Christian Goodwillie, director and curator of Special Collections and archives, co-authored a book on Shaker hymns titled Richard McNemar, Music, and the Western Shaker Communities: “Branches of One Living Tree.” The book presents a study of the Shakers’ movement west during the early 19th century.
Published by The Kent State University Press, the book was co-written with Carol Medlicott of Northern Kentucky University. According to the publisher’s website, the authors reconstructed “vast repository of early Shaker hymns, using them to uncover the dramatic history of Shakerism’s bold expansion to the frontier. They probe the hymn texts and use them to illuminate the dramatic events of the Shaker west from its founding through the 1830s.”
