Puritans, Native Americans, and Revolutionaries: Empire and Encounter in Early America

This course concerns the history of colonial America from early English settlement and encounters among English and Native Americans to revolution against Great Britain. The making of colonial America involved encounters and exchanges among various people groups-Puritans, Indigenous communities, German Moravians, English liberal thinkers with different ideas about politics-with different political convictions. This course explores those encounters, with a focus especially on Puritan and evangelical missions to Native Americans, southern plantation society and race-based slavery, English notions of religious liberty, and how ideas of political liberty, including rationales for American Independence, conflicted with, criticized, or stood as contradictions to English treatment of Indigenous and African peoples. We will read primary texts that illumine new perspectives on these issues. There is no defining argument or ideological “point” to the course but, rather, a series of observations of how different social, political, and intellectual variables made for shifting understandings of what religious ideas mattered to public life in America and how those ideas ought to shape civil affairs. As we examine these understandings, we will pay attention especially to Anglo-Indigenous interactions, the rise of a national self-consciousness that invested America with great historical purpose, the development of different responses to racial difference in America, and the disestablishment of religion from national political power (encoded in the First Amendment to the Constitution).

Course history:

Fall 2015: taught by Prof. Mark Valeri
Fall 2019: taught by Prof. Mark Valeri
Spring 2022: taught by Prof. Mark Valeri