Works-In-Progress Seminar

WIP Seminar featuring Billy Smith, Director of the Helmerich Center for American Research and Applied Associate Professor in the History Department!

Join us to engage Billy’s new research and discuss his paper, “Sounding Sovereignty: Cherokee Hymn Books and the Protean Legacy of Isaac Watts.”
From the first appearance of the Cherokee Hymn Book in 1829 through multiple editions that followed, Cherokees have translated, printed, and sung the hymns of Isaac Watts in their own language. This paper examines his little known legacy within Cherokee culture. The 1829 Hymn Book was created in partnership between Cherokee converts and white missionaries. It became the first book ever published in the Cherokee syllabary. This paper argues that Watts’ hymns, and the printed hymn books that carried them, offered a protean colonial technology that Cherokee people adapted to their own needs. The hymn book represents a material expression of Cherokee community, identity, and sovereignty. In the lead-up to the removal crisis, it served the joint purposes of defending Cherokee “civilization” to white settlers and uniting Cherokees through print and song. Cherokees and missionaries drew from the deep supply of Watts’ devotional poems as they constructed the Hymn Book and wove them into the Cherokee cultural lexicon where the body of hymn texts remain in use today.