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Recent Submissions
Item Religious Dimensions of Pandemics(School of Liberal Arts, IUPUI, 2020) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsItem Review of Adam Jortner's, The Gods of Prophetstown: The Battle of Tippecanoe and the Holy War for the American Frontier(American Antiquarian Society, 2012-07) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsI wanted to like this book. I really did. But Jortner lost me pretty early on. The premise appeared promising. He would show how two religious cultures—Indian nativism and Anglo-American deism—clashed and led to the dramatic battle at Tippecanoe, where the nativist Shawnee Prophet (Tenskwatawa) and his brother Tecumseh faced off against deist William Henry Harrison, who later became our nation's oldest (until Reagan) and shortest-serving president. My initial misgivings—prompted by the "holy war" in the title—soon grew into more serious reservations.Item Review of Daniel R. Mandell's Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880(MIT Press, 2009) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsVirtually every nineteenth-century local history of a New England town begins with a chapter about the last “red man” to have lived there. The tone is generally somber but optimistic—marking the sad but inevitable passing away of a noble race, thus allowing for the rise of true civilization. Scholarship of the last decade or so has been chipping away at this trope, but none has done so as comprehensively as Mandell. Studies of New England Indian history are rich, though heavily weighted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the larger field of Indian history, the Old Northwest garners most attention in the era of the early Republic, before shifting to the Southeast in the era of Removal, and the West in the latter half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Item Charlottesville, Exodus, and the Politics of Nostalgia(2017-08-22) Wheeler, RachelItem Review of Linford D. Fisher's The Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America(The University of Chicago Press, 2014) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsLinford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening joins a growing body of scholarship on Native American engagement with Christianity. Much of that work so far (including my own) has focused on particular individuals or communities. Fisher’s is the first to take a broader, longer scope to survey the landscape of Native engagement with Christianity in southern New England (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Long Island, and western Massachusetts) through the eighteenth century (1700–1820), and it offers a welcome contribution. Fisher’s aim is to understand Native encounter with Christianity “in the fullest possible context of local colonial interactions and the broader, transatlantic tugs of imperial power.”Item Review of Craig Atwood's Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem(The University of Chicago Press, 2004) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsColonial Moravians are far more popular today than they ever were in the eighteenth century. Then, Moravians were suspected of being “papists” on account of their liturgical practices, mistrusted because of their close relations with Indians and slaves, and thought more than a little odd in their communal living arrangements. These qualities, combined with their prodigious record keeping, have proven enticing to sociologists, historians, and ethnohistorians alike, studying everything from the life course of religious movements (Gillian Lindt Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds [New York, 1968], and Beverly Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem [Philadelphia, 1988]) to interracial religious communities (Jon Sensbach, A Separate Canaan [Chapel Hill, NC, 1998]) to the dynamics of ethnic identity in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania (Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads [Chapel Hill, NC, 2003]). All of the studies cited above treat Moravian belief and practice to a greater or lesser extent, but none goes so far as Craig Atwood’s new work in taking seriously the distinctive religiosity of the Moravian Bru¨dergemeine. Community of the Cross is a dual biography of the colorful Saxon Count, Ludwig von Zinzendorf (the main force behind the growth of the Moravian movement in the eighteenth century) and of the community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which Atwood treats as the incarnation of Zinzendorf’s theology.Item Review of Jane T. Merritt's At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier(MIT Press, 2004) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsIt has been more than a decade since White published The Middle Ground,a monumental study of the shared world of colonists and Indians in the Great Lakes region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1The middle ground, argued White, was called into existence by the mutual dependence of Indians and colonists. So long as Britain and France contested control of North America, a pragmatic accommodation prevailed. The persuasiveness and significance of White’s work is reflected by the abundance of middle grounds that scholars have since brought to light. Among the most recent contributions is Merritt’s At the Crossroads,which weds the middle ground to the transatlantic world of empires and subjects. Drawing largely on the wealth of sources in the Moravian mission archives, Merritt’s study provides a richly detailed look into the complex relations of Indian and white individuals and communities on the mid-Atlantic frontier from 1700 to 1763. At the Crossroads is one of a string of recent works—starting with Jon Sensbach ,A Seperate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840(Williamsburg, 1998)—that draws on the vast but virtually untapped sources of the relatively obscure Moravian communities to explore issues of race, culture, and religion in colonial and revolutionary America.Item Review of Gunlög Fur's A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among the Delaware Indians(Alexander Street, 2011) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsGunlög Fur's A Nation of Women is an ambitious book. It is essentially an overview of Delaware history and cultural change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a gender studies perspective. During this time, the Delaware were commonly referred to as women in diplomatic contexts, and Fur's book attempts to unpack the meanings behind this designation, first by examining the "roles and responsibilities of women" among the Delaware, and the "historical conditions that made such a gendered designation possible." She examines gender both as an "organizing principle for subsistence activities, division of labor and exchange, and dispersion of power" as well as "a process of thought and belief" that "finds sanction in the spiritual realm."Item The left needs its own story of American greatness(Washington Post, 2018-10-17) Wheeler, RachelItem Review of Carole Blackburn’s Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650(MIT Press, 2001) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsBlackburn proposes a new reading of the encounter between Jesuit and Indian in seventeenth-century New France. A work of historical anthropology driven by the insights and agenda of colonial discourse studies, Harvest of Souls sets out to show how the Jesuit missionary reports (transcribed, translated, and published between 1896 and 1901 by Reu-ben G. Thwaites as The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents) were implicated in the practice of colonialism. Her method is to “examine the intent, effect, and meaning of the texts in their entirety” (as opposed to more narrowly focused ethnographic or historical readings), searching for and exposing the “sedimented meanings that inhabit the Jesuit texts” in order to “situate these meanings in relation to the politics of colonial-ism and conversion” (8, 11). The Relations were not “just the byproducts of a political process,” they were “a more integral component of the politics of colonialism, because they expressed the themes, ideas and ideologies that served domination and justified the colonial endeavor.”