William G. McLoughlin

Revivals, awakenings, and reform : an essay on religion and social change in America, 1607-1977

In Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, McLoughlin draws on psychohistory, sociology, and anthropology to examine the relationship between Americas five great religious awakenings and their influence on five great movements for social reform in the United States. He finds that awakenings (and the revivals that are part of them) are periods of revitalization born in times of cultural stress and eventuating in drastic social reform. Awakenings are thus the means by which a people or nation creates and sustains its identity in a changing world. This book is sensitive, thought-provoking and stimulating. It is must reading for those interested in awakenings, and even though some may not revise their views as a result of McLoughlins suggestive outline, none can remain unmoved by the insights he has provided on the subject.-Christian Century This is one of the best books I have read all year. Professor McLoughlin has again given us a profound analysis of our culture in the midst of revivalistic trends.-Review and Expositor

The Cherokees in Transition: A Statistical Analysis of the Federal Cherokee Census of 1835

A LTHOUGH scholars have long been aware of the detailed, familyby-family census of the Cherokee Nation taken by the federal government in 1835, no one has yet subjected that census to a detailed analysis. In part this was because of certain shortcomings in the census figures and in part because of a lack of comparative data for other tribes or even for the Cherokee Nation. These problems still remain, but in spite of them there are ways to derive valuable information from that census about the Cherokees: some of the data corroborates other historical evidence; some is corrective. This study indicates that Andrew Jackson and many other government officials responsible for the forced removal of the Cherokees were seriously misinformed about several important aspects of Cherokee life. For example, war department records prior to 1835 indicate that officials persistently underestimated the total number of Cherokees in the East, generally using a figure of 10,000 when the true figure was over 16,500 in 1835 and never below 12,000 after the first census taken in 1808-1809.1 Jackson habitually spoke of the Cherokee Nation-and other southern Indian nations-as though they consisted of only two classes of people, those he called the real Indians and those he called the halfbreeds.2 According to Lewis Cass,

Pietism and the American Character

may be unique, if anything is, about the American character. And if I can demonstrate that the quality of pietism (or, in its broader formulation, pietistic-perfectionism) offers at least as many useful insights into the nature of the American experience as, say, the quality of pragmatism or of democratic liberalism or the influence of the frontier, then I will have made my point. While I am aware that in offering such a key I am in danger of explaining so much as to explain nothing, I prefer to leave the inevitable qualifications and exceptions to another time. I will say for this generalized approach only that the present stage in the renascence of the history of religion 2 in America seems to me to merit its consideration. American pietism had its origin in the protest of Protestantism against the ecclesiastical corruptions of the Christian church in the sixteenth century. Ernst Troeltsch, the German historian of religion, defined this dissenting spirit in terms of the sect-type versus the church-type of Christianity. And he listed as the salient features of the pietistic temper, its anti-institutionalism, its voluntarism, its exaltation of the individuals direct relationship with God, its aspiration after personal inward perfection, its hostility to worldliness and the kinds of compromise which the established church-type systems have to make with the state, and its doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Pietism, said Troeltsch, disliked

RED INDIANS, BLACK SLAVERY AND WHITE RACISM: AMERICA'S SLAVEHOLDING INDIANS

North America. None of them has been really answered yet-or rather, we have contradictory answers so far. Some historians have argued that until whites interfered the Indians were generally friendly toward blacks; others have argued that the Indians always considered black people as the allies of the whites and hence feared and disliked them; still others have said that the Indians learned to look upon black people the same way white people did and hence considered them to be little more than another form of property, like horses and cattle. Some historians have said that various Indian tribes in North America were generally friendly toward runaway black slaves and provided a refuge for them. Others say that the Indians usually joined the white slavehunters in tracking down runaways and returned them to their masters for the rewards offered. Some historians say that Indians never killed, tortured or scalped slaves in warfare; others say there is evidence they did all three. These contradictory answers to black-Indian relations (especially during

Religion in America

Reid, Daniel G., ed. Dictionary of Christianity in America. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991. BR 515 / D 554 REF Lippy, Charles H., ed. Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements. 3 vols. New York: Scribner, 1988. BL 2525 / E 26 REF Magnuson, Norris A. and William G. Travis. American Evangelicalism: An Annotated Bibliography. West Cornwall: Locust Hill Press, 1990. BR 1644 / M 188 REF Mead, Frank S. Handbook of Denominations in the United States. 4th ed. New York: Abingdon Press, 1965. BR 516.5 / M 479 REF Melton, J. Gordon: Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America. New York: Garland, 1986. BL 2525 / M 528 REF

The First Man was Red-Cherokee Responses to the Debate Over Indian Origins, 1760-1860

Race as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction. When we speak of the white race or the black race, the Jewish race or the Aryan race, we speak in biological misnomers and, more generally, in metaphors. Nevertheless, our conversations are replete with usages of race which have their source in the dubious pseudo-science of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.... Race, in these usages, pretends to be an objective classification, when in fact, it is a dangerous trope.

