Native Americans, Conversion, and Christian Practice in Colonial New England, 1640—1730

2009 ◽  
Vol 102 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Native Culture ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
The One ◽  
Christian Practices ◽  
Gospel Message ◽  
Over Time

Fortunately, the two travelers arrived before sunset. Earlier in the day, on 5 May 1674, John Eliot and Daniel Gookin had set out from Boston for Wamesit, the northernmost of the fourteen Indian “praying towns” within the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the one most subjected to retaliatory attacks from raiding bands of Mohawks in the previous few years. Upon safe arrival, the Englishmen greeted their Pennacook friends and gathered as many as they could at the wigwam of Wannalancet, the head sachem of Wamesit, where Eliot, the aging missionary to the Indians, proceeded to talk about the meaning of the parable of the marriage of the king's son in Matthew 22:1—4. Wannalancet, according to Gookin, was a “sober and grave person, and of years, between fifty and sixty”; he had from the beginning been “loving and friendly to the English,” and in return they had tried to encourage him to embrace Christianity. Although the English missionaries would have desired him to readily accept the gospel message they preached, Wannalancet voluntarily incorporated Christian practices slowly, over time, without necessarily repudiating his native culture and traditional religious practices.1 For four years Wannalancet “had been willing to hear the word of God preached”; when Eliot or other missionaries made their periodic visits to Wamesit, Wannalancet made sure he was there. Over time, Wannalancet adopted the English practices of keeping the Sabbath, learning to go to any available meeting or instruction, fellowshipping, and refraining from various activities proscribed by the town's praying leaders. Despite all that, however, the English missionaries still complained that he “hath stood off” since he had “not yielded up himself personally.”2

Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England

2009 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen W. Silliman
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
New England ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Cultural Persistence ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Eastern Pequot

The archaeological study of Native Americans during colonial periods in North America has centered largely on assessing the nature of cultural change and continuity through material culture. Although a valuable approach, it has been hindered by focusing too much on the dichotomies of change and continuity, rather than on their interrelationship, by relying on uncritical cultural categories of artifacts and by not recognizing the role of practice and memory in identity and cultural persistence. Ongoing archaeological research on the Eastern Pequot reservation in Connecticut, which was created in 1683 and has been inhabited continuously since then by Eastern Pequot community members, permits a different view of the nature of change and continuity. Three reservation sites spanning the period between ca. 1740 and 1840 accentuate the scale and temporality of social memory and the relationships between practice and materiality. Although the reservation sites show change when compared to the "precontact baseline," they show remarkable continuity during the reservation period. The resulting interpretation provides not only more grounded and appropriately scaled renderings of past cultural practices but also critical engagements with analytical categories that carry significant political weight well outside of archaeological circles.

Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638

1977 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 556
Author(s):  
Darrett B. Rutman ◽  
Everett Emerson
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony

New England

2019 ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
New Haven ◽  
The World ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

This chapter focuses mainly on developments in the law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was founded as a Puritan utopia to display to rest of the world how a society should be governed. Although Massachusetts incorporated elements of the common law into its legal system, the dominant source of law was the word of God. But the divine word, which was enforced by the magistrates of the Court of Assistants, sometimes met resistance from local juries. A major issue throughout the 1630s and 1640s was whether the magistrates or local people would have final authority to determine the substance of the law; the issue was resolved in 1649 by providing for appeals in all cases of judge-jury disagreement to the General Court sitting as a unicameral body in which representatives of localities outnumbered the magistrates and thus had final authority. The chapter ends with a brief look at legal developments in Connecticut, New Haven, Plymouth, and Rhode Island.

Population Turnover in the English West Indies in the Late Seventeenth Century: A Comparative Perspective

1985 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
David W. Galenson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Economic Market ◽  
Subsequent Increase ◽  
Plantation Management ◽  
Population Turnover ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Over Time

I present estimates here of the geographic persistence of estate owners and managers in Barbados during 1673–1723. The estimates are based on evidence generated by the functioning of an economic market; the evidence was produced by tracing the names of purchasers over time through the invoice accounts of slave sales held by the Royal African Company on the island.Estimated rates of out-migration from Barbados were low during the 1670s, comparable in magnitude to those found in colonial New England towns, but the rates rose considerably during the following decades. The initially low rates of out-migration might have been the result of the great profitability of sugar planting in early Barbados, while the subsequent increase might have been due to the development of methods of plantation management that allowed estate owners to earn profits as absentees.

