Bowden and Ronda have edited a classic from the Indian mission frontier in North America. Bowden's expertise in church history and Ronda's thorough understanding of the Native American predicament on the New England frontier are clearly reflected in this excellent volume. Thanks to their extremely useful introduction and the publication of a difficult-to-obtain tract, this book represents a valuable contribution to the growing body of ethnographic literature available to researchers.

No previous work on John Eliot's mission to the Indians has told such a comprehensive and engaging story. Richard Cogley takes a dual approach: he delves deeply into Eliot's theological writings and describes the historical development of Eliot's missionary work. By relating the two, he presents fresh perspectives that challenge widely accepted assessments of the Puritan mission. Cogley incorporates Eliot's eschatology into the history of the mission, takes into account the biographies of the proselytes (the "praying Indians") and the individual histories of the Christian Indian settlements (the "praying towns"), and corrects misperceptions about the mission's role in English expansion. He also addresses other interpretive problems in Eliot's mission, such as why the Puritans postponed their evangelizing mission until 1646, why Indians accepted or rejected the mission, and whether the mission played a role in causing King Philip's War. This book makes signal contributions to New England history, Native American history, and religious studies.

John Eliot (1604–90) has been called “the apostle to the Indians.” This book looks at Eliot not from the perspective of modern Protestant “mission” studies (the approach mainly adopted by previous research) but in the historical and theological context of seventeenth-century puritanism. Drawing on recent research on migration to New England, the book argues that Eliot, like many other migrants, went to New England primarily in search of a safe haven to practice pure reformed Christianity, not to convert Indians. Eliot’s Indian ministry started from a fundamental concern for the conversion of the unconverted, which he derived from his experience of the puritan movement in England. Consequently, for Eliot, the notion of New England Indian “mission” was essentially conversion-oriented, Word-centered, and pastorally focused, and (in common with the broader aims of New England churches) pursued a pure reformed Christianity. Eliot hoped to achieve this through the establishment of Praying Towns organized on a biblical model—where preaching, pastoral care, and the practice of piety could lead to conversion—leading to the formation of Indian churches composed of “sincere converts.”

Looks at implications of colonialism for both English and Americans.

This book traces the development of John Eliot’s mission to the Algonquian-speaking people of Massachusetts Bay, from his arrival in 1631 until his death in 1690. It explores John Eliot’s determination to use the Massachusett dialect of Algonquian, both in speech and in print, as a language of conversion and Christianity. The book analyzes the spoken words of religious conversion and the written transcription of those narratives; it also considers the Algonquian language texts and English language texts which Eliot published to support the mission. Central to this study is an insistence that John Eliot consciously situated his mission within a tapestry of contesting transatlantic and political forces, and that this framework had a direct impact on the ways in which Native American penitents shaped and contested their Christian identities. To that end, the study begins by examining John Eliot’s transatlantic network of correspondents and missionary-supporters in England, it then considers the impact of conversion narratives in spoken and written forms, and ends by evaluating the impact of literacy on praying Indian communities. The study maps the coalescence of different communities that shaped, or were shaped by, Eliot’s seventeenth-century mission.

This third volume on Missionary Linguistics focuses on morphology and syntax. It contains a selection of papers derived from the international conferences on missionary linguistics held in Hong Kong/Macau and Valladolid. As with the previous two volumes (2004, on general issues, and 2005, on orthography and phonology), this volume looks at methodology and descriptive techniques from a historical point of view, offering articles of interest to historiographers of linguistics, typologists, and descriptive linguists. It presents research into languages such as Tarasco (Pur'épecha), Massachusett, Nahuatl, Conivo, Sipibo, Guaraní, Vietnamese, Tamil, Southern Min Chinese dialects, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Tagalog and other Austronesian languages, such as Yapese and Chamorro.

Pre-eighteenth century America was a uniquely pragmatic, utopian society—a new world in which the expectations of a new beginning brought by explorers, traders, and settlers often conflicted violently the Native Americans they encountered. In Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture 1521–1680, E. Brooks Holifield identifies the act of persuasion as the common ground on which these disparate groups stood. As he clearly documents and persuasively interprets an America that some readers may not recognize, Holifield includes compelling insights into the social expressions of Native Americans and Africans as well as Europeans. His view extends from the pueblos of New Mexico and the missions of France to the plantations of Virginia and the towns of New England. Era of Persuasion portrays an early American society populated by passionate visionaries with urgently persuasive purposes who lived by applied philosophy and inspired action, and will be appreciated by the curious reader and avid historian alike.