SACRED POETRY: CONSISTING OF PSALMS AND HYMNS, Adapted to Christian Devotion, in Publick and Private. Selected from the best authors, with variations and additions

Boston: Thomas Wells, 1818. Created by Jeremy Belknap, A New Edition with Additional Hymns. With six pages of musical notations. 16mo, original full contemporary straight grain red morocco, the covers bordered with gilt fillet rules at the borders, the spine with raised bands, gilt ruled compartments, one compartment lettered in gilt, marbled endpapers. v, 255 pp. A very well preserved copy with fine and pleasing binding. A NICE PERSONAL PRINTING OF THE PSALMS AND HYMNS AND A VERY WELL PRESERVED COPY. Jeremy Belknap was born in Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bayr. His uncle was Mather Byles, one of New England's intellectual leaders. He was educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, where he graduated in 1762. In 1764 he moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he "kept the school" and studied theology with Samuel Haven. In 1767 he began his ministry in Dover, New Hampshire, where he would spend twenty years at the Congregational Church.
After the Battle of Lexington in 1775 some units of the Dover militia were called out to support the Siege of Boston. Belknap accompanied them and remained through the next winter as chaplain to the New Hampshire troops involved with the siege.
Besides attending to his growing congregation, Belknap served as a secretary to the convention of New Hampshire ministers from 1769 until 1787. This position required travel throughout the state, and he used it as a chance to begin accumulating notes on the history of New Hampshire. In 1772 he began to write his history. In 1784 he published the first volume of the History of New Hampshire, but it would take until 1792 to complete the work. Its reputation grew over the years, and after his death, Alexis de Tocqueville named him as America's best native historian.
The History represented a new approach in its field. Besides just narrating events, he added two innovations. He tried to clearly separate facts from analysis and opinion, and he provided many annotations to show the source and location of records that he had inspected.
He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1784. In 1785 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Belknap accepted a new position in 1787, when he moved back to Boston to become pastor of the Federal Street Church. He would serve there until his death. He remained active in research, writing, and promoting American history as a field.
He continued his quest into history, seeking ways to report and preserve historic sources. On January 24, 1791, he invited nine friends with similar interests to meet at his home. They agreed to help build a repository for these records. The meeting resulted in the Massachusetts Historical Society, which was the first historical society and served as a prototype for many later ones. They also pledged to contribute family papers. John Eliot, a fourth-generation descendant of the 17th-century "Apostle to the Indians" and himself a minister, added Governor Thomas Hutchinson's manuscript for the History of Massachusetts Bay, which his father Andrew Eliot had saved during the Revolution when a mob looted the governor's home.