Reviews
Unlike modern hymnals, which are larger and heavier and more expensively produced, older hymnbooks were affordable and designed to be read. People dog-eared them, wrote notes in them, learned to read with them and gave them as gifts to children and relatives. These homely little volumes, Mr. Phillips rightly contends, filled an important and mostly overlooked role in forging America's Anglo-Protestant worldview and shaping America's literary sensibilities.
... continual thought-provoking insights transcending national boundaries.
A well-researched, clearly written book on a relatively neglected subject. Enlightening and useful.
Book Details
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Looking for Hymns
Introduction: A Reader’s Hymnbook
Interlude 1. The Wide, Wide World of Hymns
Part I. Church
1. How Hymnbooks Made a People
2. How to Fight with
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Looking for Hymns
Introduction: A Reader’s Hymnbook
Interlude 1. The Wide, Wide World of Hymns
Part I. Church
1. How Hymnbooks Made a People
2. How to Fight with Hymnbooks
3. Hymnbooks at Church
4. Giving Hymnbooks, and What the Hymnbook Gives
5. Devotion and the Shape of the Hymnbook
Interlude 2. Philadelphia, 1844
Part II. School
6. Hymnbooks and Literacy Learning
7. How Hymnbooks Made Children’s Literature
8. How Hymns Remade Schoolbooks
9. Singing as Reading; or, A Tale of Two Sacred Harps
Interlude 3. Henry Ward Beecher Takes Note
Part III. Home
10. Did Poets Write Hymns?
11. How Poems Entered the Hymnbook
12. The Return of the Private Hymnbook
13. Emily Dickinson’s Hymnody of Privacy
Epilogue: The Hymnological Decade
Glossary of Bibliographic Terms
Notes
Index