TO LIVE UPON HOPE
Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast
Rachel Wheeler
Two Northeast Indian communities with similar histories of colonization accepted Congregational and Moravian missionaries, respectively, within five years of one another: the Mohicans of Stockbridge, Massachusetts (1735), and Shekomeko, in Dutchess County, New York (1740). In To Live upon Hope, Rachel Wheeler explores the question of what “missionary Christianity” became in the hands of these two native communities.
The Mohicans of Stockbridge and Shekomeko drew different conclusions from their experiences with colonial powers. Both tried to preserve what they deemed core elements of Mohican culture. The Indians of Stockbridge believed education in English cultural ways was essential to their survival and cast their acceptance of the mission project as a means of preserving their historic roles as cultural intermediaries. The Mohicans of Shekomeko, by contrast, sought new sources of spiritual power that might be accessed in order to combat the ills that came with colonization, such as alcohol and disease.
Through extensive research, especially in the Moravian records of day-to-day life, Wheeler offers an understanding of the lived experience of Mohican communities under colonialism. She complicates the understanding of eighteenth-century American Christianity by demonstrating that mission programs were not always driven by the destruction of indigenous culture and the advancement of imperial projects. In To Live upon Hope, Wheeler challenges the prevailing view of accommodation or resistance as the two poles of Indian responses to European colonization; colonialism placed severe strains on native peoples, yet Indians also exercised a level of agency and creativity that aided in their survival.
Reviews
“To Live upon Hope will affect the way American religious history is taught. Rachel Wheeler shows how Christianity provided a language for coping with the suffering brought about by colonization and offered ritual practices that preserved aspects of an indigenous worldview while accounting for new kinds of violence and destruction. She also takes a giant step forward in understanding eighteenth-century American evangelicalism by showing the difference between German and English approaches: the Moravian records reveal much about the religious lives of individual Mohicans, while those kept by English missionaries are concerned with governing, disciplining, and civilizing Mohicans. Readers will appreciate the fine-grained analysis of religious emotion this book provides as well as its far-reaching implications.”—Amanda Porterfield, Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion, Florida State University
“To Live upon Hope is that rare work that fulfills its ambition to treat both Indians and colonists with an even hand. Rachel Wheeler is the only scholar of whom I'm aware to systematically employ the rich German-language Moravian archive to study New England Indian history. This pathbreaking use of sources, and Wheeler's fine-grained analysis of the differing Moravian and Congregationalist priorities, is a major achievement. What makes To Live upon Hope even more important is Wheeler's sophisticated exploration of the Moravians' appeal to the Mohicans at emotional, spiritual, social, and political levels and her use of that understanding to better explain what drew Mohicans to–and what repelled them from—the Congregationalist mission at Stockbridge.”—David J. Silverman, The George Washington University
"Rachel Wheeler's To Live upon Hope is simply superb—as an informed ethnographic report on Native American religion, a sophisticated comparative study of Congregationalist and Moravian missionary practices, a major contribution to the pluralization of colonial American studies, a thoughtful
reflection on the failures of the Revolution to reach Indian communities, and a rich source of intensely poignant biographical narratives. It should satisfy readers with a wide variety of historical interests."—Mark Noll Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History, University of Notre Dame
"This is a book we have long been waiting for. Smashing easy generalizations about colonizer and colonized, Christianity and Native tradition, culture and acculturation, To Live upon Hope reveals real people struggling to make sense of their lives in times of tremendous upheaval. In the very different stories of two Mohican communities’ experiences with two varieties of protestant religion—two ways of responding to European imperialism, two ways of seeking spiritual meaning while making hard political choices—Rachel Wheeler recovers textures of eighteenth-century Native experience that until now seemed inaccessible."—Daniel K. Richter, The Richard S. Dunn Director, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
About the Author
Rachel Wheeler is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis.
$45.00s cloth
Available in JUNE, 336 pages, 6 x 9, 2 maps, 9 halftones
ISBN: 978-0-8014-4631-3
Cornell University Press 512 East State Street, Ithaca, NY 14850 607-277-2338 (phone) 607-277-2374 (fax)
WILD YANKEES
The Struggle for Independence along Pennsylvania's Revolutionary Frontier
Paul B. Moyer
Northeast Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley was truly a dark and bloody ground, the site of murders, massacres, and pitched battles. The valley's turbulent history was the product of a bitter contest over property and power known as the Wyoming controversy. This dispute, which raged between the mid-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, intersected with conflicts between whites and native peoples over land, a jurisdictional contest between Pennsylvania and Connecticut, violent contention over property among settlers and land speculators, and the social tumult of the American Revolution. In its later stages, the controversy pitted Pennsylvania and its settlers and speculators against “Wild Yankees”—frontier insurgents from New England who contested the state's authority and soil rights.
