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.

2. Empires and enclaves

2014 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Stephen Aron
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
New England ◽  
American Indians ◽  
North American ◽  
Population Declines ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
North American Indians ◽  
Alternative Approaches

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.

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Western History ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Research

Jonathan Edwards and Scripture provides a fresh look at the important, burgeoning field of Edwards and the Bible. For too long, Edwards scholars have published new research on Edwards without paying due attention to the work he took most seriously: biblical exegesis. Edwards is recognized as an innovative theologian who wielded tremendous influence on revivalism, evangelicalism, and New England theology, but what is often missed is how much time he devoted to studying and understanding the Bible. He kept voluminous notebooks on Christian Scripture and had plans for major treatises on the Bible before he died. Edwards scholars need to take stock of the place of the Bible in his thought to do justice to his theology and legacy. In fact, more and more experts are recognizing how important this aspect of his life is, and this book brings together the insights of leading Edwards scholars on this topic. This volume seeks to increase our understanding of Edwards’ engagement with Scripture by setting it in the context of seventeenth-century Protestant exegesis and eighteenth-century colonial interpretation. It provides case studies of Edwards’ exegesis in varying genres of the Bible and probes his use of Scripture to develop theology. It also sets his biblical interpretation in perspective by comparing it with that of other exegetes. This book advances our understanding of the nature and significance of Edwards’ work with Scripture and opens new lines of inquiry for students of early modern Western history.

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.

Historical and Ecclesiastical Contexts

2021 ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
George Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The World ◽  
Colonial Government

This chapter sketches some of the webs of interrelated contexts that helped shape Edwards’s life and work. It surveys some of the background contexts growing out of the Reformation, Puritanism in England, and related political developments including the seventeenth-century political revolutions. Then it turns to the background of seventeenth-century Puritan New England including ecclesiastical and political developments that shaped the world Edwards was born into. Finally it looks at the major social, political, and ecclesiastical contexts shaping Edwards’s world during his years in eighteenth-century New England. That includes relations to Indians both in warfare and in missions, British wars with Roman Catholic powers, colonial politics and local colonial government, hierarchical social assumptions, slavery, church controversies, especially regarding the sacraments, and international and colonial pietism and awakenings.

The Proposal in the Pre-Revolutionary Decade for Establishing Anglican Bishops in the Colonies

1962 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack M. Sosin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Religious Toleration ◽  
Glorious Revolution ◽  
The South ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The Glorious Revolution

Time supposedly heals all wounds, but the religious strife between Puritans and Anglicans in the seventeenth century had left a bitter legacy in the minds of the New England Congregationalist ministers. Even after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9 had in time brought the principle of religious toleration for the protestant sects in the mother country, the animosities of the Stuart regime still evoked suspicion and distrust in the minds of those in New England whose ancestors had left England to found their Zion in the wilderness. But many years had passed since the days of archbishop William Laud, the Clarendon code and the policy of conformity. Although Anglicanism was dominant in England, by the middle of the eighteenth century it was tempered by the principle of toleration for dissenting protestants. But in New England those professing the Anglican faith were a minority among the Congregationalist offspring of the founding puritan fathers. Even in those provinces to the south where it represented the majority of the colonists the Anglican Church suffered from one great defect. There were no resident bishops in America; consequently, those colonists who wished to be ordained as ministers must make the long, expensive, and often hazardous journey to England. Few could undertake such a trip so that most of the Anglican clergy in the colonies came from the mother country.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Gina M. Martino
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
New France ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
King Philip's War ◽  
French Colonies ◽  
Almost Continuous

The introduction sets out the book’s major topics and arguments and discusses its methodology, sources, and organization. It states that seventeenth and eighteenth-century women living in the borderlands of the northeastern America participated as essential, martial actors in wars fought by New England, New France, and Native polities. English, French, and Native societies’ existing gender ideologies included space for women to act as combatants, spies, and leaders. Women made war with the approval of their societies, and their presence in remote towns, holding the line in fortified communities was essential to polities’ strategies of expansion and colonization. In English and French colonies, European ideas that supported women taking on substantial roles as public actors in the early modern period are significant throughout the book and are introduced here. Although the book argues that these were centuries of almost continuous war, conflicts that receive particular attention include: the Beaver Wars (mid-seventeenth-century), King Philip’s War (1675-1676), King William’s War (1688-1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713), Dummer’s War (1723-1726), King George’s War (1744-1748), and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763).

