then in high school, to enroll in a business course offered by a correspondence school out of Chicago so that Sidney could learn how to keep records and communicate on his father's behalf with Ford Motor Company. “The old man could outsell anybody,” Vopat recalled, “but he wasn't too good at penmanship.”

This recollection carries many of the major formations of literacy and literacy learning of the twentieth century. First and foremost is the sheer acceleration of economic and technological change that courses through American lives. In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Vopat's father, a man with a fourth-grade education, hammered out horseshoes and made his own tools on an anvil in a shop that he owned in a small crossroads town in the rural Midwest. By the 1920s, his shop was a franchise for Model T's, then Whippets, then Chryslers, and, by the 1950s, Vopat's father would be dealing television antennas. Turbulent economic and technological changes force changes in the nature of work, rearrangements in systems of communication and social relations, and fluctuation in the value of human skills. With the unique kinds of economic and technological changes of the twentieth century, those fluctuations came especially to affect the value of literacy.