Thomas Jefferson and the Beginning of Cherokee Nationalism, 1806 to 1809

o many Georgians and other worried southern frontiersmen the thirteen thousand Cherokee people on their borders appeared by i827 to have established an imperium in imperio of such internal strength and stability as to pose a threat that could be countered only by their forced removal. While ethnohistorians disagree about the nature and extent of nationalism, acculturation, and deculturation among the various Indian tribes of North America, they generally concur that in the early nineteenth century the Cherokees achieved the closest approximation to nationhood of any tribe east of the Mississippi. One of the largest and wealthiest tribes, they adopted a written constitution in i827 (modeled closely upon the United States Constitution), published a national newspaper in their own language (utilizing the unique Sequoyan syllabary), and developed such a sophisticated legislative, judicial, and educational system that their social order was more advanced than that of many of the rude white settlements around them. Many Americans in the North, particularly in New England, thought the Cherokees deserved serious consideration as a potential Indian state within the Union. Most accounts date the beginning of Cherokee nationhood from i8i7 when a law of the council established a republic with a national bicameral legislature.2 But in important respects the impulse toward

Ghost Dance Movements : Some Thoughts on Definition Based on Cherokee History

La distinction entre vrais et faux mouvements pratiquant la danse de lEsprit est contestable parce quelle suppose que ces mouvements sont toujours lexpression du desespoir de lethnie qui se sent menacee

CHEROKEE ANTI-MISSION SENTIMENT, 1824-1828

Recently discovered letters written by some Cherokee chiefs in 1824 throw new light on White Paths Rebellion of 1827. They indicate that what appears on the surface to be anti-mission factionalism may, in the case of large, advanced tribes scattered over wide regions, be better understood as conflict over the speed and degree of acculturation, particularly when a prominent group of well-to-do or nominally Christian mixed bloods assert undue influence over political centralization. Most accounts of the Cherokee Indians during the early nineteenth century say little about anti-mission sentiment. Partly this is because the best known Cherokee leaders, fighting desperately against federal removal policies, did not want to alienate White American public opinion. Furthermore, they found among New England missionaries after 1817 a vital source of support in this fight as the work of Jeremiah Evarts and the Reverend Samuel A. Worcester indicates (Bass 1936:138-160). Many Cherokees welcomed the mission schools to teach their children and increase their technical skills. Mixed blood chiefs in particular believed that rapid acculturation (or deculturation) would prove that savages could be civilized and thus the Cherokees would be allowed to remain upon the lands of their forefathers. Persistent missionary activity after 1800 succeeded in converting some influential chiefs to Christianity. In addition, many Cherokees of mixed White and Indian ancestry were nominally Christians. By virtue of their more rapid acculturation, these progressives tended to become better farmers and traders, to assume positions of leadership (vis a vis Whites) and to become what might be termed a Red bourgeoisie among the Cherokees. Some of them became slaveowners and cotton planters. But while this progressive element has received the bulk of attention from ethnohistorians, there was an equally strong element among the Cherokees who opposed, at least in part, the acculturation process. James

Indian Slaveholders and Presbyterian Missionaries, 1837–1861

Founded in 1837 to provide a denohinational foreign mission board for the Old School Presbyterians, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (PBFM) had from the outset a very different outlook toward mission work among slaveholding Indians than did its closest rival, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which served the New School Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists.1 The difference increased until 1859 when the latter organization, unable to reconcile its antislavery conviction with the determined proslavery position of the southern Indians, withdrew from that field. The PBFM, headquartered in New York City, thereupon took under its patronage most of those ABCFM missionaries who had been abandoned by their Boston-based board for refusing to expound and practice an antislavery position among the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles and Creeks. Some Presbyterians in the North opposed this decision, arguing that their denomination already had the reputation of being emphatically the Slave Church of America. To take in missionaries whom the venerable American Board had dropped for their desire to remain neutral about slavery could very well lead many northern Presbyterians to leave the church: In this way some of our churches have bled freely already and much of the blood they have lost was of their best blood.2 The image of the bleeding body was prophetic, for the Presbyterian denomination was dismembered in the following year. It was also indicative of the depth of the prevailing spiritual anguish over this issue. Despite protests, the PBFM unanimously voted to accept the Choctaw mission of the ABCFM into its ranks and until the Civil War ended northern-based mission operations among the southern Indians, it continued to add other missionaries as they were abandoned by the Boston board. The PBFM denied that slavery, pro or con, had anything to do with its decision to take in the ABCFMs abandoned missionaries. It simply decided that these dedicated, experienced missionaries (most of whom had joined the presbytery formed in the Indian Territory despite their Congregational origins) wanted to continue their work and deserved to be continued. The PBFM had had its own missionaries in the Indian