Even 150 years ago, people grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks.

Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African-American janitors to farm women, abolitionists to Confederates all cut out and pasted down their reading — a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture that New Jersey City University professor of English Ellen Gruber Garvey explores in her book, “Writing with Scissors: Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance.”

Garvey is scheduled to speak from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday at Alderson Auditorium in the Kansas Union, 1301 Jayhawk Blvd.

The free presentation is co-sponsored by Kansas University’s departments of English and American studies, and the Hall Center for the Humanities. For more information on the author and book, visit the calendar listing at www.hallcenter.ku.edu.