Sunday School Books

The Nye Collections include Sunday School books and moral tales for children, with holdings of 1,500 books covering the nineteenth centry to the present. There are examples of tract society publications which played a pivotal role in the nineteenth-century Sunday School Movement. Twentieth-century religious publishing houses, including Moody and Zondervan, are well represented, featuring the works of such authors as Bernard Palmer, Ken Anderson, Bertha Moore, and Grace Livingston Hill.

A project of scanning complete images and texts of many of our Sunday School books was funded by a Library of Congress/Amertech grant, and is available online:

Sunday School Books: Shaping the Values of Youth in Nineteenth-Century America

This collection presents 163 Sunday school books published in America between 1815 and 1865, drawn from the collections of Michigan State University Libraries and the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University Libraries. They document the culture of religious instruction of youth in America during the Antebellum era. They also illustrate a number of thematic divisions that preoccupied nineteenth-century America, including sacred and secular, natural and divine, civilized and savage, rural and industrial, adult and child. Among the topics featured are history, holidays, slavery, African Americans, Native Americans, travel and missionary accounts, death and dying, poverty, temperance, immigrants, and advice.

Michigan State University Libraries

Special Collections Division

Sunday School Books Collection
URL: http//www.lib.msu.edu/coll/main/spec_col/nye/sschool.htm
Last updated: July 24, 2001
Page editor: Randall W. Scott
scottr@msu.edu