Increase Mather: The Foremost American Puritan

The classic biography of preeminent colonial Massachusetts minister and President of Harvard College, Increase Mather (1639-1723). This is the work that re-started Puritan studies in America. “A book which will be indispensable to students of early American history.” —Times Literary Supplement “It is a book to welcome and appreciate.” —American Historical Review “The available sources have been used carefully, and the story is told with great literary skill.” —The Sewanee Review “[Murdock’s book] opened the sluice gates to powerful streams of scholarship that in the next two decades revised our understanding of American Puritanism.” —Philip F. Gura, in A Concise Companion to American Studies

A European Turn in Early American History?

From the nineteenth century onwards, Americans have naturalized their colonial origins into a consensual nationalist history, emphasizing America’s perceived role as a refuge for the persecuted, while smoothing out a myriad of complexities in the process. Evan Haefeli attempts to overturn the assumptions underpinning this narrative and is convinced that many important aspects of early America need to be understood within a broader European context. In Accidental Pluralism, he argues that the collapse of religious unity in England lies at the root of the emergence of pluralism in colonial America, in which he includes Canada and the Caribbean. Relationships among states, churches, and publics were contested from the earliest decades of colonization and created a pluralistic religious landscape that no one had anticipated. The four reviewers are fulsome in their praise, calling it an impressive, important, powerful, and sweeping book that few scholars could have written. The reviewers also raise questions, for instance by problematizing the incorporation of the colonial American dimension into early British history, criticizing the validity of the chosen end date, and questioning his definitions of diversity, pluralism, and religious toleration. In his response Evan Haefeli takes the opportunity to reflect on what drove him to write the book and to organize it in this way. He acknowledges that connecting early American history with its broader European context was more difficult than it should have been, as the dominant questions in the two historiographies are an ocean apart. While the argument of the book is aimed at early Americanists, Haefeli is grateful that the reviewers situate the story he tells within the broader early modern European history of toleration.

The Passion of Anne Hutchinson

Anne Hutchinson remains an iconic figure in early American history and women’s history. More than a hundred years of scholarship on Puritans and New England colonization have positioned the controversy surrounding her as a critical moment during the first decade of Massachusetts’s settlement, although the importance of Hutchinson herself (rather than her male opponents and supporters) and the actual nature of her challenge have been matters of intense debate. While most articles and books emphasize the theological and political battles among men, women’s historians have turned to Hutchinson, but as emblematic of the status and limitations surrounding women. This project approaches Hutchinson from a position informed by intellectual and women’s history, pushing into the intricate, competing, but sometimes complementary cultural systems of Puritan spirituality and gender ideology. The book examines Puritanism and its practitioners over the long term, from its mid-sixteenth-century origins through and beyond the establishment of the New England colonies to the English Civil War and the fragmentation of English Puritanism in the 1660s. Through Anne Hutchinson, her predecessors, and her followers, the book explores the relationship between gender as a cultural system in flux and the radical religious community that inspired the colonization of New England. Puritanism was, perhaps, a religious system that provided strategies and justifications for controlling women. Yet the religious radicalism, ideology, and practices also attracted and empowered powerful women who actively supported the clergy, flourished spiritually, connected with God experientially, and came to lead as advisers, prophets, and preachers. Anne Hutchinson marks the power and promise of such charisma.

Thirty Years Lost: Studies of Early American History in Japan

Studies of early and Native American history in Japan have been stagnant for thirty years. Despite the “aboriginal turn” in the United States, Japanese scholars have not recognized the great progress even in this era of active interactions between and integration of the academic communities in Japan and the U.S., and have continued to treat European colonial history as early American history. This essay does not discuss why this generation-long neglect has occurred but aims to point out the lag and the specific shortcomings it has caused.