In Wild Yankees, Paul B. Moyer argues that a struggle for personal independence waged by thousands of ordinary settlers lay at the root of conflict in northeast Pennsylvania and across the revolutionary-era frontier. The concept and pursuit of independence was not limited to actual war or high politics; it also resonated with ordinary people, such as the Wild Yankees, who pursued their own struggles for autonomy. This battle for independence drew settlers into contention with native peoples, wealthy speculators, governments, and each other over land, the shape of America's postindependence social order, and the meaning of the Revolution. With vivid descriptions of the various levels of this conflict, Moyer shows that the Wyoming controversy illuminates settlement, the daily lives of settlers, and agrarian unrest along the early American frontier.
Reviews
"Paul B. Moyer casts the struggles between Connecticut claimants and Pennsylvania settlers at the center of a new view of the American Revolutionary period. Moyer's emphasis on the farmers' revolution and the struggles over property and power on the Pennsylvania frontier significantly adds to the growing scholarship focusing on the lives of ordinary folk. Wild Yankees clearly illustrates how the everyday experiences of those living on the frontier shaped the American Revolution."—Jeffrey A. Davis, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania
"Paul B. Moyer's evocation of the day-to-day interests of Pennamites and Connecticut claimants is vivid; Wild Yankees shows that the American Revolution and its immediate aftermath were part of a larger internal struggle over the future of America. Moyer helps to demolish the notion of a single group of 'settlers' by showing the vehement animosity among Anglo-Americans in the region as they struggled with each other over subsistence and land rights."—Gregory Knouff, Keene State College
“In Wild Yankees, Paul B. Moyer recaptures the violence and uncertainty of the Susquehanna backcountry during the Revolutionary Era. This book skillfully reconstructs the mental and social world of the Yankees and Pennamites who clashed over these lands and connects them to the wider currents of private ambition and agrarian protest that transformed the new nation's frontier.”—Timothy J. Shannon, Gettysburg College
About the Author
Paul B. Moyer is Associate Professor of History at SUNY Brockport.
$39.95s cloth
2007, 232 pages, 6 x 9, 4 maps, 3 halftones
ISBN: 978-0-8014-4494-4
The Mirror of Antiquity
American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900
Caroline Winterer
In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women’s classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and freedom.
In a strikingly innovative use of both texts and material culture, Winterer exposes the neoclassical world of furnishings, art, and fashion created in part through networks dominated by elite women. Many of these women were at the center of the national experience. Here readers will find Abigail Adams, teaching her children Latin and signing her letters as Portia, the wife of the Roman senator Brutus; the Massachusetts slave Phillis Wheatley, writing poems in imitation of her favorite books, Alexander Pope’s Iliad and Odyssey; Dolley Madison, giving advice on Greek taste and style to the U.S. Capitol’s architect, Benjamin Latrobe; and the abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child, who showed Americans that modern slavery had its roots in the slave societies of Greece and Rome.
Thoroughly embedded in the major ideas and events of the time—the American Revolution, slavery and abolitionism, the rise of a consumer society—this original book is a major contribution to American cultural and intellectual history.
Reviews“Caroline Winterer uncovers and deftly delineates a women’s world of classicism that paralleled and intersected the more well-known evocations of Greece and Rome used by the male founders. Employing clothes, needlework, and furnishings, as well as documents, as her sources, Winterer unveils the compelling historical paradox of American women reaching back to the ancient world to stake their claim to a modern world.”—Catherine Allgor, University of California Riverside
“This charming book reminds us once again how protean is the legacy of classicism. It focuses on American women in the period spanning the huge upheavals of the War for Independence and the Civil War, and shows in vivid cameos how classical models provided an arena of both possibility and circumscription for women in all walks of life—from drawing rooms to slave quarters. The classics served as an ideological Trojan horse, enabling discourse on women’s rights as readily as a justification of slaveholding. And the very haphazardness of women’s classical education led to extraordinary creative eclecticism. Here are many enticing glimpses through the back door of history, from the inspiration of the ‘sable Muse’ Phillis Wheatley to the surprising significance of the ‘sopha’. The Mirror of Antiquity is a nuanced, complex, and engagingly narrated work.”—Catherine Conybeare, Bryn Mawr College
“In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer affirms the broad currency of classicism in the century following the American Revolution, revealing women’s contradictory relations to the texts, images, and objects inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. She shows us how the culture of classicism simultaneously embraced and excluded women and how different groups of women—abolitionist and slaveholding, erudite and merely educated—laid claim to different strands of this wide-ranging discourse. Stylishly written, The Mirror of Antiquity offers fresh insights into the gendered connections between imaginative worlds and political ideologies.”—Catherine E. Kelly, University of Oklahoma
About the Author
Caroline Winterer is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910.
