This is the first comprehensive study of American Indians of southern New England from 1500 to 1650. Focusing on Natives in their own right, rather than on their relationship with Europeans, anthropologist Kathleen J. Bragdon portrays a unique people who maintained and developed their own culture despite the advancement of colonization. Ninnimissinuok is the term Bragdon uses to designate the Natives of southern New England, who include the Pawtucket, Massachussett, Nipmuck, Pocumtuck, Narragansett, Pokanoket, Niantic, Mohegan, and Pequot. Bragdon discusses the common features of these groups as well as their significant differences. To draw such a complex portrait, she makes frequent reference to the writings of European observers but balances that perspective with important evidence, some of it entirely new, from archaeology and linguistics. As a result, she corrects stereotypes of American Indians, both negative and positive, that originated from outsiders and persist to the present day. Although she acknowledges the impact of the Europeans, Bragdon shows how internally developed customs and values were the primary determinants in the development of Native culture. Employing current theory in anthropology and ethnohistory, Bragdon illuminates various aspects of Ninnimissinuok life, such as diet, farming and hunting, trade, diplomacy, politics, language, and spirituality. Of particular interest is her analysis of the role of Ninnimissinuok women, who contributed enormously to the economy of the region yet whose status was not commensurate with that of men. With its wealth of detail on all aspects of southern New England Native life and its wide selection of drawings, photographs, and maps, this book is an indispensable reference for scholars as well as for anyone wishing to know more about the region's rich cultural past.

As rigid and unforgiving as the boarding schools established for the education of Native Americans could be, the intellectuals who engaged with these schools—including Mohegans Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson, and Montauketts David and Jacob Fowler in the eighteenth century, and Cherokees Catharine and David Brown in the nineteenth—became passionate advocates for Native community as a political and cultural force. From handwriting exercises to Cherokee Syllabary texts, Native students negotiated a variety of pedagogical practices and technologies, using their hard-won literacy skills for their own purposes. By examining the materials of literacy—primers, spellers, ink, paper, and instructional manuals—as well as the products of literacy—letters, journals, confessions, reports, and translations—English Letters and Indian Literacies explores the ways boarding schools were, for better or worse, a radical experiment in cross-cultural communication. Focusing on schools established by New England missionaries, first in southern New England and later among the Cherokees, Hilary E. Wyss explores both the ways this missionary culture attempted to shape and define Native literacy and the Native response to their efforts. She examines the tropes of "readerly" Indians—passive and grateful recipients of an English cultural model—and "writerly" Indians—those fluent in the colonial culture but also committed to Native community as a political and cultural concern—to develop a theory of literacy and literate practice that complicates and enriches the study of Native self-expression. Wyss's literary readings of archival sources, published works, and correspondence incorporate methods from gender studies, the history of the book, indigenous intellectual history, and transatlantic American studies.

The tragic and fascinating history of the first epic struggle between white settlers and Native Americans in the early seventeenth century: “a riveting historical validation of emancipatory impulses frustrated in their own time” (Booklist, starred review) as determined Narragansett Indians refused to back down and accept English authority. A devout Puritan minister in seventeenth-century New England, Roger Williams was also a social critic, diplomat, theologian, and politician who fervently believed in tolerance. Yet his orthodox brethren were convinced tolerance fostered anarchy and courted God’s wrath. Banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635, Williams purchased land from the Narragansett Indians and laid the foundations for the colony of Rhode Island as a place where Indian and English cultures could flourish side by side, in peace. As the seventeenth century wore on, a steadily deepening antagonism developed between an expansionist, aggressive Puritan culture and an increasingly vulnerable, politically divided Indian population. Indian tribes that had been at the center of the New England communities found themselves shunted off to the margins of the region. By the 1660s, all the major Indian peoples in southern New England had come to accept English authority, either tacitly or explicitly. All, except one: the Narragansetts. In God, War, and Providence “James A. Warren transforms what could have been merely a Pilgrim version of cowboys and Indians into a sharp study of cultural contrast…a well-researched cameo of early America” (The Wall Street Journal). He explores the remarkable and little-known story of the alliance between Roger Williams’s Rhode Island and the Narragansett Indians, and how they joined forces to retain their autonomy and their distinctive ways of life against Puritan encroachment. Deeply researched, “Warren’s well-written monograph contains a great deal of insight into the tactics of war on the frontier” (Library Journal) and serves as a telling precedent for white-Native American encounters along the North American frontier for the next 250 years.