Abstract
Rogers-Stokes concludes her study of the records of trial from Thomas Shepard’s church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by calling attention to the need to read and engage with primary sources objectively, and with curiosity, rather than through the often warped lens of secondary scholarship. She offers several examples of modern historians who allow primary sources to speak for themselves, and by doing so present more accurate, factual, and compelling historical studies. Rogers-Stokes urges scholars to explore the wealth of primary sources being made available through digital history projects and collections with open minds and a readiness to be surprised by what they find.
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Notes
- 1.
There were some scholars who might have warned us; as described in Chap. 2, Patricia Caldwell clearly saw the original manuscripts but did not publicize their striking differences from the transcriptions.
- 2.
New England’s Hidden Histories is hosted by the Congregational Library and Archives in Boston, Massachusetts, and the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University in Connecticut. Its 1:1 transcriptions are published online at http://www.congregationallibrary.org/nehh/main. Colonial North America at Harvard Library is working to digitize materials from over a dozen libraries and archives at Harvard University and make them available to the general public at https://colonialnorthamerica.library.harvard.edu/spotlight/cna/
- 3.
“We seem to be returning to an older, hostile view of the Puritans, as expressed in the 1920s by William Carlos Williams and recently summarized with sympathy by a sitting president of the Modern Language Association: the Puritans were the people, tout court, ‘who massacred the Indians and established the self-righteous religion and politics that determined American ideology.’” Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 7.
- 4.
ShawnaKim Lowey-Ball, “History by Text and Thing,” Perspectives on History 58, no. 3 (March 2020), 13, 14. Italics in the original.
- 5.
Alfred A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 8, 9–10. Emphasis added. He notes that “it is ironic that, while historians of the early contact period generally accept the ethno-historians’ warning that one must comprehend and weigh the cultural values of Native Americans in order to understand their reaction to the European presence, they sometimes understate the extent to which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans were driven by beliefs and assumptions rather unlike our own. Quite simply, the Pequot War must be placed in the context of Puritan assumptions about intercultural encounters in the wilderness.”
- 6.
Zachary Andrew Carmichael, “Fit Men: New England Tavern Keepers, 1620–1720” (MA thesis, Miami University, 2009), 2, 40, 47.
- 7.
James Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 2.
- 8.
Newell also confirms Drake’s discovery that “any discussion of New England society must consider its hybrid quality—the fact that Indians, English, and eventually Africans created it jointly. Indians shaped the shared culture not merely at a distance from the English but also from within the same towns and homes. …Some scholars have argued persuasively that English colonists arrived with or quickly developed a strong racist attitude about Indian and African difference and inferiority that made them prone to enslave these groups. But equally compelling evidence points to a more complex, evolving set of views regarding the Indians’ nature and humanity.” Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015), 4, 6, 7–8.
- 9.
Therefore, there can be no monolithic “colonial view” of Native Americans and Africans, because different English colonists in different locations at different times with different immediate contexts had different perspectives and interactions: “While Virginia colonists developed a notion of Indians and Africans as no longer ‘potential Christians’ who might eventually blend with English colonial society but rather as innately incompatible ‘hereditary heathens,’ the debate unfolded rather differently in Bermuda and New England.” Heather Miyano Kopelson, Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 6. Emphasis added.
- 10.
Daragh Grant, “The Treaty of Hartford (1638): Reconsidering Jurisdiction in Southern New England,” The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Ser., 72, no. 3 (July 2015), 461, 465, 486–7, 490, 492.
- 11.
Adrian Chastain Weimer, “The Resistance Petitions of 1664–1665: Confronting the Restoration in Massachusetts Bay,” The New England Quarterly 92, no. 2 (June 2019), 222, 223, 247. Italics in original.
- 12.
Drake, King Philip’s War, 197.
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Rogers-Stokes, L. (2020). Conclusion. In: Records of Trial from Thomas Shepard’s Church in Cambridge, 1638–1649. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50845-6_6
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