"Good Books Make Better Children":
Nineteenth-Century Textbooks in Special Collections
Primers |
Before progressing to more difficult stories and poems in readers, young children learned their alphabet, their numbers, and their nursery rhymes from primers. The most popular of these in America was the New England Primer--over two million copies were printed in America by 1820. |
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This facsimile of a New England Primer printed between 1785 and 1790 effectively shows the crudeness of the original's woodcuts. The chief schoolbook of the American Puritans for one hundred years, the Primer taught the alphabet (shown here), the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and other pious selections. Notice the repeated references to death and dying in this alphabet. |
