The New England Primer

The single most influential Christian textbook in history, most scholars agree that most, if not all, of the Founding Fathers were taught to read and write using this The New England Primer, which is unsurpassed to this day for its excellence of practical training and Christian worldview. First published in 1690, the goal of the Primer was to combine the study of the Bible with the alphabet, vocabulary, and the reading of prose and poetry. This is the book that introduced the children's prayer, "Now I lay me down to sleep," and which made the "Shorter Catechism" a staple of education for all American children. More than five million copies were sold in the nineteenth century alone.

Richly illustrated with often antic images from alphabet books and primers, The Story of A relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance. Offering a poetics of alphabetization and explicating the alphabet's tropes and rhetorical strategies, the author demonstrates the far-reaching cultural power of such apparently neutral statements as "A is for apple." The new market for children's books in the eighteenth century established for the "republic of ABC" a cultural potency equivalent to its high-culture counterpart, the "republic of letters," while shaping its child-readers into consumers. As a central rite of socialization, alphabetization schooled children to conflicting expectations, as well as to changing models of authority, understandings of the world, and uses of literature. In the nineteenth century, literacy became a crucial aspect of American middle-class personality and subjectivity. Furnishing the readers and writers needed for a national literature, the alphabetization of America between 1800 and 1850 informed the sentimental-reform novel as well as the self-consciously aesthetic novel of the 1850s. Through readings of conduct manuals, reading primers, and a sentimental bestseller, the author shows how the alphabet became embedded in a maternal narrative, which organized the world through domestic affections. Nathaniel Hawthorne, by contrast, insisted on the artificiality of the alphabet and its practices in his antimimetic, hermetic The Scarlet Letter, with its insistent focus on the letter A. By understanding this novel as part of the network of alphabetization, The Story of A accounts for its uniquely persistent cultural role. The author concludes, in an epilogue, with a reading of postmodern alphabets and their implications for the future of literacy.

"It’s hard to align with money if you think that it is evil and nasty. But once you come to an understanding that money is neutral, it’s easy to see that having money does not necessarily deprive somebody else. There’s no reason why you can’t be very rich and still be an extremely spiritual and wonderfully generous person—aligned to the God Force—with a huge heart, and compassion for everyone you meet." — Stuart Wilde

The first of these works was intended to teach spelling and reading while pointing out the "evils" of Catholicism; the second was a combination religious instructor and reader used by children of early New England.

A rarely discussed aspect of children's literature--the politics behind a book's creation--has been thoroughly explored in this intelligent, enlightening, and fascinating account.

The Slave Bible was published in 1807. It was commissioned on behalf of the Society for the Conversion of Negro Slaves in England. The Bible was to be used by missionaries and slave owners to teach slaves about the Christian faith and to evangelize slaves. The Bible was used to teach some slaves to read, but the goal first and foremost was to tend to the spiritual needs of the slaves in the way the missionaries and slave owners saw fit.