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As inauguration day nears, we thought we'd highlight four items with presidential ties from our Rare Document collection.

1. Woodrow Wilson, President 1913-1921

2. Herbert Hoover, President 1929-1933

3. Franklln D. Roosevelt, President 1933-1945

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--by Christopher N. Phillips

How much do you love your church’s hymn-singing tradition? Enough to steal its hymnbook? That was the case for George Fleming, a newspaper publisher in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Why would he do such a thing? A quick history of Presbyterian hymnbooks gives some clues.

Presbyterians, like most English-speaking Calvinists, didn’t sing hymns in church until the second half of the 18th century; it took the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America’s General Assembly (GA) until 1802 to declare that Isaac Watts’...