front cover of Accidental Pluralism
Accidental Pluralism
America and the Religious Politics of English Expansion, 1497-1662
Evan Haefeli
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The United States has long been defined by its religious diversity and recurrent public debates over the religious and political values that define it. In Accidental Pluralism, Evan Haefeli argues that America did not begin as a religiously diverse and tolerant society. It became so only because England’s religious unity collapsed just as America was being colonized. By tying the emergence of American religious toleration to global events, Haefeli creates a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing how the relationships among states, churches, and publics were contested from the beginning of the colonial era and produced a society that no one had anticipated. Accidental Pluralism is an ambitious and comprehensive new account of the origins of American religious life that compels us to refine our narratives about what came to be seen as American values and their distinct relationship to religion and politics.
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front cover of After King Philip’s War
After King Philip’s War
Presence and Persistence in Indian New England
Edited by Colin G. Calloway
Dartmouth College Press, 1997
The 1676 killing of Metacomet, the tribal leader dubbed "King Philip" by colonists, is commonly seen as a watershed event, marking the end of a bloody war, dissolution of Indian society in New England, and even the disappearance of Native peoples from the region. This collection challenges that assumption, showing that Indians adapted and survived, existing quietly on the fringes of Yankee society, less visible than before but nonetheless retaining a distinct identity and heritage. While confinement on tiny reservations, subjection to increasing state regulation, enforced abandonment of traditional dress and means of support, and racist policies did cause dramatic changes, Natives nonetheless managed to maintain their Indianness through customs, kinship, and community.
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The American Aeneas
Classical Origins Of American Self
John C. Shields
University of Tennessee Press, 2001



Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book??

“John Shields's book is a provocative challenge to the venerable Adamic myth so exhaustively deployed in examinations of early American literature and in American studies. Moreover, The American Aeneas builds wonderfully on Shields's considerable work on Phillis Wheatley. “?—American Literature??

“The American Aeneas should be of interest to classicists and American studies scholars alike.” ?—The New England Quarterly??

John Shields exposes a significant cultural blindness within American consciousness. Noting the biblical character Adam as an archetype who has long dominated ideas of what it means to be American, Shields argues that an equally important component of our nation’s cultural identity—a  secular one deriving from the classical tradition—has been seriously neglected.??Shields shows how Adam and Aeneas—Vergil’s hero of the Aeneid— in crossing over to American from Europe, dynamically intermingled in the thought of the earliest American writers. Shields argues that uncovering and acknowledging the classical roots of our culture can allay the American fear of “pastlessness” that the long-standing emphasis on the Adamic myth has generated.

John C. Shields is the editor of The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley and the author of The American Aeneas: Classical Origins of the American Self, which won a Choice Outstanding Academic Book award and an honorable mention in the Harry Levin Prize competition, sponsored by the American Comparative Literature Association.  

 

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front cover of The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820
The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820
Robert A. Ferguson
Harvard University Press, 1997
This concise literary history of the American Enlightenment captures the varied and conflicting voices of religious and political conviction in the decades when the new nation was formed. Robert Ferguson’s trenchant interpretation yields new understanding of this pivotal period for American culture.
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front cover of American Passage
American Passage
The Communications Frontier in Early New England
Katherine Grandjean
Harvard University Press, 2015

New England was built on letters. Its colonists left behind thousands of them, brittle and browning and crammed with curls of purplish script. How they were delivered, though, remains mysterious. We know surprisingly little about the way news and people traveled in early America. No postal service or newspapers existed—not until 1704 would readers be able to glean news from a “public print.” But there was, in early New England, an unseen world of travelers, rumors, movement, and letters. Unearthing that early American communications frontier, American Passage retells the story of English colonization as less orderly and more precarious than the quiet villages of popular imagination.

The English quest to control the northeast entailed a great struggle to control the flow of information. Even when it was meant solely for English eyes, news did not pass solely through English hands. Algonquian messengers carried letters along footpaths, and Dutch ships took them across waterways. Who could travel where, who controlled the routes winding through the woods, who dictated what news might be sent—in Katherine Grandjean’s hands, these questions reveal a new dimension of contest and conquest in the northeast. Gaining control of New England was not solely a matter of consuming territory, of transforming woods into farms. It also meant mastering the lines of communication.

