Swindler Sachem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Hale Pulsipher
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
English Education ◽  
Native People ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Charles Ii

According to his kin, John Wompas was “no sachem,” although he claimed that status to achieve his economic and political ends. He drew on the legal and political practices of both Indians and the English—even visiting and securing the support of King Charles II—to legitimize the land sales that funded his extravagant spending. But he also used the knowledge acquired in his English education to defend the land and rights of his fellow Nipmucs. This book offers a window on seventeenth-century New England and the Atlantic world from the unusual perspective of an American Indian who, even though he may not have been what he claimed, was certainly out of the ordinary. Drawing on documentary and anthropological sources as well as consultations with Native people, the book shows how Wompas turned the opportunities and hardships of economic, cultural, religious, and political forces in the emerging English empire to the benefit of himself and his kin.

Generation of Violence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lyman Bushman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Native People ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Land Conflicts ◽  
Indian Wars ◽  
Middle Colonies ◽  
Land Companies

Although population in North America grew at an astounding rate in the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin believed the vast open lands in North American could easily absorb the growth. He underestimated the tensions created by farm parents seeking land for their children in a time of rising prices. Through the seventeenth century, open lands along the coast and up the rivers provided adequate acreage for the rising generation. Land was distributed by headrights and grants in the South and Middle Colonies; in New England, it was given as townships to groups of settlers. These systems broke down as the population grew and land prices rose. Settlers in search of farms were forced on to lands that were in dispute. Adjoining colonies laid claim to the same areas, or the native people refused to acknowledge purchases by colonies or land companies. In these contested areas, violence broke out between the rival claimants. From the Carolinas to Vermont, farmers used force to defend their titles. They resisted law officers or fought with the Indians to protect the farms that supplied their families. After the Revolution, the new federal government developed systems for distributing land. Conflicts occurred occasionally and Indian wars lasted through the century, but the violence abated as institutions formed to help families acquire land for their children.

From Protestant Supremacy to Christian Supremacy

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 763-766
Author(s):  
Rebecca Anne Goetz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
The Body ◽  
Native People ◽  
Specific Work ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
The Caribbean

Over the last generation, historians have begun to explain Christianity's impact on developing ideas of race and slavery in the early modern Atlantic. Jon Sensbach's A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840 showed how Moravians struggled with both race and slavery, ultimately concluding that Moravians adopted the racist attitudes of their non-Pietist North Carolina neighbors. Travis Glasson's Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World showed how the Anglican church accustomed itself to slavery in New York and the Caribbean. Richard Bailey's Race and Redemption in Puritan New England unraveled changing puritan ideas about race and belonging in New England. My own book, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race, argued that Protestant ideas about heathenism and conversion were instrumental to how English Virginians thought about the bodies and souls of enslaved Africans and Native people, and to how they developed a nascent idea of race in seventeenth-century Virginia. Heather Kopelson's Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic traced puritan ideas about race, the soul, and the body in New England and Bermuda. From a different angle, Christopher Cameron's To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement outlined the influence of puritan theologies on black abolitionism. Engaging all this scholarly ferment is Katharine Gerbner's new book, Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. Gerbner's work both synthesizes and transforms this extended scholarly conversation with a broad and inclusive look at Protestants—broadly defined as Anglicans, Moravians, Quakers, Huguenots, and others—and race in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over a geography stretching from New York to the Caribbean. The book is synthetic in that it builds on the regional and confessionally specific work of earlier scholars, but innovative in its argument that Protestants from a variety of European backgrounds and sometimes conflicting theologies all wrestled with questions of Christian conversion of enslaved peoples—could it be done? Should it be done? And, of overarching concern: how could Protestant Christians in good conscience hold fellow African and Native Christians as slaves?

Contested Passages

Memory Lands ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine M. DeLucia
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Native People ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Boston Harbor ◽  
Massachusetts Bay ◽  
Epidemic Disease ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
Massachusetts Bay Colony

This chapter examines the area around Boston Harbor and how Algonquians as well as Massachusetts Bay colonists engaged in contestations beginning in the seventeenth century. It begins by unpacking how Wampanoag and Massachusett peoples understood such geographies, including the meanings of rivers, maritime spaces, and islands, drawing upon deep-time oral traditions and archaeology. It then follows the arrival of John Winthrop and Puritans into Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and how that colonial enterprise began to exert pressures on Native people through epidemic disease, land loss, and imbalanced diplomatic relationships. The arrival of Protestant missionaries such as John Eliot also transformed certain Natives’ relationships to kin networks, homelands, and spiritual affiliations. When King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, Christian-affiliated Natives around the “Praying Town” of Natick, situated on the Charles River, were forcibly rounded up and removed from Natick to an incarceration site on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where they suffered large casualties. The chapter tracks how survivors of Deer Island navigated a challenging postwar landscape and rebuilt their lives and communities. It also examines New England forms of commemoration in the seventeenth century onward, including literary as well as physical types of memorialization.

The Powhatan Landscape

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin D. Gallivan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
American Indian ◽  
Annual Cycle ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Native People ◽  
Place Names ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Enduring Power

The Powhatan Landscape traces the Native past in the Chesapeake from the Algonquian arrival circa A.D. 200 through the rise and fall of the Powhatan chiefdom. Martin D. Gallivan argues that the current fixation with the English at Jamestown in 1607 has concealed the deeper history of Tsenacomacoh (sehn-uh-kuh-MAH-kah), the Algonquian term for Tidewater Virginia. Drawing from maps, place names, ethnohistory and, above all, archaeology, Gallivan shifts the frame of reference from English accounts of the seventeenth century toward a longer narrative of Virginia Algonquians’ construction of places, communities, and connections in between. Riverine settlements occupied for centuries oriented the ways Algonquian people dwelled in the Chesapeake estuary, initially around fishing grounds and collective burials visited seasonally, and later within horticultural towns occupied year-round. Ritualized spaces, including trench enclosures within the Powhatan center place of Werowocomoco (WAYR-uh-wah-KOH-muh-koh), gathered people for events that anchored the annual cycle. Despite the violent disruptions of the colonial era, Native people returned to Werowocomoco and to other riverine towns after 1607 for pilgrimages that commemorated the enduring power of place. For today’s American Indian communities in the Chesapeake, the rethought and reinterpreted landscape represents a powerful basis from which to contest narratives and policies that have denied their existence. This book seeks to add to these conversations by offering other reference points in a deeper history of landscape.

“Why should you be so furious?”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
First Aid ◽  
Global English ◽  
East Indies ◽  
English Identity

Chapter 4 focuses on the representation of Anglo-Dutch relations from Asia to America in the seventeenth century. The chapter analyzes the representation of an incident in 1623 on the spice island Amboyna when Dutch traders tortured (with waterboarding) and killed their English rivals in the East Indies. Decades later, New England writers returning to this incident, treating it as news, invoked anti-English violence half a world away to lay claim to a global English identity. The chapter compares visual representation of the Amboyna incident with John Underhill’s “figure” of the Mystic Fort massacre in New England, arguing that these representations of violence are key elements of colonial fantasies that made (and make) real atrocities possible. The coda discusses Stephen Bradwell’s 1633 first-aid manual, partly inspired by the Amboyna incident, which maintains that properly trained, authorized metropolitan authorities can control the potential dangers of the remedies torture and tobacco.

‘A Welsh Lancashire’? Monmouthshire Catholics in the Eighteenth Century

1979 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The West ◽  
The North ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Jesuit Mission ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Popish Plot

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.

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