During the Protestant evangelical awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, widely-circulated hymnals carried the message of evangelicals by way of mouth across great periods of time and vast geographic expanses. This study traces the cultural route of specific religious expressions in these hymns as they crossed national, linguistic, ecclesiastic, social, and other cultural barriers to become ubiquitous expressions found in religious, social, and political discourses. More specifically, this dissertation traces the route of fleshly-spiritual imagery in Baroque Lutheran and German Pietist hymns as they traveled to England by way of the Wesleys during the eighteenth-century evangelical revival and eventually surfaced during the Methodist revivals of the Second Great Awakening in nineteenth-century America. Fleshly-spiritual imagery, that concretizes spiritual experience in the human body, expressed a change in religious subjectivity experienced by Protestant revivalists in the period. This imagery captures an epistemological change in progress as individuals took authority from the clergy to commune directly with the Divine and judge the validity of that experience for themselves. Rather than framing this work as a study of specific authors or literary movements, I have traced the historical trajectory of a set of discursive practices as they were used by hymn authors, re-written by hymn editors, and often spontaneously reedited by participants. This discursive approach without regard to authorship and often in absence of standard texts more clearly illuminates the convergence of religious and public rhetoric, an intersection that remains occluded by traditional studies of a single author, genre, literary period, or national literature. / text

This thesis undertakes a study of some of the historical origins and developments of the Southern Baptist Convention in relation to its music.

Ignorance of the basic principles of music reading was one of the primary obstacles to the improvement of congregational singing in nineteenth-century America. Six separate numeral notation systems arose to provide a simple way for the common man to learn the basic principles of music. Hartley Day developed his own numeral notation system and published six tune-books that enjoyed modest success in the New England area. This thesis examines Day's numeral notation system as it appeared in the Boston Numeral Harmony (1845), and the One-Line Psalmist (1849). It also studies Day's periodical, The Musical Visitor, in which he continually attacked Lowell Mason, possibly leading to Mason's dismissal as Superintendent of Music of Boston's public schools.

This thesis considers how Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, Mohegan writers in Early America, used the hymns of English hymnodist, Isaac Watts. Each chapter traces how either Samson Occom or Joseph Johnson's adapted Isaac Watts's hymns for Native communities and how these texts are sites of affective sovereignty.