Robbie Richardson. The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. 247. $70.00 (cloth).

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 834-835
Author(s):  
Rachel Winchcombe
Author(s):  
Stephen Aron

Columbus discovered an Old World in 1492. Steep population declines reduced Indian numbers by more than 90 percent in the following four centuries. European maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed to have carved up most of North America, but ‘Empires and enclaves’ shows that control over North American lands remained hotly contested during this time. Well into the eighteenth century, the vast majority of North American Indians had not become the subordinates of European colonizers and in most places there were no European settlements yet. The first contacts between European and Indians are described along with seventeenth-century English settlements in New England, the Spanish conquest in New Mexico, and the alternative approaches of the French.


1921 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Edward Payson Johnson

The average person, of average acquaintance with the history of our country, knows but little of the missionary labors of our Christian ancestors. He remembers hearing something, or reading somewhere, about a certain John Eliot, a Puritan preacher, who tried for years to Christianize some Indian communities near Boston; and to him Eliot was simply a visionary and a gently-stubborn fanatic, unpractical and unreasonable as the enthusiastic preacher sometimes is; but of course Eliot was the only preacher foolish enough to try to Christianize Indians; and the slow development and the final decay of Eliot's enterprise proved conclusively the utter folly and futility of giving the white man's religion to the red man, and also proved conclusively that Eliot himself was little more than a dreamer, or a monomaniac, to foresee his cause triumphant finally over countless impossibilities. Christian preachers and people generally devote themselves to labors more profitable and objects more sensible.


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