Princeton University Press

New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America

Edward G. Gray

Cloth | 1999 | $35.00 / £21.95
190 pp. | 6 x 9 | 1 Map 10 halftones

New World Babel is an innovative cultural and intellectual history of the languages spoken by the native peoples
of North America from the earliest era of European conquest through the beginning of the nineteenth century. By
focusing on different aspects of the Euro-American response to indigenous speech, Edward Gray illuminates the
ways in which Europeans' changing understanding of "language" shaped their relations with Native Americans.
The work also brings to light something no other historian has treated in any sustained fashion: early America
was a place of enormous linguistic diversity, with acute social and cultural problems associated with
multilingualism.

Beginning with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and using rarely seen first-hand accounts of colonial
missionaries and administrators, the author shows that European explorers and colonists generally regarded
American-Indian languages, like all languages, as a divine endowment that bore only a superficial relationship to
the distinct cultures of speakers. By relating these accounts to thinkers like Locke, Adam Smith, Jefferson, and
others who sought to incorporate their findings into a broader picture of human development, he demonstrates
how, during the eighteenth century, this perception gave way to the notion that language was a human innovation,
and, as such, reflected the apparent social and intellectual differences of the world's peoples.

The book is divided into six chronological chapters, each focusing on different aspects of the Euro-American
response to indigenous languages. New World Babel will fascinate historians, anthropologists, and
linguists--anyone interested in the history of literacy, print culture, and early ethnological thought.

Edward G. Gray is Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University. He is currently a Mellon
Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Huntington Library.

Endorsements:

"Gray [covers] a vast range of very diverse material, much of it unknown and unread by modern scholars. . .
."--Anthony Pagden, The Johns Hopkins University

"A substantial contribution to American intellectual history and to our understanding of how white presumptions
shaped the attitudes toward Indian language and culture."--Kenneth Cmiel, University of Iowa


American History
American Language and Literature
Anthropology

ISBN: 0-691-01705-0 Cloth: $35.00

The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800:
The Shaping of an Evangelical Culture

Dee E. Andrews


The Methodists and Revolutionary America is the first in-depth narrative of the origins of American Methodism,
one of the most significant popular movements in American history. Placing Methodism's rise in the ideological
context of the American Revolution and the complex social setting of the greater Middle Atlantic where it was first
introduced, Dee Andrews argues that this new religion provided an alternative to the exclusionary politics of
Revolutionary America. With its call to missionary preaching, its enthusiastic revivals, and its prolific religious
societies, Methodism competed with republicanism for a place at the center of American culture.

Based on rare archival sources and a wealth of Wesleyan literature, this book examines all aspects of the early
movement. From Methodism's Wesleyan beginnings to the prominence of women in local societies, the
construction of African Methodism, the diverse social profile of Methodist men, and contests over the movement's
future, Andrews charts Methodism's metamorphosis from a British missionary organization to a fully
Americanized church. Weaving together narrative and analysis, Andrews explains Methodism's extraordinary
popular appeal in rich and compelling new detail.

Dee E. Andrews holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at the University of
California at San Diego, the University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton University. She is Associate Professor of
History at California State University, Hayward, and co-convener of the Bay Area Seminar in Early American
History and Culture.

Endorsement:

"The Methodists and Revolutionary America is superbly researched, solidly written, and imaginatively
conceived--a superbly synoptic account of one of the defining groups in American religious history."--Jon Butler,
Yale University

Cloth | April 2000 | $59.50 / £38.00
352 pp. | 6 x 9 | 14 tables, 15 halftones

Authorizing Experience:
Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing

Jim Egan


The emphasis on practical experience over ideology is viewed by many historians as a profoundly American
characteristic, one that provides a model for exploring the colonial challenge to European belief systems and the creation
of a unique culture. Here Jim Egan offers an unprecedented look at how early modern American writers helped make
this notion of experience so powerful that we now take it as a given rather than as the product of hard-fought rhetorical
battles waged over ways of imagining one's relationship to a larger social community. In order to show how our modern
notion of experience emerges from a historical change that experience itself could not have brought about, he turns to
works by seventeenth-century writers in New England and reveals the ways in which they authorized experience,
ultimately producing a rhetoric distinctive to the colonies and supportive of colonialism.

Writers such as John Smith, William Wood, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Benjamin Tompson, and William
Hubbard were sensitive to the challenge experiential authority posed to established social hierarchies. Egan argues that
they used experience to authorize a supplementary status system that would at once enhance England's economic,
political, and spiritual status and provide a new basis for regulating English and native populations. These writers were
assuaging fears over how exposure to alien environments threatened actual English bodies and also the imaginary body
that authorized English monarchy and allowed English subjects to think of themselves as a nation. By reimagining the
English nation, these supporters of English colonialism helped create a modern way of imagining national identity and
individual subject formation.

Jim Egan is Associate Professor of English at Brown University.

Cloth | 1999 | $37.50 / £23.50
184 pp. | 6 x 9

Inventing the "Great Awakening"

Frank Lambert


"Lambert successfully shows that the notion of a North Atlantic 'Great Awakening,' including a
'great work' in the American colonies, was 'invented' during the period 1735-45, rather than
with the publication of Joseph Tracy's The Great Awakening a century later, as some recent
historians have suggested. The book is outstanding in tracing down and summarizing the wealth
of pro- and anti-revivalist literature of this period. Its treatment of anti-revival works is the most
nearly complete of any book on the colonial revivals."--Mark Noll, Wheaton College

This book is a history of an astounding transatlantic phenomenon, a popular evangelical revival
known in America as the first Great Awakening (1735-1745). Beginning in the mid-1730s,
supporters and opponents of the revival commented on the extraordinary nature of what one
observer called the "great ado," with its extemporaneous outdoor preaching, newspaper
publicity, and rallies of up to 20,000 participants. Frank Lambert, biographer of Great
Awakening leader George Whitefield, offers an overview of this important episode and proposes
a new explanation of its origins.

The Great Awakening, however dramatic, was nevertheless unnamed until after its occurrence,
and its leaders created no doctrine nor organizational structure that would result in a historical
record. That lack of documentation has allowed recent scholars to suggest that the movement was
"invented" by nineteenth-century historians. Some specialists even think that it was wholly
constructed by succeeding generations, who retroactively linked sporadic happenings to fabricate
an alleged historic development. Challenging these interpretations, Lambert nevertheless
demonstrates that the Great Awakening was invented--not by historians but by eighteenth-century
evangelicals who were skillful and enthusiastic religious promoters. Reporting a dramatic
meeting in one location in order to encourage gatherings in other places, these men used
commercial strategies and newly popular print media to build a revival--one that they also
believed to be an "extraordinary work of God." They saw a special meaning in contemporary
events, looking for a transatlantic pattern of revival and finding a motive for spiritual rebirth in
what they viewed as a moral decline in colonial America and abroad.

By examining the texts that these preachers skillfully put together, Lambert shows how they told
and retold their revival account to themselves, their followers, and their opponents. His inquiries
depict revivals as cultural productions and yield fresh understandings of how believers "spread
the word" with whatever technical and social methods seem the most effective.

Frank Lambert is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University and the author of
"Pedlar in Divinity:" George Whitefield and the Transatlantic Revivals, 1737-1770
(Princeton).


ISBN: 0-691-04379-5 Cloth: $35.00

Cloth | 1999 | $35.00 / £21.95
320 pp. | 6 x 9 | 11 tables 5 halftones

June 1, 2001