The Baptism of Early Virginia
July 19, 2013
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14946658-the-baptism-of-early-virginia The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race by Rebecca Anne Goetz In The Baptism…
Rebecca Goetz
Areas of Interest: Early North America, History of Race and Slavery, History of the Atlantic World, History of American Religion and Research and Teaching. Dr. Goetz received her PhD in 2006 from Harvard University. A historian of early North America, she specializes in the history of race and slavery. She also has broad interests in the history of the Atlantic World and in comparative colonialisms in North America and the Caribbean. She teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on many aspects of early American history. Her current work, a manuscript tentatively titled "Indian Enslavement in the English Atlantic World, 1500-1700" examines English enslavement of Indians in the first two centuries after contact. Focusing on the Caribbean, the manuscript argues that Indian enslavement by the English was widespread but concealed behind a liberationist ideology and the mythology of the Black Legend. Indian slavery was nevertheless critical to England's colonial goals, and was the foundation on which English imperialism in the Americas rested. The practice of Indian enslavement bound the continent and its islands together. Enslavement was a constant, and a constant risk; it could affect native peoples in any place. While most recent studies have focused on the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, English colonists were actively and critically involved in stimulating a trade in Indian slaves well before the Carolina incarnation of the trade in 1670. (English people in Carolina were able to build an Indian slave trade because they had prior experience in the Caribbean.) Interest in Indian slaving was an early and regular feature of English colonization attempts from the late sixteenth century on, especially in the Caribbean, yet no studies have explained English interest in enslaved Indians at this early date. Uncovering English involvement in Indian slavery is a difficult task methodologically since most English sources glossed over Indian enslavement. The most revealing sources for the project are not in English: French, Spanish, and Dutch sources are critical for uncovering English involvement in the trade in enslaved Indian people.
-
Read more
