{"id":1766,"date":"2014-10-10T12:19:54","date_gmt":"2014-10-10T12:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/?p=1766"},"modified":"2014-10-10T12:19:54","modified_gmt":"2014-10-10T12:19:54","slug":"cornerstone-of-american-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/2014\/10\/10\/cornerstone-of-american-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Cornerstone of American Education"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"new<\/a>The New England primer<\/i>.\u00a0 (Providence: John Waterman, 1775).<\/p>\n

The New England Primer<\/i> stands at the forefront of early American schoolbooks.\u00a0 The first mention of it occurs in the register of London Stationers in 1683, under the title The New England Primer, or, Milk for Babes.<\/i> One of its predecessors in England was The Protestant Tutor<\/i>, which, like its successor, contained the alphabet, the syllabarium, the Lord\u2019s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, and the picture of the burning of the Protestant martyr John Rogers.\u00a0 The earliest surviving primer produced in America was printed in Boston, 1727\u2014by which time it was a staple product of the colonial printer.\u00a0 The print shop run by Benjamin Franklin and his partner David Hall printed over 37,000 copies between 1749 and 1766, and only one copy has survived.\u00a0 It has been estimated that from 1680-1830 six to eight million copies were produced (only about 1,500 survive).\u00a0 Portraits of English kings (e.g., George II and III) were replaced eventually by famous Americans (e.g., John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and George Washington).\u00a0 Around 1790 the primers were secularized, and little boys and girls ceased to be promised salvation or threatened with eternal fire; girls were instead warned that \u201cpert Miss Prat-a-pace\u201d was to have no treats unless she turned into \u201cpretty miss prudence,\u201d and that good boys would be rewarded with \u201ccredit and reputation,\u201d whereas bad ones would live in beggary.<\/p>\n

We have dozens of examples of the NEP, and thousands of other early American schoolbooks in our Barnard Collection<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New England primer.\u00a0 (Providence: John Waterman, 1775). The New England Primer stands at the forefront of early American schoolbooks.\u00a0 The first mention of it occurs in the register of London Stationers in 1683, under the title The New England Primer, or, Milk for Babes. One of its predecessors in England was The Protestant Tutor, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,5,29,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1766"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1768,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1766\/revisions\/1768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/commons.trincoll.edu\/watkinson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}