Bloggin' the Bookshelf: David Hall's "Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England"

Editor's Note: This is a new series started with the aim of reviewing older works that are either directly linked with prelim reading lists or dissertation research. Of course, we invite any reader to contribute content about works valuable to their own research, regardless of period or topic.

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement:
Popular Religious Beliefs in
Early New England (1989)

In Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, David D. Hall has reexamined the spiritual community of colonial New England, arguing for the existence of a popular religion that is both rooted in and supported by culture. Hall’s approach is novel, arguing that religion acted as “a mode of literacy” (18), and this prevailing connection between faith and literacy dominates this seminal work.

For Hall, the faith that emerges in New England cannot be simply explained as a product of cultural transmission. A variety of reasons are noted for colonial distinctiveness: the utility and persistence of folk belief, the spatial relationship between minister and congregation, the separate nature of church and state, the relative lack of appeal for ‘radical’ (i.e. Quaker, Baptist) faiths, the accommodative nature of magic and religion (paying homage to Keith Thomas’ 1971 seminal work), and the prominence of literacy. Popular culture represents something unique, facilitating an environment that was at once strictly demarcated, but flexible enough to include “countervailing practices and motifs” (245).

Bloggin' the Bookshelf: Peter Mancall's "Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America"

Editor's Note: This is a new series started with the aim of reviewing older works that are either directly linked with prelim reading lists or dissertation research. Of course, we invite any reader to contribute content about works valuable to their own research, regardless of period or topic. 

Neither Indians nor colonists could sever the alcohol trade from the workings of empire. The peculiar vice of Europeans had become a fixture in Indian country, deadly medicine that remained to poison relations between the peoples of North America (180).

So concludes Peter Mancall's nearly twenty-year old work on alcohol in early America. Mancall, now at Southern Cal, wrote this book not only with an eye towards trying to figure out the roots of the conundrum of rampant alcoholism in modern Native American communities, but also to try and highlight how contingency - and not simply a biological predisposition - played such an important role in the early alcohol trade. According to Mancall, "Indians in colonial America made choices when they drank" (8), more often than not as responses to opportunities that became available to them.