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front cover of Another's Country
Another's Country
Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Cultural Interactions in the Southern Colonies
Edited by J.W. Joseph and Martha Zierden
University of Alabama Press, 2001
An engaging look at the rise and fall of cultural diversity in the colonial South and its role in shaping a distinct southern identity
 
The 18th-century South was a true melting pot, bringing together colonists from England, France, Germany, Ireland, Switzerland, and other locations, in addition to African slaves—all of whom shared in the experiences of adapting to a new environment and interacting with American Indians. The shared process of immigration, adaptation, and creolization resulted in a rich and diverse historic mosaic of cultures.
 
The cultural encounters of these groups of settlers would ultimately define the meaning of life in the nineteenth-century South. The much-studied plantation society of that era and the Confederacy that sprang from it have become the enduring identities of the South. A full understanding of southern history is not possible, however, without first understanding the intermingling and interactions of the region’s eighteenth-century settlers. In the essays collected here, some of the South’s leading historical archaeologists examine various aspects of the colonial experience, attempting to understand how cultural identity was expressed, why cultural diversity was eventually replaced by a common identity, and how the various cultures intermeshed.
 
Written in accessible language, this book will be valuable to archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike. Cultural, architectural, and military historians, cultural anthropologists, geographers, genealogists, and others interested in the cultural legacy of the South will find much of value in this book.
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front cover of The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638
The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638
A Documentary History
David D. Hall, ed.
Duke University Press, 1990
The Antinomian controversy—a seventeenth-century theological crisis concerning salvation—was the first great intellectual crisis in the settlement of New England. Transcending the theological questions from which it arose, this symbolic controversy became a conflict between power and freedom of conscience. David D. Hall’s thorough documentary history of this episode sheds important light on religion, society, and gender in early American history.
This new edition of the 1968 volume, published now for the first time in paperback, includes an expanding bibliography and a new preface, treating in more detail the prime figures of Anne Hutchinson and her chief clerical supporter, John Cotton. Among the documents gathered here are transcripts of Anne Hutchinson’s trial, several of Cotton’s writings defending the Antinomian position, and John Winthrop’s account of the controversy. Hall’s increased focus on Hutchinson reveals the harshness and excesses with which the New England ministry tried to discredit her and reaffirms her place of prime importance in the history of American women.
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front cover of The Archaeology of Protestant Landscapes
The Archaeology of Protestant Landscapes
Revealing the Formation of Community Identity in the US South
Kimberly Pyszka
University of Alabama Press, 2023
How religious institutions used landscapes and architecture to express their religious and social ideologies
 
The Archaeology of Protestant Landscapes focuses on three religious institutions in the US South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: St. Paul’s Parish Church in coastal South Carolina, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in central Alabama, and Cane Hill College in Northwest Arkansas. Drawing from archaeological surveys and excavations, artifact analysis, archival research, geophysical testing, and architectural information on religious structures, Kimberly Pyszka offers case studies of these institutions, which were located in developing communities that varied socially, politically, and economically.

Pyszka uses these case studies to demonstrate that select religious institutions used and modified natural landscape features to create cultural landscapes to express their ideology, identity, goals, and social, religious, and political power. She notes that where those structures were constructed, how they sat on the landscape, their architectural style, and their overall visual appearance were well-considered decisions made by religious leaders to benefit their organizations, communities, and, sometimes, themselves.

Pyszka also uses these case studies to highlight the social roles that religious organizations played in the development of communities. She points to landscape decisions—specifically to how the architectural design of religious structures was used, intentionally or not, to unite people, often those of differing religious backgrounds—as contributing to the creation of a common identity among people living in new and still-growing settlements, aiding in community development. This book contributes to the growing body of work within historical archaeology on churches, churchyards, and cemeteries and to the increasing awareness among archaeologists of how these sites contribute to questions of identity, consumerism, trade, and colonialism.
 
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