New England’s Peculiar Institution

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Archer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
History Of ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Almost All

The chapter provides a history of slavery in New England and an interpretation of the origins and evolution of racism and racist practices. Although the first African Americans arrived in New England in the 1630s, their numbers remained small throughout the seventeenth century and almost all lived in some form of servitude. They faced discrimination largely because of their place in the hierarchy rather than their ethnic origins. A significant change occurred in the early eighteenth century when the number of people of African descent, almost all slaves, increased significantly. That growth was met by a host of racist laws. Slavery took various forms, but most slaveholders held one or two slaves. The exceptions were western Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut where plantation slavery took hold, and it would distinguish that part of New England by its extreme racism even after slavery disappeared.

Let the Children Come: The Religion of the Protestant Child in Early America

2007 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 750-777 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Brooks Holifield
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
Early America ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Middle Colonies ◽  
Special Instruction ◽  
Christian Practices

In 1844, the Congregationalist minister Enoch Pond in Bangor, Maine, reminded his fellow clergy that they had been commissioned not only to feed the sheep of their flocks but also to nurture the lambs. Under no circumstances, he cautioned, would a good minister neglect the children, for both Christian parents and their pastors felt “the deepest anxiety” that the children of American parishes would not “receive that wise government, that faithful discipline, that Christian instruction and restraint, which, by the blessing of God, shall result in their speedy conversion, and bring them early and truly into the fold of Christ.” He called for pastors to pray for the children, to convene meetings of praying parents, to pay attention to children during pastoral visits, to impart special instruction to children from the pulpit, to visit their schools, to institute Sunday schools, to teach children the Bible, and to offer catechetical instruction. The devoted pastor would acquaint himself with children, “enter into their feelings, and interest himself in their affairs; and thus engage their affections, and win their confidence.“Christian clergy in America had long heeded such admonitions. Seventeenth-century Puritan ministers made serious, if sporadic, efforts to teach the catechism, often invited groups of children into their homes for instruction, contended over the implications of the baptismal covenant, and urged parents to teach their offspring religious truths and Christian practices. Eighteenth-century Anglican clergy made similar efforts to instruct children, and their revivalist counter-parts in New England and the Middle Colonies encouraged the conversion of children at younger than customary ages. Jonathan Edwards devoted careful attention to his four-year-old convert Phebe Bartlet, who followed in the path of her converted eleven-year-old brother by announcing, after anguished prayers and cries for mercy, that “the kingdom of God had come” to her.

Narrating Lives: A Mughal Empress, A French Nabob, A Nationalist Muslim Intellectual

1995 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 474-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara D. Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Indian Subcontinent ◽  
The Political ◽  
Benjamin Franklin ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Political Figure

With some exaggeration, one could claim that these three biographies, despite their disparate subjects—a seventeenth-century aristocratic lady of the Mughal court, an eighteenth-century French adventurer, and a twentieth-century Muslim intellectual and political figure—all tell the same story. In each case, a figure is born (as it happens, outside the Indian subcontinent) in relatively humble circumstances and emerges as a singular figure in some combination of the political, economic, intellectual life of the day. Each account proceeds chronologically, with the life presented as an unfolding, linear story, the fruit of “developments” and “influences,” in which the protagonist independently takes action. These accounts fit, in short, the genre of biography or autobiography known to us Americans from Benjamin Franklin to Malcolm X, of rags to riches—and, typically, lessons to impart (Ohmann 1970). Each is an example of the canonical form of male biography and autobiography that emerged in Europe from the eighteenth century.

GREECE AND ROME IN AMERICA

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
JOHN PAUL RUSSO
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Window Dressing ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

The classics appear conspicuously in the pamphlet wars of the American Revolution, though in the opinion of Bernard Bailyn (written many years ago), their presence is “window-dressing” and their influence “superficial.” They are “everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought” (my italics). Up the scale in influence comes Enlightenment rationalism, also “superficial” but only “at times”—that removes the foreigners, ancient and modern. Then, further up the scale are English common-law writers, “powerfully influential” though still insufficiently “determinative”; above them, a “major source,” New England Puritan thought and culture; and finally, at the top, seventeenth-century British “heroes of liberty” and the “early eighteenth-century transmitters of this tradition,” e.g. Commonwealth men, Bishop Hoadly. Who would have thought that the bishop of Winchester weighed in the balance more heavily than Plato and Aristotle? Only once in passing does Bailyn even mention Machiavelli, to whom J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Harvey C. Mansfield would grant large prominence in the development of Revolutionary thought.

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