front cover of The San Antonio Missions and their System of Land Tenure
The San Antonio Missions and their System of Land Tenure
By Félix D. Almaráz, Jr.
University of Texas Press, 1989

San Antonio, Texas, is unique among North American cities in having five former Spanish missions: San Antonio de Valero (The Alamo; founded in 1718), San José y San Miguel de Aguayo (1720), Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Acuña (1731), San Juan Capistrano (1731), and San Francisco de la Espada (1731). These missions attract a good deal of popular interest but, until this book, they had received surprisingly little scholarly study. The San Antonio Missions and Their System of Land Tenure, a winner in the Presidio La Bahía Award competition, looks at one previously unexamined aspect of mission history—the changes in landownership as the missions passed from sacred to secular owners in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Drawing on exhaustive research in San Antonio and Bexar County archives, Félix Almaráz has reconstructed the land tenure system that began with the Spaniards' jurisprudential right of discovery and progressed through colonial development, culminating with ownership of the mission properties under successive civic jurisdictions (independent Mexico, Republic of Texas, State of Texas, Bexar County, and City of San Antonio). Several broad questions served as focus points for the research. What were the legal bases for the Franciscan missions as instruments of the Spanish Empire? What was the extent of the initial land grants at the time of their establishment in the eighteenth century? How were the missions' agricultural and pastoral lands configured? And, finally, what impact has urbanization had upon the former Franciscan foundations?

The findings in this study will be valuable for scholars of Texas borderlands and Hispanic New World history. Additionally, genealogists and people with roots in the San Antonio missions area may find useful clues to family history in this extensive study of landownership along the banks of the Río San Antonio.

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front cover of The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891-1961
The Search for Medieval Music in Africa and Germany, 1891-1961
Scholars, Singers, Missionaries
Anna Maria Busse Berger
University of Chicago Press, 2020
This innovative book reassesses the history of musicology, unearthing the field’s twentieth-century German and global roots. In the process, Anna Maria Busse Berger exposes previously unseen historical relationships such as those between the modern rediscovery of medieval music, the rise of communal singing, and the ways in which African music intersected with missionary work in the German colonial period. Ultimately, Busse Berger offers a monumental new account of the early twentieth-century music culture in Germany and East Africa.

​The book unfolds in three parts. Busse Berger starts with the origins of comparative musicology circa 1900, when early proponents used ideas from comparative linguistics to test whether parallels could be drawn between nonwestern and medieval European music. She then turns to youth movements of the era—the Wandervogel, Jugendmusikbewegung, and Singbewegung—whose focus on joint music making influenced many musicologists. Finally, she considers case studies of Protestant and Catholic mission societies in what is now Tanzania, where missionaries—many of them musicologists and former youth-group members—extended the discipline via ethnographic research and a focus on local music and communities. In highlighting these long-overlooked transnational connections and the role of global music in early musicology, Busse Berger shapes a fresh conception of music scholarship during a pivotal part of the twentieth century.
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Seventeen Years in Alaska
A Depiction of Life Among the Indians of Yakutat
Albin Johnson
University of Alaska Press, 2014
Swedish missionary Albin Johnson arrived in Alaska just before the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of miles from home and with just two weeks’ worth of English classes under his belt. While he intended to work among the Tlingit tribes of Yakutat, he found himself in a wave of foreign arrivals as migrants poured into Alaska seeking economic opportunities and the chance at a different life. While Johnson came with pious intentions, others imposed Western values and vices, leaving disease and devastation in their wake.

Seventeen Years in Alaska is Johnson’s eyewitness account of this tumultuous time. It is a captivating narrative of an ancient people facing rapid change and of the missionaries working to stem a corrupting tide. His journals offer a candid look at the beliefs and lives of missionaries, and they ultimately reveal the profound effect that he and other missionaries had on the Tlingit. Tracing nearly two decades of spiritual hopes and earthbound failures, Johnson’s memoir is a fascinating portrait of a rapidly changing world in one of the most far-flung areas of the globe.
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front cover of The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870
The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870
Stephen Warren
University of Illinois Press, 2004
Stephen Warren traces the transformation in Shawnee sociopolitical organization over seventy years as it changed from village-centric, multi-tribe kin groups to an institutionalized national government led by wealthy men with only marginal kin ties to the people they claimed to represent. The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 lays bare the myths and histories produced by Shawnee interpreters and their vested interests in modernizing the tribes.

Until recently, historians have assumed that Central Algonquians derive from politically unified tribes, but by analyzing the crucial role that individuals, institutions, and policies played in shaping modern tribal governments, Warren reveals a messier, more complicated history of migration and conflict. Ultimately, Warren establishes that the form of the modern Shawnee "tribe" was coerced in accordance with the U.S. government's desire for an entity with whom to do business, rather than as a natural development of traditional Shawnee ways.

