Editing Millennial Praises (section)

== Background==
The Shakers began writing down their hymns as a means of conveying their religious philosophy to new converts.<ref name=gifts>{{cite book |url=https://muse.jhu.edu/books/9781613760956 |title=Project MUSE review of Millennial Praises &ndash; A Shaker Hymnal |date=2015 |publisher=The Johns Hopkins University Press / The Milton S. Eisenhower Library |isbn=9781613760956 |access-date=June 30, 2015 }}</ref>{{sfn|Medlicott|2013|page=123}} Thousands of handwritten hymns were recorded in hundreds of manuscripts.{{sfn|Foley|2000|page=280}}

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Shakers began moving west from New York, into Ohio and Kentucky. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, there were at least five communities and as many as twenty in Ohio and Kentucky.{{sfn|Opdahl|2004|page=xxiv}}{{sfn|Medlicott|2013|page=125}} This western expansion brought about the idea for collecting the hymns into a printed book. The scribes could no longer keep up with the pace of copying new hymns that were being composed both at [[Mount Lebanon Shaker Society|New Lebanon]] in New York and in the western communities, where fully two-thirds of the hymns were being written.{{sfn|Medlicott|2013|page=124}} From this body of handwritten hymns were selected the 140 hymns published in ''Millennial Praises''.{{sfn|Chase|1992|page=205}}