The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees, Abridged Edition


Book Description

In 1801 the Moravians, a Pietist German-speaking group from Central Europe, founded the Springplace Mission at a site in present-day northwestern Georgia. The Moravians remained among the Cherokees for more than thirty years, longer than any other Christian group. John and Anna Rosina Gambold served at the mission from 1805 until Anna's death in 1821. Anna, the principal author of the diaries, chronicles the intimate details of Cherokee daily life for seventeen years. Anna describes mission life and what she heard and saw at Springplace: food preparation and consumption, transactions pertaining to land, Cherokee body ornaments, conjuring, Cherokee law and punishment, Green Corn ceremonies, ball play, and matriarchal and marriage traditions. She similarly recounts stories she heard about rainmaking, the origins of the Cherokee people, and how she herself conversed with curious Cherokees about Christian images and fixtures. She also recalls earthquakes, conversions, notable visitors, annuity distributions, and illnesses. This abridged edition offers selected excerpts from the definitive edition of the Springplace diary, enabling significant themes and events of Cherokee culture and history to emerge. Anna's carefully recorded observations reveal the Cherokees' worldview and allow readers a glimpse into a time of change and upheaval for the tribe.




Pious Pursuits


Book Description

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




The Dragons of Springplace


Book Description

In the title story of this first-rate science fiction collection, a renegade misfit conquers the dragons and renews the threat of nuclear chaos aboard Springplace, a man-made repository for old reactor cores, dirty plutonium, and dismantled bombs. Another story is a sprawling intergalactic epic that takes place aboard a starship. Salvaged and commandeered by humans, the massive generation starship becomes the setting for a titanic struggle between two alien entities who engage in a monumental battle for survival. The tale "Chrysalis” explores not just an alien milieu but the nature of man himself when another ancient starship lands and investigates an icy unknown planet inhabited by humans millions of years earlier.




The Cherokees


Book Description

Of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians the Cherokees were early recognized as the greatest and the most civilized. Indeed, between 1540 and 1906 they reached a higher peak of civilization than any other North American Indian tribe. They invented a syllabary and developed an intricate government, including a system of courts of law. They published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English and became noted as orators and statesmen. At the beginning the Cherokees’ conquest of civilization was agonizingly slow and uncertain. Warlords of the southern Appalachian Highlands, they were loath to expend their energies elsewhere. In the words of a British officer, "They are like the Devil’s pigg, they will neither lead nor drive." But, led or driven, the warlike and willful Cherokees, lingering in the Stone Age by choice at the turn of the eighteenth century, were forced by circumstances to transfer their concentration on war to problems posed by the white man. To cope with these unwelcome problems, they had to turn from the conquests of war to the conquest of civilization.




The Moravian Springplace Mission to the Cherokees: 1814-1821


Book Description

"In 1801 the Moravians, a Pietist German-speaking group from Central Europe, founded the Springplace Mission at a site in present-day northwestern Georgia. The Moravians remained among the Cherokees for more than thirty years, longer than any other Christian group. John and Anna Rosina Gambold served at the mission from 1805 until Anna's death in 1821. The principal author of the diaries, Anna, chronicles the intimate details of Cherokee daily life. This edition of the diary includes the entire text in translation as well as a critical apparatus, contextual introductory material, and extensive notes. Rowena McClinton's translation from German script, an archaic writing convention, makes these primary eyewitness accounts available in English for the first time. These diaries will be of immense value for understanding Cherokee culture and history during the early nineteenth century and missionary efforts in the South during this time. McClinton gained unlimited access to the diaries and other supporting documents for the completion of this project, published with the consent of the Moravian Church of the Southern Province. Volume 1 includes diary entries from 1805-13, a preface, and an introduction. Volume 2 includes diary entries from 1814-21, the editor's epilogue, and a names index and a subject index for both volumes." -- Publisher's description




The Chance of Salvation


Book Description

The United States has a long history of religious pluralism, and yet Americans have often thought that people’s faith determines their eternal destinies. The result is that Americans switch religions more often than any other nation. The Chance of Salvation traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion is a matter of individual choice. Lincoln Mullen shows how the willingness of Americans to change faiths, recorded in narratives that describe a wide variety of conversion experiences, created a shared assumption that religious identity is a decision. In the nineteenth century, as Americans confronted a growing array of religious options, pressures to convert altered the basis of American religion. Evangelical Protestants emphasized conversion as a personal choice, while Protestant missionaries brought Christianity to Native American nations such as the Cherokee, who adopted Christianity on their own terms. Enslaved and freed African Americans similarly created a distinctive form of Christian conversion based on ideas of divine justice and redemption. Mormons proselytized for a new tradition that stressed individual free will. American Jews largely resisted evangelism while at the same time winning converts to Judaism. Converts to Catholicism chose to opt out of the system of religious choice by turning to the authority of the Church. By the early twentieth century, religion in the United States was a system of competing options that created an obligation for more and more Americans to choose their own faith. Religion had changed from a family inheritance to a consciously adopted identity.




