The entry of Europeans into the Indian's world caused a series of dislocations through disease, trade, and warfare. Indian leaders, who encountered new diplomatic and trading partners, found themselves caught between a familiar old and an unsettling new world. John Lawson, employed by Carolina's proprietor to explore the colony's backcounry and aspiring to a career as a natural scientist, spent months traveling through the Carolina interior in the company of colonists and Indians. This excerpt from Lawson's published account of the trip describes the final leg of the journey, when Lawson relied on Enoe Will, the chief of the Eno-Shakori. Will was a well known and trusted guide among colonial traders. He confided to Lawson that he feared he had alienated some of his own people, and now sought European protection. But Will remained close to his native religion and roundly rejected Lawson's offer of conversion to Christianity.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century Mohegan Indians had lost vast amounts of their land to the English colonists. They found it hard to continue with their traditional tribal economy; some turned to alcohol for escape and others found an answer in Christianity. Evangelical ministers converted Mohegan Samsom Occom to Christianity during the Great Awakening in the late 1730s and 1740s. He attended the Reverend Eleazer Wheelock's school and trained as a missionary and teacher for his people, first in New London, Connecticut, and then moving to Montauk on Long Island as an ordained Presbyterian minister. Occom composed a short autobiography where he described the difficulties of making a living, his experience as an Indian minister, and his poor treatment at the hands of the religious establishment.

In this 1970 interview with University of South Dakota historian Herbert Hoover, Henrietta Chief, A Winnebago, talks of her religious conversion at the Tomah School in the first decade of the 20th century. The Tomah school was one of the federal government's off-reservation boarding schools, the linchpin of federal policy after 1887 to Americanize and assimilate Indian youth by removing them from their home environment and culture. Henrietta Chief's conversion made her a fervent apostle of Christianity for the rest of her life.

Religion figured prominently in the 1928 presidential election when Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic governor of New York, became the first Catholic to run as the candidate of a major political party. Smith, who ran against the Republican Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, tried to downplay the subject of his religion. In his speech accepting the presidential nomination, Smith sought to reassure voters that he would not favor Catholics, "Wets" (supporters of Prohibition), or Easterners if elected president. While his words may have reassured some, his obvious New York accent reinforced the worries--and prejudices--of others.

This Wide Angle video segment explores economic and religious development in Kayseri, a city in central Turkey.

International Women's Voices has several objectives. It introduces students to a variety of works by contemporary women writers from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and North America. The emphasis is on non-western writers. The readings are chosen to encourage students to think about how each author's work reflects a distinct cultural heritage and to what extent, if any, we can identify a female voice that transcends national cultures. In lectures and readings distributed in class, students learn about the history and culture of each of the countries these authors represent. The way in which colonialism, religion, nation formation and language influence each writer is a major concern of this course. In addition, students examine the patterns of socialization of women in patriarchal cultures, and how, in the imaginary world, authors resolve or understand the relationship of the characters to love, work, identity, sex roles, marriage and politics.This class is a communication intensive course. In addition to becoming more thoughtful readers, students are expected to become a more able and more confident writers. Assignments are designed to allow for revision of each paper. The class will also offer opportunities for speaking and debating so that students can build oral presentation skills that are essential for success once they leave MIT. The class is limited to 25 students and there is substantial classroom discussion.

Religious concepts and metaphors suffused the words and ideas of many late nineteenth-century American workers. The New and Old Testaments provided not only personal succor to many working people but also a set of allusions and parables they applied directly to their lives and struggles in industrial America. Working-class ideas and writing often were cast in stark millenarian terms, with prophesies of imminent doom predicted for capitalists who worshiped at Mammon's temple and imminent redemption for hard-working, long-suffering, and God-fearing laboring men and women. Christ was uniformly depicted in workers' writing as a poor workingman put on Earth to teach the simple principles of brotherhood and unionism. Indiana coal miner's wife Ettie West pined for the "good and religious" ways of her mother's time in this letter to the editor, published in 1900 in The United Mine Workers Journal.

