The result of a conference bringing historians and educators together with government officials to learn about current literacy research and to discuss research needs, this book presents eight conference papers. Topics covered include (1) the spread of literacy, (2) the impact of the printing press on current attitudes toward literacy, (3) the cultural context for literacy in seventeenth-century England and New England, (4) the relationship between literacy and traditional culture in England between 1600 and 1850, (5) the position of the illiterate person in the nineteenth-century American court system, (6) functional literacy in nineteenth-century China, (7) schooling and literacy in late Imperial Russia, (8) discriminatory assessments of black literacy, and (9) significant readings on literacy. (MM)