New England Primer, The

Rob Hardy

The New England Primer was the first textbook published in the American colonies, and the most popular elementary textbook for generations of American schoolchildren in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The book is believed to have been the work of the English printer Benjamin Harris, author of the anti-Catholic Protestant Tutor (1679), who left England for Boston after the accession of the Catholic monarch, James II, in 1685. In Boston, he opened a bookstore and coffeehouse, and published the first newspaper printed in the Colonies, Publiek Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, which was suppressed after a single issue of September 25, The ...

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