American cursive 1850–1950: Spencerian, Palmer and copperplate

Why it looks like that

The oldest of the three hands is the English round hand. It emerged in the 1660s and became England's most practical and beautiful style of handwriting,[^1] and writing masters competed to publish the most elegant engraved examples of it.[^2] The best-known collection, George Bickham's The Universal Penman, came out in fifty-two parts between 1733 and 1741.[^3] Because such models were printed from engraved copper plates, the style is still called copperplate.[^4]

In America it gave way to Platt Rogers Spencer's system, first published in 1848.[^5] Spencer built his letters on the elliptical curve,[^6] and his own key names the play of light and shade on each letter as one of its most prominent claims to originality.[^7] After the Civil War his method almost completely dominated penmanship teaching,[^8] spreading from business colleges down to primary schools.[^9]

Austin Palmer called it too ornate and too slow.[^10] His Guide to Business Writing appeared in 1894,[^11] and his lessons taught a rapid, plain, unshaded hand[^12] moved by the muscles of the arm[^13] and not the fingers.[^14] It began displacing Spencer's method in the 1890s, and by the 1910s millions of Americans had been Palmerized.[^15]

One older habit outlived all three: the long s. It fell out of use in the United States around 1820,[^16] and in a document from before the mid-1800s a letter that looks like a lowercase f is an s.[^17]

Other scripts

• Russian cursive
• German Kurrent
• Sütterlin
• Hebrew cursive