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front cover of Sisters in Spirit
Sisters in Spirit
Christianity, Affect, and Community Building in East Africa, 1860–1970
Andreana C. Prichard
Michigan State University Press, 2017
In this pioneering study, historian Andreana Prichard presents an intimate history of a single mission organization, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), told through the rich personal stories of a group of female African lay evangelists. Founded by British Anglican missionaries in the 1860s, the UMCA worked among refugees from the Indian Ocean slave trade on Zanzibar and among disparate communities on the adjacent Tanzanian mainland. Prichard illustrates how the mission’s unique theology and the demographics of its adherents produced cohorts of African Christian women who, in the face of linguistic and cultural dissimilarity, used the daily performance of a certain set of “civilized” Christian values and affective relationships to evangelize to new inquirers. The UMCA’s “sisters in spirit” ultimately forged a united spiritual community that spanned discontiguous mission stations across Tanzania and Zanzibar, incorporated diverse ethnolinguistic communities, and transcended generations. Focusing on the emotional and personal dimensions of their lives and on the relationships of affective spirituality that grew up among them, Prichard tells stories that are vital to our understanding of Tanzanian history, the history of religion and Christian missions in Africa, the development of cultural nationalisms, and the intellectual histories of African women.
 
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front cover of Situating the Andean Colonial Experience
Situating the Andean Colonial Experience
Ayllu Tales of History and Hagiography in the Time of the Spanish
Denise Y. Arnold
Arc Humanities Press, 2021
Re-situating Andean colonial history from the perspective of the local historians of ayllu Qaqachaka, in highland Bolivia, this book draws on regional oral history combined with local and public written archives. Rejecting the binary models in vogue in colonial and postcolonial studies (indigenous/non-indigenous, Andean/Western, conquered/conquering), it explores the complex intercalation of legal pluralism and local history in the negotiations around Spanish demands, resulting in the so-called “Andean pact.” The Qaqachaka’s point of reference was the preceding Inka occupation, so in fulfilling Spanish demands they sought cultural continuity with this recent past. Spanish colonial administration, with its roots in Roman-Germanic and Islamic law, infiltrated many practices into the newly-conquered territories. Two major cycles of ayllu tales trace local responses to these colonial demands, in the practices for establishing settlements, and the feeding and dressing of the Catholic saints inside the new church, with their forebears in the Inka mummies.
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front cover of Sojourners in a Strange Land
Sojourners in a Strange Land
Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China
Florence C. Hsia
University of Chicago Press, 2009

Though Jesuits assumed a variety of roles as missionaries in late imperial China, their most memorable guise was that of scientific expert, whose maps, clocks, astrolabes, and armillaries reportedly astonished the Chinese. But the icon of the missionary-scientist is itself a complex myth. Masterfully correcting the standard story of China Jesuits as simple conduits for Western science, Florence C. Hsia shows how these missionary-scientists remade themselves as they negotiated the place of the profane sciences in a religious enterprise.

Sojourners in a Strange Land develops a genealogy of Jesuit conceptions of scientific life within the Chinese mission field from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Analyzing the printed record of their endeavors in natural philosophy and mathematics, Hsia identifies three models of the missionary man of science by their genres of writing: mission history, travelogue, and academic collection. Drawing on the history of early modern Europe’s scientific, religious, and print culture, she uses the elaboration and reception of these scientific personae to construct the first collective biography of the Jesuit missionary-scientist’s many incarnations in late imperial China. 

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front cover of Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau
Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau
The Jesuit, the Medicine Man, and the Indian Hymn Singer
Chad S. Hamill
Oregon State University Press, 2012
Songs of Power and Prayer in the Columbia Plateau explores the role of song as a transformative force in the twentieth century, tracing a cultural, spiritual, and musical encounter that upended notions of indigeneity and the rules of engagement for Indians and priests in the Columbia Plateau.

In Chad Hamill’s narrative, a Jesuit and his two Indian “grandfathers”—one a medicine man, the other a hymn singer—engage in a collective search for the sacred. The priest becomes a student of the medicine man. The medicine man becomes a Catholic. The Indian hymn singer brings indigenous songs to the Catholic mass. Using song as a thread, these men weave together two worlds previously at odds, realizing a promise born two centuries earlier within the prophecies of Circling Raven and Shining Shirt.

Songs of Power and Prayer reveals how song can bridge worlds: between the individual and Spirit, the Jesuits and the Indians. Whether sung in an indigenous ceremony or adapted for Catholic Indian services, song abides as a force that strengthens Native identity and acts as a conduit for power and prayer.

