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The 1780s and 1790s were a critical era for communities of color in the new United States of America. Even Thomas Jefferson observed that in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust. This book explores the means bywhich the very first Black and Indian authors rose up to transform their communities and the course of American literary history. It argues that the origins of modern African-American and American Indian literatures emerged at the revolutionary crossroads of religion and racial formation as earlyBlack and Indian authors reinvented American evangelicalism and created new postslavery communities, new categories of racial identification, and new literary traditions.While shedding fresh light on the pioneering figures of African-American and Native American cultural history--including Samson Occom, Prince Hall, Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and John Marrant--this work also explores a powerful set of little-known Black and Indian sermons, narratives, journals,and hymns. Chronicling the early American communities of color from the separatist Christian Indian settlement in upstate New York to the first African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston, it shows how eighteenth-century Black and Indian writers forever shaped the American experience of race and religion.American Lazarus offers a bold new vision of a foundational moment in American literature. It reveals the depth of early Black and Indian intellectual history and reassesses the political, literary, and cultural powers of religion in America.

This volume brings together for the first time the known writings of the pioneering Native American religious and political leader, intellectual, and author, Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). The largest surviving archive of American Indian writing before Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux; 1858-1939), Occom's writings offer unparalleled views into a Native American intellectual and cultural universe in the era of colonialization and the early United States. His letters, sermons, journals, prose, petitions, and hymns--many of them never before published--document the emergence of pantribal political consciousness among the Native peoples of New England as well as Native efforts to adapt Christianity as a tool of decolonialization. Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.

This volume brings together for the first time the known writings of the pioneering Native American religious and political leader, intellectual, and author, Samson Occom (Mohegan; 1723-1792). The largest surviving archive of American Indian writing before Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux; 1858-1939), Occom's writings offer unparalleled views into a Native American intellectual and cultural universe in the era of colonialization and the early United States. His letters, sermons, journals, prose, petitions, and hymns--many of them never before published--document the emergence of pantribal political consciousness among the Native peoples of New England as well as Native efforts to adapt Christianity as a tool of decolonialization. Presenting previously unpublished and newly recovered writings, this collection more than doubles available Native American writing from before 1800.

For at least a century the Bible played a significant, positive role in Native American letters starting with the eighteenth-century writings of Samson Occom. A product of the Great Awakening, Occom’s engagements with the Bible resembled those of other Protestant thinkers and writers of his time, although his sermons were sometimes specifically tailored for Indian audiences and topics. After Occom, Indian authors in the nineteenth century such as Elias Boudinot and William Apess drew upon the Bible to make arguments against removal and “scientific racism.” In the twentieth century writers like Zitkala-Ša and Charles Alexander Eastman cast a critical eye on Christianity and reconsidered the virtues of traditionalism. John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks (1932) was the century’s fullest literary depiction of a traditional religion, but it came at the cost of concealing Black Elk’s actual religion, Catholicism. During the 1960s and 70s oral tradition was privileged over sacred scripture, as seen in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968). While the Bible makes fewer appearances than it used to in Native American literature, it would be premature to suggest that Christianity is finished in Indian country.

Between his ordination by the Long Island Presbytery in 1759 and his death in 1792, Samson Occom developed an original, powerful, and largely overlooked theological perspective on the Indigenous peoples of North America. Almost all ministers in mid-eighteenth-century Anglophone North America believed that Native Americans were in an historical position akin to that of the Canaanites of the Old Testament who occupied the Promised Land on the eve of the Israelites' return. According to this interpretive paradigm, Indians were an obstacle to God's chosen nation as it progressed toward its grand historical and eschatological destiny; they were historically important \"only as the people Yahweh removes from the land in order to bring the chosen people in,\" as Robert Warrior puts it. The theological consensus likening Indians to Canaanites dated back at least to King Philip's War. Earlier in the seventeenth century, a minority of puritan thinkers including John Eliot had entertained the notion that Native Americans might be nothing other than the \"lost tribes\" of Israel, a notion that resurfaced in American culture at the end of the eighteenth century. But in Occom's milieu the Canaanite interpretation prevailed.

Many of the major crowd actions in Boston during the American Revolution—the Stamp Act riots of 1765, the arrival of 4,000 British Troops at Long Wharf in 1768, the murder of Christopher Snider in a street action in 1770, and the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770—took place on or around King Street, the street where Phillis Wheatley lived. As indicated by Wheatley's poems on the King's repeal of the Stamp Act, the murder of Snider, and the Boston Massacre, this essay argues that more so than we have imagined, Wheatley was probably a participant in the street actions on King Street and other crowd actions in Revolutionary Boston during the war.

Few texts in the Pauline corpus have been subjected to such extensive and varied comparative analysis as 2 Cor 10–13. Since Hans Windisch's influential designation of the passage as a Narrenrede (“fool's speech”), wherein Paul apes the boastful fool (ὁ ἀλαζών) of the Greek mime, exegetes have assembled a remarkable array of additional comparanda: the peristasis or hardship catalogues of Cynic and Stoic philosophers; Augustus's Res gestae; apologies epistolary, forensic, and Socratic; conventions for periautologia (self-praise) as attested by Quintilian and Plutarch and as demonstrated by Demosthenes; conventions for synkrisis (comparison) as preserved in the Progymnasmata. Despite the diversity of the evidence adduced, methodologically these studies have much in common. In general, their explanatory mode is formal and genealogical—that is, they elucidate the characteristics of Paul's boasting by identifying and describing the literary or rhetorical forms to which he is indebted.

Brooks explores the literary merits of six hymns written by Samson Occom, a Mohegan tribal leader and Presbyterian minister. A brief account of Occom's background and several published works is mentioned. Full textual content of the six hymns are also presented.

While the scant written records from Indian converts offer no definitive statement of belief, by looking at the figure of the Indian missionary, one can approach a better understanding of the role converts played in altering the religion they adopted, and one can better understand the competing desires within colonialism that would lead an Indian to choose the religion of the colonizer in the first place. The life and writings of the Reverend Samson Occom, New England missionary and teacher, Mohegan leader, and author, provide such an opportunity.