Religious concepts and metaphors suffused the words and ideas of many late nineteenth-century American workers. The New and Old Testaments provided not only personal succor to many working people but also a set of allusions and parables they applied directly to their lives and struggles in industrial America. Working-class ideas and writing often were cast in stark millenarian terms, with prophesies of imminent doom predicted for capitalists who worshiped at Mammon's temple and imminent redemption for hard-working, long-suffering, and God-fearing laboring men and women. Christ was uniformly depicted in workers' writing as a poor workingman put on Earth to teach the simple principles of brotherhood and unionism. The power loom weavers of Rhode Island were the intended audience of this "catechism" written by labor activists "Bobba Chuttle" and "Betty Reedhook" (pseudonyms evocative of the tools of the textile worker's trade) in 1887. Drawing on church traditions, the pair patterned their educational effort, published in The People, along the lines of a call-and-response format.

Introduction to Sociology is intended for a one-semester introductory sociology course. Conceived of and developed by active sociology instructors, this up-to-date title and can be downloaded now by clicking on the "Get this book" button below. This online, fully editable and customizable title includes sociology theory and research; real-world applications; simplify and debate features; and learning objectives for each chapter

During their 26 years of marriage, New Englanders Abigail Abbot and Asa Bailey lived on farms in Haverhill and Landaff, New Hampshire, and had 14 children. In 1770, Asa conducted an affair with one of the farm's hired women. Three years later, a second farm servant accused him of rape. Asa also beat his wife. In the eighteenth century, the social and economic consequences of divorce for women were grave, and Abigail chose to remain with her husband. But in late 1788, Asa perpetrated an act of incest on their 17-year-old daughter, a crime his wife could not forgive. Abigail sent him away, endured his return on several occasions, and finally divorced him in 1793. As the marriage unraveled, a religious revival unfolded in the region around her New Hampshire town. Influenced by the revival, Abigail's memoir, from which this selection is drawn, is as much a record of her relationship with God as it is a story of her trials with her husband.

Many Indian peoples had and still have stories of creation that explain how they came to be and to live in their homelands. These narratives offer a glimpse into the belief systems present before Europeans entered North America. Many northeastern Indian peoples share a legend of how the world was created on the back of a giant sea turtle (some still refer to North America as a "turtle island"). While there are many versions of the tradition, the following selection is from the Iroquois Indians of New York State. Anthropologists collected and transcribed most versions of the Iroquois creation myth in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. However, John Norton, son of Scottish and Cherokee parents and adopted by the Mohawks, recorded this version, one of the earliest, in 1816. Norton traveled widely in the eastern woodlands, playing an important role in the life of the Mohawks in the early-nineteenth century.

Surveys the major political, socio-economic, and cultural changes in the Middle East from the rise of Islam to present times (A.D. 600-2002), with special emphasis on Islam's encounter with the West. Examines the rise and fall of Islamic empires; the place of Arabs, Persian and Turkic peoples, as well as minorities in Islamic society; scientific and technological achievements and their transmission to the West; and the impact of European expansion after 1800. Considers contemporary crises and upheavals facing the Middle East in light of the historical past. This course aims to provide students with a general overview of basic themes and issues in Middle Eastern history from the rise of Islam to the present, with an emphasis on the encounters and exchanges between the "Middle East" (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and the "West" (Europe and the United States).

Charles Woodmason, a newly ordained Anglican minister, left the comforts of Charleston, South Carolina, in 1761 to travel for six years in the Carolina backcountry as an itinerant minister, seeking to bring the established church to areas where it had not taken hold. He also became a fierce partisan of the Regulator movement, a frontier rebellion attempting to obtain a greater voice and fairer claims for backcountry residents who resented the monopolization of power by the coastal leaders. Although Woodmason was hostile toward the colony's elite for their lack of concern over the political and especially religious life of the frontier, the British migrant held traditional beliefs about morality and social order. He was appalled by the immoral and irreligious behavior rampant on the frontier, as he made clear in this selection from his journal of 1768.

" This class explores the creation (and creativity) of the modern scientific and cultural world through study of western Europe in the 17th century, the age of Descartes and Newton, Shakespeare, Milton and Ford. It compares period thinking to present-day debates about the scientific method, art, religion, and society. This team-taught, interdisciplinary subject draws on a wide range of literary, dramatic, historical, and scientific texts and images, and involves theatrical experimentation as well as reading, writing, researching and conversing. The primary theme of the class is to explore how England in the mid-seventeenth century became "a world turned upside down" by the new ideas and upheavals in religion, politics, and philosophy, ideas that would shape our modern world. Paying special attention to the "theatricality" of the new models and perspectives afforded by scientific experimentation, the class will read plays by Shakespeare, Tate, Brecht, Ford, Churchill, and Kushner, as well as primary and secondary texts from a wide range of disciplines. Students will also compose and perform in scenes based on that material."

