Early American Bibles
Bibles from the New World constitute another rich category of the Prothro Collection. This section of the exhibition includes two of the earliest Bibles printed in the Western Hemisphere: John Eliot’s 1685 translation into the Native American language of Massachusett, and a Bible for Pennsylvania’s German congregations printed in 1743. Both were published while the printers of London, Oxford, and Cambridge held royal patents on the English Bible. From the post-Revolutionary period, the collection includes the first American edition of the English Bible (1782), the first English translation by an American (1808), and other landmarks of Bible printing in the United States.