The Rest Are All Singing: Literacy, Print, and Sacred Song in the American South

Print was crucial to the creation and dissemination of black and white sacred music in the South. Revival songs circulated along with the hymns of the Anglo-American tradition in tens of thousands of pamphlets, hymnbooks, and tune-books in the decades before the Civil War. This talk will restore the importance of this rich literate tradition to the history of American culture.

About Beth Barton Schweiger:

Beth Barton Schweiger taught history for fifteen years at the University of Arkansas. She is the author of A Literate South: Reading before Emancipation (Yale University Press, 2019) and The Gospel Working Up (Oxford University Press, 2000), and editor of Religion in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). She has received fellowships from many institutions including the National Endowment for Humanities, Yale University, and the University of Cambridge. She is an independent scholar in greater Seattle.