Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back.

“Part of being an American is being able to read cursive writing,” Ms. Roach told King 5 News.

Lawmakers have also invoked the Declaration of Independence, which was marked by John Hancock’s flamboyant signature, as a reason for a script revival.

Andrew Brenner told the local news media in Ohio in December, when he was a state representative, that he had co-sponsored a bill requiring cursive instruction because studies show benefits for brain development and hand dexterity. He said it also taught students to read prominent historical texts.

“You can learn the founding documents from reading them directly,” Mr. Brenner, a Republican who now serves in the Ohio Senate, told The Fulton County Expositor.

Others have emphasized the importance of a signature.

“I think your cursive writing identifies you as much as your physical features do,” Dickie Drake, a Republican state representative in Alabama who introduced a bill requiring schools to provide cursive instruction by the end of third grade, told The New York Times in 2016.

Lawmakers in Louisiana supported an even broader measure, in part, because Magna Carta and the United States Constitution were written in cursive. State senators shouted “America!” when they unanimously approved it in 2016.

The history of society is intertwined with the history of script.

“When we want to embrace the past, when we get nostalgic for the past, when we think it was better, then we get all warm and fuzzy about handwriting,” Tamara Plakins Thornton, the author of “Handwriting in America,” said in an interview with NPR.

Cursive was also politicized during the Cold War, becoming a display of patriotism.

“Unbelievably, there were arguments that the fact that American kids couldn’t do cursive made us vulnerable to the Russian menace,” Dr. Thornton said.