Manufacturing in Puritan rural towns in New England 1630–60: ‘A Miller Never Goes to Heaven’

Rural History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
John R. Mullin ◽  
Zenia Kotval
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
New England ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Physical Character ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony

Abstract This article is an analysis of the influence of blacksmiths, and saw and grain millers on the development of Puritan communities in the Massachusetts Bay Colony between 1630 and 1660. During this period these artisans played a significant role in defining the physical form of the rural Puritan town and its economic development, without intent and in a social and cultural climate where they were often disliked and distrusted. This article focuses on the impacts of these manufacturers on the formation and physical character of Puritan communities in New England.

scholarly journals Uncovering Indigenous Worlds and Histories on a Bend of a New England River before the 1650s: Problematizing Nomenclature and Settler Colonial History, Deep History, and Early Colonization Narratives

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Strobel ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Praying Town

The essay explores the often-ignored histories of the indigenous people who resided on the confluence of the Merrimack and the Concord rivers up to the 1650s. This place is characterized by a significant bend in the Merrimack River as it changes its southerly flow into an easterly direction. Today, the area includes the modern city of Lowell, Massachusetts, and its surroundings. While the 1650s saw the creation of a Native American “praying town” and the incorporation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s towns of Chelmsford and Billerica, it is the diverse and complex indigenous past before this decade which North American and global historians tend to neglect. The pre-colonial and early colonial eras, and how observers have described these periods, have shaped the way we understand history today. This essay problematizes terminology, looks at how amateur historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries have shaped popular perceptions of Native Americans, and explores how researchers have told the history before the 1650s. The materials available to reconstruct the history of the region’s Native Americans are often hard to find, a common issue for researchers who attempt to study the history of indigenous peoples before 1500. Thus, the essay pays special attention to how incomplete primary sources as well as archeological and ethnohistorical evidence have shaped interpretations of this history and how these intellectual processes have aided in the construction of this past.

Anne Bradstreet

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Thickstun
Keyword(s):  
Extended Family ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Anne Bradstreet ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Poet ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
Over Time

Anne Dudley Bradstreet (b. c. 1612–d. 1672) emigrated from England to Massachusetts Bay Colony with her extended family in 1630 and remained there until her death. In 1650 a volume of her poems appeared in England under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America and attributed to “a Gentlewoman of those parts.” An expanded edition, Several Poems, was published in Boston, Massachusetts, six years after her death. Because she was the first published “American” poet, Bradstreet’s work has always been in the public eye, although assessments of its quality and ideas about which pieces merit attention have fluctuated over time.

“Hee Had Lost a Great Many Men in the Warr”

2018 ◽  
pp. 157-175
Author(s):  
Jenny Hale Pulsipher
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Plymouth Colony ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony ◽  
Northern New England

This chapter looks at the war between the colonists and many of the surrounding Native peoples in New England, which began in late June 1675. Initially, it involved only the English of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoags under their sachem Philip Metacom—also known as King Philip—but the conflict quickly spread to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and northern New England, drawing in English and Indian combatants from all of those locales, including the Nipmucs of the central Massachusetts highlands. Few groups suffered more during King Philip's War than the Christian Indians, caught as they were between the distrust of their Indian kin and the English to whom they had pledged their loyalty. Their treatment by the English during and after King Philip's War fueled John Wompas's growing anger against the Massachusetts government, which would explode on his return to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1677.

“Such Monstrous Births”: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy

1985 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Jacobson Schutte
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The Other ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Critical Moment ◽  
Antinomian Controversy ◽  
Colonial New England ◽  
Theological Conflict ◽  
Scholarly Attention

The Antinomian controversy of 1636-1638, the earliest major theological conflict in colonial New England, has attracted much scholarly attention. For many, the central figure in the drama, Anne Hutchinson, is a heroine, a champion of religious freedom against the bigoted theocratic Puritan establishment of Massachusetts Bay captained by the elder John Winthrop, Governor of the colony. Others have interpreted the Puritan prosecution of the Antinomians as perhaps regrettable but absolutely necessary; theological splintering might well have led, as most contemporaries believed it would, to a fatal political weakening of the young colony at a critical moment. One feature of the Antinomian episode, however, has not yet received the attention it deserves: the occurrence of two monstrous births, one in the midst of the controversy (although belatedly discovered) and the other at its denouement.

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