Catalysts in the birth of evangelicalism, the Moravians supported their religious projects through financial savvy, a distinctive communalism at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and transatlantic commercial networks. This book traces the Moravians' evolving projects, arguing that imperial war, not capitalism, transformed Moravian religious life.

The Moravian Brethren are one of the most notable of the pietistic sects to emerge from the Protestant Reformation. Mrs. Fries here documents the brief history of the Moravian community in Georgia, commencing with an overview of the sect and continuing through the negotiations between Brethren leader August Spangenburg and Georgia founder General James Oglethorpe, establishment of the Brethren community in Savannah, missionary work among the Creeks, and the departure of the Moravians for England, Pennsylvania, and other locations. Genealogists will find numerous references to transfers of land involving the Moravians, settlement maps, passenger lists of Moravian arrivals, a brief list of Moravian deaths in Georgia, and a name index to the persons mentioned in the text.

In Moravian Soundscapes, Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and the world around them. In Moravian communities, cultures of hearing and listening encompassed and also superseded musical traditions such as song and hymnody. Complex biophonic, geophonic, and anthrophonic acoustic environments—or soundscapes—characterized daily life in Moravian settlements such as Bethlehem, Nain, Gnadenhütten, and Friedenshütten. Through detailed analyses and historically informed recreations of Moravian communal, environmental, and religious soundscapes and their attendant hymn traditions, Moravian Soundscapes explores how sounds—musical and nonmusical, human and nonhuman—shaped the Moravians' religious culture. Combined with access to an interactive website that immerses the reader in mid-18th century Pennsylvania, and framed with an autobiographical narrative, Moravian Soundscapes recovers the roles of sound and music in Moravian communities and provides a road map for similar studies of other places and religious traditions in the future.

In colonial North Carolina, German-speaking settlers from the Moravian Church founded a religious refuge--an ideal society, they hoped, whose blueprint for daily life was the Bible and whose Chief Elder was Christ himself. As the community's demand for labor grew, the Moravian Brethren bought slaves to help operate their farms, shops, and industries. Moravians believed in the universalism of the gospel and baptized dozens of African Americans, who became full members of tightly knit Moravian congregations. For decades, white and black Brethren worked and worshiped together--though white Moravians never abandoned their belief that black slavery was ordained by God. Based on German church documents, including dozens of rare biographies of black Moravians, A Separate Canaan is the first full-length study of contact between people of German and African descent in early America. Exploring the fluidity of race in Revolutionary era America, it highlights the struggle of African Americans to secure their fragile place in a culture unwilling to give them full human rights. In the early nineteenth century, white Moravians forsook their spiritual inclusiveness, installing blacks in a separate church. Just as white Americans throughout the new republic rejected African American equality, the Moravian story illustrates the power of slavery and race to overwhelm other ideals.

In the mid-eighteenth century, members of the Moravian Church, which had its origins in Central Europe, began conducting mission work among the Cherokee people. Their archives, now housed in North Carolina, include valuable records of their contact with the Cherokees. Drawing from these archives, these volumes offer a firsthand account of daily life among the Cherokees from initial contact between the Moravians and Cherokees in 1752 to the close of the nineteenth century.

Essays re members of the Moravian Church; although many of these Protestant immigrants spoke German, they originated in various countries.