The New-England Primer
The New-England Primer

Author: Vision Forum

Publisher: Vision Forum

Published: 2002-09-01

Total Pages: 80

ISBN-13: 9781929241255

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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.

The Protestant Tutor
The Protestant Tutor

Author: Benjamin Harris

Publisher: Dissertations-G

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13:

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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.

The Story of A
The Story of A

Author: Patricia Crain

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780804731751

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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.