A First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies book

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front cover of Sonora
Sonora
A Description of the Province
Ignaz Pfefferkorn; Foreword by Bernard L. Fontana; Translated and Annotated by Theodore E. Treutlein
University of Arizona Press, 1989
"The bloodsucking bat, construction of bows and arrows, the punishment for adultery among the Apaches... all was grist that dropped into the industrious mill of Father Pfefferkorn's eyes, ears, and brain."—Saturday Review

"To be read for enjoyment; nevertheless, the historian will find in it a wealth of information that has been shrewdly appraised, carefully sifted, and creditably related."—Catholic Historical Review

"Of interest not only to the historian but to the geographer and anthropologist."—Pacific Historical Review
 
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front cover of The Standard Bearer of the Roman Church
The Standard Bearer of the Roman Church
Lawrence of Brindisi and Capuchin Missions in the Holy Roman Empire (1599-1613)
Andrew J.G. Drenas
Catholic University of America Press, 2018
The Standard Bearer of the Roman Church examines the missionary work of the early modern Capuchin friar, and doctor of the Church, Lawrence of Brindisi. Renowned in his own day as a preacher, Bible scholar, missionary, chaplain, and diplomat, as well as vicar general of his order, Lawrence led the first organized, papally-commissioned Capuchin mission among the non-Catholics of Bohemia in the Holy Roman Empire from 1599 to 1602. He returned again under papal mandate, from 1606 to 1613. Andrew Drenas analyzes Lawrence’s evangelistic and polemical strategies in central Europe in order to shed light on some of the ways the Capuchins labored in religiously divided territories to confirm Catholics in their faith and to win over heretics. The introduction explains, principally, the book’s purpose and the historiographical background. After providing a brief biographical sketch of Lawrence’s life followed by details of his afterlife, Drenas examines Lawrence’s leading role in establishing the Capuchins’ new Commissariate of Bohemia-Austria-Styria in 1600, and specifically its first three friaries in Prague, Vienna, and Graz. From there the volume moves on to treat his preaching against heresy, followed by a focus on how Lawrence, while in Prague, involved himself directly in theological disputations with two different Lutheran preachers. The first dispute, with Polycarp Leyser, took place in July 1607, and dealt with good works and justification. The second, with a Lutheran whose identity remains unknown, and which occurred in August 1610, concerned Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary. This is followed by an analysis of the Lutheranismi hypotyposis, or The Express Image of Lutheranism, Lawrence’s literary refutation of Lutheranism following additional contact with Polycarp Leyser in 1607. Finally, Drenas considers briefly the effectiveness of Lawrence’s apostolate and closes with a review of the book as a whole.
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front cover of Stitches on Time
Stitches on Time
Colonial Textures and Postcolonial Tangles
Saurabh Dube
Duke University Press, 2004
Destined to become a key work of subaltern studies and a crucial intervention in postcolonial scholarship, Stitches on Time probes the relationships between empire and modernity, nation and history, the colonial and the postcolonial, and power and difference. Saurabh Dube combines history and anthropology to provide critical understandings of the theory and practice of historical ethnography and contemporary historiography. Drawing on extensive archival research and innovative fieldwork as well as political economy and social theory—including considerations of gender—he unpacks the implications of specific Indian pasts from the middle of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century.

Dube provides incisive accounts of the interactions between North American evangelical missionaries and Christian converts of central India, and between colonial legal systems and Indian popular laws. He reflects on the difficulties of history writing by considering the production and reception of recent Hindu nationalist histories. Assessing the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective, he offers substantial critical readings of major writings by Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, and others. Dube develops the concept and practice of a “history without warranty” as a means of rigorously rethinking categories such as modernity, colonialism, the West, the postcolonial, and the nation.

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front cover of The Sun God and the Savior
The Sun God and the Savior
The Christianization of the Nahua and Totonac in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico
Guy Stresser-Péan
University Press of Colorado, 2009

The first English translation of Guy Stresser-Péan's tour-de-force presents two decades of fieldwork in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico, where native pre-Hispanic pagan beliefs blended with traditional Catholic evangelization from the sixteenth century and the more recent intrusion of modernism.

The Indians of the Sierra Norte de Puebla are deeply devoted to Christianity, but their devotion is seamlessly combined with pagan customs, resulting in a hybrid belief system that is not wholly indigenous, yet not wholly Christian. The syncretism practiced here has led the Totonac and Nahua people to identify Christ with the Sun God, a belief expressed symbolically in ritual practices such as the Dance of the Voladores.

Spanning the four centuries from the earliest systematic campaign against Nahua ritual practices - Zumárraga's idolatry trials of 1536-1540 - to the twentieth century, Stresser-Péan contextualizes Nahua and Totonac ritual practices as a series of responses to Christian evangelization and the social reproduction of traditional ritual practices. The Sun God and the Savior is a monumental work on the ethnographic and historical knowledge of the peoples of the Sierra Norte.

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