We Have Raised All of You


Book Description

White, black, and Native American women in the early South often viewed motherhood as a composite of roles, ranging from teacher and nurse to farmer and politician. Within a multicultural landscape, mothers drew advice and consolation from female networks, broader intellectual currents, and an understanding of their own multifaceted identities to devise their own standards for child rearing. In this way, by constructing, interpreting, and defending their roles as parents, women in the South maintained a certain degree of control over their own and their children's lives. Focusing on Virginia and the Carolinas from 1750 to 1835, Katy Simpson Smith's study examines these maternal practices to reveal the ways in which diverse groups of women struggled to create empowered identities in the early South. We Have Raised All of You contributes to a wide variety of historical conversations by affirming the necessity of multicultural -- not simply biracial -- studies of the American South. Its equally weighted analysis of white, black, and Native American women sets it distinctly apart from other work. Smith shows that while women from different backgrounds shared similar experiences within the trajectory of motherhood, no universal model holds up under scrutiny. Most importantly, this book suggests that parenthood provided women with some power within their often-circumscribed lives. Alternately restricted, oppressed, belittled, and enslaved, women sought to embrace an identity that would give them some sense of self-respect and self-worth. The rich and varied roles that mothers inherited, Smith shows, afforded women this empowering identity.




The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes


Book Description

From December 1811 to February 1812, massive earthquakes shook the middle Mississippi Valley, collapsing homes, snapping large trees midtrunk, and briefly but dramatically reversing the flow of the continent’s mightiest river. For decades, people puzzled over the causes of the quakes, but by the time the nation began to recover from the Civil War, the New Madrid earthquakes had been essentially forgotten. In The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes, Conevery Bolton Valencius remembers this major environmental disaster, demonstrating how events that have been long forgotten, even denied and ridiculed as tall tales, were in fact enormously important at the time of their occurrence, and continue to affect us today. Valencius weaves together scientific and historical evidence to demonstrate the vast role the New Madrid earthquakes played in the United States in the early nineteenth century, shaping the settlement patterns of early western Cherokees and other Indians, heightening the credibility of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa for their Indian League in the War of 1812, giving force to frontier religious revival, and spreading scientific inquiry. Moving into the present, Valencius explores the intertwined reasons—environmental, scientific, social, and economic—why something as consequential as major earthquakes can be lost from public knowledge, offering a cautionary tale in a world struggling to respond to global climate change amid widespread willful denial. Engagingly written and ambitiously researched—both in the scientific literature and the writings of the time—The Lost History of the New Madrid Earthquakes will be an important resource in environmental history, geology, and seismology, as well as history of science and medicine and early American and Native American history.




Publications ...


Book Description




Anetso, the Cherokee Ball Game


Book Description

Anetso, a centuries-old Cherokee ball game still played today, is a vigorous, sometimes violent activity that rewards speed, strength, and agility. At the same time, it is the focus of several linked ritual activities. Is it a sport? Is it a religious ritual? Could it possibly be both? Why has it lasted so long, surviving through centuries of upheaval and change? Based on his work in the field and in the archives, Michael J. Zogry argues that members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation continue to perform selected aspects of their cultural identity by engaging in anetso, itself the hub of an extended ceremonial complex, or cycle. A precursor to lacrosse, anetso appears in all manner of Cherokee cultural narratives and has figured prominently in the written accounts of non-Cherokee observers for almost three hundred years. The anetso ceremonial complex incorporates a variety of activities which, taken together, complicate standard scholarly distinctions such as game versus ritual, public display versus private performance, and tradition versus innovation. Zogry's examination provides a striking opportunity for rethinking the understanding of ritual and performance as well as their relationship to cultural identity. It also offers a sharp reappraisal of scholarly discourse on the Cherokee religious system, with particular focus on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Nation.