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The United States has long been defined by its religious diversity and recurrent public debates over the religious and political values that define it. In Accidental Pluralism, Evan Haefeli argues that America did not begin as a religiously diverse and tolerant society. It became so only because England’s religious unity collapsed just as America was being colonized. By tying the emergence of American religious toleration to global events, Haefeli creates a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing how the relationships among states, churches, and publics were contested from the beginning of the colonial era and produced a society that no one had anticipated. Accidental Pluralism is an ambitious and comprehensive new account of the origins of American religious life that compels us to refine our narratives about what came to be seen as American values and their distinct relationship to religion and politics.
Although commonly regarded as a prejudice against Roman Catholics and their religion, anti-popery is both more complex and far more historically significant than this common conception would suggest. As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, anti-popery is a powerful lens through which to interpret the culture and politics of the British-American world. In early modern England, opposition to tyranny and corruption associated with the papacy could spark violent conflicts not only between Protestants and Catholics but among Protestants themselves. Yet anti-popery had a capacity for inclusion as well and contributed to the growth and stability of the first British Empire. Combining th...
An account that explores the raid from the conflicting viewpoints of the raiders, both French-Canadian and Native American, and the Deerfield villagers.
The settlers of New Netherland were obligated to uphold religious toleration as a legal right by the Dutch Republic's founding document, the 1579 Union of Utrecht, which stated that "everyone shall remain free in religion and that no one may be persecuted or investigated because of religion." For early American historians this statement, unique in the world at its time, lies at the root of American pluralism. New Netherland and the Dutch Origins of American Religious Liberty offers a new reading of the way tolerance operated in colonial America. Using sources in several languages and looking at laws and ideas as well as their enforcement and resistance, Evan Haefeli shows that, although tole...
"Evan Haefeli argues that America's professed religious tolerance arose out of necessity, since no standard could prevail on its polyglot immigrants. More important, Haefeli ties the emergence of religious toleration to events worldwide, creating a true transnationalist history that links developing American realities to political and social conflicts and resolutions in Europe, showing the ways in which the codification of relationships among states, churches, and publics was endlessly contested in the colonial era. This is an ambitious attempt to reconcile our understandings of power-secular and otherwise- and refine our narratives about what came to be seen as American values"--
Evan Haefeli demonstrates how convoluted and uncertain were the beginnings of religious tolerance in America, by giving them an international context.
This volume draws together an unusually rich body of original sources that tell the story of the 1704 French and Indian attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, from different vantage points. Texts range from one of the most famous early American captivity narratives, John Williams' The Redeemed Captive, to the records of French soldiers and clerics, to little-known Abenaki and Mohawk stories of the raid that emerged out of their communities' oral traditions. Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney provide a general introduction, extensive annotations, and headnotes to each text. Although the oft-reprinted Redeemed Captive stands at the core of this collection, it is juxtaposed to less familiar accounts o...
In many ways, religion was the United States' first prejudice—both an early source of bigotry and the object of the first sustained efforts to limit its effects. Spanning more than two centuries across colonial British America and the United States, The First Prejudice offers a groundbreaking exploration of the early history of persecution and toleration. The twelve essays in this volume were composed by leading historians with an eye to the larger significance of religious tolerance and intolerance. Individual chapters examine the prosecution of religious crimes, the biblical sources of tolerance and intolerance, the British imperial context of toleration, the bounds of Native American sp...
In colonial North and South America, print was only one way of communicating. Information in various forms flowed across the boundaries between indigenous groups and early imperial settlements. Natives and newcomers made speeches, exchanged gifts, invented gestures, and inscribed their intentions on paper, bark, skins, and many other kinds of surfaces. No one method of conveying meaning was privileged, and written texts often relied on nonwritten modes of communication. Colonial Mediascapes examines how textual and nontextual literatures interacted in colonial North and South America. Extending the textual foundations of early American literary history, the editors bring a wide range of media to the attention of scholars and show how struggles over modes of communication intersected with conflicts over religion, politics, race, and gender. This collection of essays by major historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars demonstrates that the European settlement of the Americas and European interaction with Native peoples were shaped just as much by communication challenges as by traditional concerns such as religion, economics, and resources.
Colonial government, Pilgrims, the New England town, Native land, the background of religious toleration, and the changing memory recalling the Pilgrims – all are examined and stereotypical assumptions overturned in 15 essays by the foremost authority on the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony. Thorough research revises the story of colonists and of the people they displaced. Bangs’ book is required reading for the history of New England, Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts Natives, the Mennonite contribution to religious toleration in Europe and New England, and the history of commemoration, from paintings and pageants to living history and internet memes. If Pilgrims were radical, so is this book.