I'm a historian and the death of cursive writing is a crisis for archives

I work in a university archives, and I'm here to tell you that the decline of cursive writing is creating a genuine crisis for historical research. We have centuries of documents—letters, diaries, government records, personal papers—all written in cursive. And the current generation of students and even young researchers cannot read them . I've watched brilliant graduate students struggle with primary sources because they simply don't have the fluency to decipher handwriting that was standard 100 years ago.

We offer paleography courses to help, but it's not the same as growing up with the skill. If we lose cursive literacy, we lose direct access to our own history. Future generations will be dependent on transcriptions and translations, which are always interpretations. I'm not saying everyone needs to write cursive, but the ability to read it feels culturally essential.

Historians in this forum, how are you dealing with this? And educators, do you think about this when you make curriculum decisions?

I'm a historian and I've been sounding this alarm for years. The death of cursive isn't just about nostalgia for pretty handwriting—it's about access to primary sources. We have millions of documents that will become illegible to future researchers. Census records, diaries, letters, even typed documents with handwritten marginalia—all inaccessible without cursive literacy.

Some archives are investing heavily in digitization and transcription, but it's slow and expensive. A single diary can take months to transcribe accurately. And transcriptions always lose something—the physicality of the writing, the pressure of the pen, the crossings-out that show thought processes. We're preserving content but losing context.

The most frustrating part is that this is a recent problem. My grandparents read cursive easily. My parents can read it. I can read it. My students? Mostly not. We've lost an entire skill in one generation. That's not natural evolution—that's a curriculum failure.