Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Mother Jones

    A BRIEF HISTORY OF HANDWRITING

    by Madison Pauly Aug 21, 2016 3 minutes

    3200 B.C.: With stylus and clay tablets, ancient Mesopotamians create abstract symbols to represent syllables of their spoken language.

    600s: Quill pens and parchment paper take hold in Europe. Drippy ink discourages pen lifting, hence cursive.

    1440s: Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press forces scribes to pivot to teaching penmanship.

    c. 1712: A popular copybook by George Bickham teaches farmers and merchants to write in a “round” hand. Gentlemen of the era employ an italic

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from Mother Jones

    Mother Jones6 min readAmerican Government
    Party Crashers
    EVEN BEFORE THE last shots of the Revolutionary War were fired, John Adams wrote a friend to warn, “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties.” Alas, political scientists will tell you the winner-takes-all
    Mother Jones2 min read
    What Gives?
    Tesla, SpaceX, etc. Musk, whose richest-man status relies on public subsidies and contracts, once told a follower that half of his wealth would be used to “help establish a self-sustaining city on Mars” in case “we destroy ourselves”—which is more li
    Mother Jones12 min readAmerican Government
    Fighting Chance
    ON THE AFTERNOON of January 6, 2021, as election deniers armed with Tasers and tomahawks overran the US Capitol, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) handed his colleague and close friend Eric Swalwell a pen. “Here,” he said to the California Democrat. “Stic

    Related