$35.00s clothAvailable in JUNE 2007, 264 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4, 42 halftones
ISBN: 978-0-8014-4163-9
Uncas: First of the Mohegans
MICHAEL LEROY OBERG
“Oberg has produced what should stand for some time as the definitive biography of Uncas, one that significantly advances our understanding of the sachem’s life and of Anglo-Indian relations in seventeenth-century southern New England. He is especially effective in showing just how fluid indigenous political leadership and tributary relationships were and how Uncas and other Indian leaders capitalized on that fluidity. . . . Oberg has given us our fullest portrait of Uncas to date, together with a solid account of the historical context that shaped, and was shaped by, this remarkable sachem.”—The New England Quarterly
“Michael Leroy Oberg avoids caricaturing Uncas and humanizes him. Because Uncas closely allied himself with the English yet managed to maintain a greater cultural gap between his people and the colonists than did many other leaders, he was unique. Yet if one had to choose an Indian whose life story could be used to present a microcosm of seventeenth-century New England, it would have to be Uncas.”—William and Mary Quarterly
Many know the name “Uncas” only from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, but the historical Uncas flourished as an important leader of the Mohegan people in seventeenth-century Connecticut. In Uncas: First of the Mohegans, Michael Leroy Oberg integrates the life story of an important Native American sachem into the broader story of European settlement in America. The arrival of the English in Connecticut in the 1630s upset the established balance among the region’s native groups
and brought rapid economic and social change. Oberg argues that Uncas’s methodical and sustained strategies for adapting to these changes made him the most influential Native American leader in colonial New England.
MICHAEL LEROY OBERG is Associate Professor of History at the State University of New York–Geneseo. He is the author
of Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1685, also from Cornell.
APRIL, 288 pages, 4 maps, 2 halftones, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN 0-8014-7294-6 $17.95s/£10.50
(Cloth ISBN 0-8014-3877-2)
Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City
BRUCE DORSEY
“Bruce Dorsey’s Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City is an exciting and creative examination of reform activity in the early nineteenth century. . . . [Dorsey] brilliantly demonstrates the tremendous impact of gender on social issues such as slavery, temperance, poverty, and immigration, and just how deeply it affected the lives of men and women in the antebellum city.”—Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
“The most thorough and convincing account of the development of male gender ideology in the early republic yet published. Reforming Men and
Women marks an important advance in the historiography of American gender history. . . . The arguments here are complex, subtle, and ultimately convincing. . . . To top it all off, Dorsey weaves close readings of popular fiction into each chapter. The result is to present the reader with a variety of different kinds of evidence and to show how the theoretical observations of literary scholars can be used to buttress traditional historical arguments. What makes all this work so well is Dorsey’s fine prose.”—Journal of the Early Republic
Before the Civil War, the public lives of American men and women intersected most frequently in the arena of religious activism. Bruce Dorsey broadens the field of gender studies, incorporating an analysis of masculinity into the history of early American religion and reform. His
is a holistic account that reveals the contested meanings of manhood and womanhood among antebellum Americans, both black and white, middle class and working class.
BRUCE DORSEY is Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College.
APRIL, 320 pages, 12 halftones, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Paper ISBN 0-8014-7288-1 $24.95s/£14.50
(Cloth ISBN 0-8014-3897-7)
CLAIMING THE PEN
Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South
Catherine Kerrison
In 1710, the imperious Virginia patriarch William Byrd II spitefully refused his wife Lucy's plea for a book; a century later, Lady Jean Skipwith placed an order that sent the Virginia bookseller Joseph Swan scurrying to please. These vignettes bracket a century of change in white southern women's lives. Claiming the Pen offers the first intellectual history of early southern women. It situates their reading and writing within the literary culture of the wider Anglo-Atlantic world, thus far understood to be a masculine province, even as they daily inhabited the limited, provincial social circles of the plantation South. Catherine Kerrison uncovers a new realm of female education in which conduct-of-life advice--both the dry pedantry of sermons and the risqué plots of novels--formed the core reading program. Women, she finds, learned to think and write by reading prescriptive literature, not Greek and Latin classics; in homes serving as impromptu classrooms, not colleges and universities; and from kin and friends, rather than schoolmates and professors.
Kerrison also reveals that southern women, in their willingness to "take up the pen" and so claim new rights, seized upon their racial superiority to offset their gender inferiority. In depriving slaves of education, southern women claimed literacy as a privilege of their whiteness, and perpetuated and strengthened the repressive institutions of slavery.
Catherine Kerrison is Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University.
Cloth Available in DECEMBER 2005 288pp 6 x 9 5 halftonesISBN: 0-8014-4344-X $45.00s
May 13, 2008