In 1899 Americans divided sharply over whether to annex the Philippines. Annexationists and anti-annexationists, despite their differences, generally agreed that the U.S. needed opportunities for commercial expansion but disagreed over how to achieve that goal. Few believed that the Philippines themselves offered a crucial commercial advantage to the U.S., but many saw them as a crucial way station to Asia. "Had we no interests in China," noted one advocate of annexation, "the possession of the Philippines would be meaningless." In the Paris Peace negotiations, President William McKinley demanded the Philippines to avoid giving them back to Spain or allowing a third power to take them. One explanation of his reasoning came from this report of a delegation of Methodist church leaders. The emphasis on McKinley's religious inspiration for his imperialist commitments may have been colored by the religious beliefs of General James Rusling. But Rusling's account of the islands, falling unbidden on the U.S., and the arguments for taking the islands reflect McKinley's official correspondence on the topic. McKinley disingenuously disavowed the U.S. military action that brought the Philippines under U.S. control, and acknowledged, directly and indirectly, the equally powerful forces of racism, nationalism, and especially commercialism, that shaped American actions.

President Calvin Coolidge captured the spirit of the 1920s when he announced in a speech before the Society of American Newspaper Editors that "the chief business of the American people is business." Coolidge's aphorism revealed the centrality of commerce to the nation and its culture in the 1920s, even while it concealed some of the wrenching cultural changes required to accommodate a commercial civilization. An even more forceful publicist for the view that business and spirituality were compatible was Bruce Barton. The son of a Congregational minister, Barton cofounded one of the nation's largest and best-known advertising agencies. Barton's greatest fame, however, came from the best-selling book that he published in 1925, The Man Nobody Knows, in which he crafted a new vision of Christ and Christianity that was not simply compatible with, but organically connected to, the business-oriented 1920s. Barton's aggressive efforts to merge business and Christianity may seem comical in the late 20th century, but his exertions were sincerely felt by him and sincerely received by many Americans. The Jaqua Way, a business publication, offered on its first page the hymn, "A Man's Thanksgiving," in the which author thanked the "God of business men" for "my customers and for the power to serve them faithfully."

Harpreet Singh has a different color for every mood and occasion, from pink for dancing to bhangra beats to red for courage. He especially takes care with his patka—his turban—smoothing it out and making sure it always matches his outfit. But when Harpreet’s mom finds a new job in a snowy city and they have to move, all he wants is to be invisible. Will he ever feel a happy sunny yellow again?-------------Authors: Supriya Kelkar (Sterling’s Childrens Books) & The Sikh Coalition

Examines cultural developments within European literature from different societies at different time-periods throughout the Middle Ages (500-1500). Considers--from a variety of political, historical, and anthropological perspectives--the growth of institutions (civic, religious, educational, and economic) which shaped the personal experiences of individuals in ways that remain quite distinct from those of modern Western societies. Texts mostly taught in translation. Topics vary and include: Courtly Literature of the High and Late Middle Ages, Medieval Women Writers, Chaucer and the 14th Century, and the Crusades.

Examines cultural developments within European literature from different societies at different time-periods throughout the Middle Ages (500-1500). Considers--from a variety of political, historical, and anthropological perspectives--the growth of institutions (civic, religious, educational, and economic) which shaped the personal experiences of individuals in ways that remain quite distinct from those of modern Western societies. Texts mostly taught in translation. Topics vary and include: Courtly Literature of the High and Late Middle Ages, Medieval Women Writers, Chaucer and the 14th Century, and the Crusades.

Camp meetings such as this one, held near Sparta, Georgia, in 1807, were a manifestation of the nationwide Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century. The Second Great Awakening was an evangelical religious revival conducted by Baptists, Methodists, and other dissenting Protestant sects. Evangelical religion was often described as "enthusiastic," and people attending expressed their feelings through spontaneous movements and speech. Like the first Great Awakening of the 18th century, the Second Great Awakening was notably egalitarian, with men, women, blacks, and poor whites mingling together in worship.