Henry Wilder Foote

Foote, Rev. Henry Wilder (II), D.D., Litt.D. (Boston, Massachusetts, February 2, 1875--August 27, 1964). Educated at Harvard, A.B. 1897; A.M. 1900; S.T.B. 1902. He entered the Unitarian ministry and has served churches in New Orleans, Louisiana; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Belmont, Massachusetts; and Charlottesville, Virginia. From 1914 to 1924 he was an assistant professor at the Harvard Divinity School where he gave a course on the history of Christian hymnody. He was secretary of the committee which edited The New Hymn and Tune Book, published in 1914 by the American Unitarian Association, and was chairman of the committee which edited Hymns of the Spirit, published in 1937 by the Beacon Press (to be distinguished from the earlier Hymns of the Spirit by S. Johnson and S. Longfellow, 1864). This later book includes one hymn by Dr. Foote beginning "Thou whose love brought us to birth."

Dr. Foote also edited the words in The Concord Anthem Book, 1924, and in The Second Concord Anthem Book, 1936, for which Professor Archibald T. Davison selected and edited the music. He is the author of several books and articles on the cultural or religious aspects of American colonial history, one of which, Three Centuries of American Hymnody, 1940, covers the period from the publication of the Bay Psalm Book in 1640 to the late nineteen-thirties.

--DNAH Archives