Rachel M. Wheeler

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On an Eighteenth-Century Trail of Tears The Travel Diary of Johann Jacob Schmick of the Moravian Indian Congregation’s Journey to the Susquehanna, 1765
(2015) Wheeler, Rachel; Hahn-Bruckart, Thomas; Department of Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
This piece is a translation of a travel journal kept by missionary Johann Jacob Schmick as he traveled with the Moravian Indian congregation from Philadelphia to the Susquehanna in 1765. The community of mostly Delaware and Mohican Indians had been living under armed guard at the Philadelphia Barracks following the violence instigated by Pontiac’s Revolt and the Paxton Boys uprising. The community’s settlement on the Susquehanna marked a new model of Moravian mission and serves as an early example of Indian removal, particularly noteworthy in this instance because the community was composed of Christian Indians.
Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2011-04-08) Goff, Philip; Farnsley II, Arthur E.; Wheeler, Rachel; Thuesen, Peter J.
The NEH Summer Institute for Teachers will support the studies of twenty-five talented teachers from across the nation as they join with nationally renowned scholars to explore how religion has shaped, and been shaped by, the American experience. The institute directors, Philip Goff, Arthur Farnsley, and Rachel Wheeler, are all noted scholars in their field, whose work encompasses a wide range of subject matter and methodologies. The institute will enable participants from many different fields to develop new materials on American religion that can be incorporated into their current curricula. An English teacher introducing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, will be better prepared to discuss the nexus of religion and race in the context of nineteenth-century America. A civics teacher focusing on the origins of the American government will be able to incorporate discussion about the religion of the founders and the ways in which the First Amendment has shaped American society. The prime goal of The Bible in American Life project is to gain insight for clergy and scholars on Bible-reading as a religious practice. We are particularly interested in how people use the Bible in their personal lives, how religious communities and even the internet shape individuals’ comprehension of scripture, and how individual and communal understandings of scripture influence American public life. Employing both quantitative methods (the General Social Survey and a local survey) and qualitative research (focus-group interviews, historical analysis, and other means), we hope to provide an unprecedented perspective on the Bible’s role outside the context of worship, in the lived religion of a broad cross-section of Americans both now and in the past. Such data will be invaluable to clergy and seminar professors seeking more effective ways to teach and preach scripture in an age saturated with information and technology. The results of the project also will help scholars seeking to understand recent changes in American Christianity.
Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture NEH Summer Institute for Teachers July 12-30, 2010
(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2010-04-09) Goff, Philip; Farnsley II, Arthur E.; Wheeler, Rachel
This institute will support the studies of twenty-five talented teachers from across the nation as they join with nationally renowned scholars to explore how religion has shaped, and been shaped by, the American experience. The institute directors, Philip Goff, Arthur Farnsley, and Rachel Wheeler, are all noted scholars in their field, whose work encompasses a wide range of subject matter and methodologies. The institute will enable participants from many different fields to develop new materials on American religion that can be incorporated into their current curricula. An English teacher introducing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, will be better prepared to discuss the nexus of religion and race in the context of nineteenth-century America. A civics teacher focusing on the origins of the American government will be able to incorporate discussion about the religion of the founders and the ways in which the First Amendment has shaped American society.
Lessons from Stockbridge: Jonathan Edwards and the Stockbridge Indians
(University Press of America, 2005) Wheeler, Rachel
Women and Christian practice in a Mahican village
(University of California Press, 2003) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
This article explores the development of native Christianity in the mid-eighteenth century at the site of a Moravian mission in the Mahican village of Shekomeko. Two native women, baptized Sarah and Rachel, appear prominently in the vast mission records, providing a unique opportunity to study the gendered meanings of Christian ritual for native women. Combining the techniques and insights of ethnohistory and recent scholarship on "lived religion," this article examines the implications of a century of colonial encounter on Mahican culture and the meanings infused in Christian ritual by native practitioners within this context of dramatic culture change. Focusing on the lives of these two women, this article examines the development of native interpretations of Christianity by exploring the overlap and the divergences between Moravian and Mahican understandings of Christian ritual. It was in the performance of these rituals that many Shekomekoans engaged in the process of forming a new identity that they hoped might carry them through the severe trials of colonization. By exploring the meanings of these rituals for both Moravian and Mahican, this article attempts to enrich and complicate our understanding of the process of cultural and religious negotiation and adaptation undertaken in mission communities. Further, this study offers a ground level perspective on Indian encounters with Christianity that has rarely been possible for this time period. Finally, the often intensely personal and affecting nature of those sources representing Mahican sentiments allows for a more complex and personalized understanding of Indian responses to Christianity.
Review of Jonathan Edwards, A Life. George Marsden. New Haven; London : Yale Univ Pr, 2003.
(De Gruyter, 2006) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
By now, it would seem there is not much left to be said about George Marsden’s commanding biography of Jonathan Edwards. It has been awarded prizes too numerous to list, (but including the Bancroft, the Merle Curti, and the Grawemeyer). It has been praised as a “magisterial synthesis,” and the “best book ever written about America’s … greatest theologian” (comments by Edmund Morgan and Sam Logan from dust jacket.) It is, indeed, a much-needed book. The first major biography of Edwards in over half a century, it is arguably the first biography ever to attempt to take the measure of the whole man. Marsden’s signal contribution is in creating a cogent, compelling synthesis of the rapidly expanding field of Edwards scholarship. In a tightly wrought narrative that clocks in at just over 500 pages, Marsden elegantly braids together this new scholarship with the raw materials that have only recently been made more widely accessible through the efforts of Harry Stout, Kenneth Minkema and the others at the Works of Jonathan Edwards at Yale who carry on the work started by Perry Miller. A look at the newly launched website of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale (http://edwards.vale.edu/) quickly makes apparent the magnitude of Marsden’s achievement and why such a biography could only have been written recently. The website will soon make available all 26 volumes of the published Works of Jonathan Edwards series, representing about 25,000 manuscript pages of Edward’s writings. An additional 25,000 pages will be added over the next few years.
Review of A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America. By Nancy Shoemaker (New York, Oxford University Press, 2004) 211 pp.
(MIT Press, 2005) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
Shoemaker’s A Strange Likeness is the latest contribution to a growing field of study devoted to tracing the development of racially oriented identities (in this case, “red” and “white” rather than “black” and “white”) in early America. This short and eminently readable book surveys the landscape of the British colonies during the eighteenth century, exploring how Lenape, Iroquois, Creek, and many others all came to be “red” and the English, Irish, German, etc., came to be “white.” Shoemaker’s main task is to demonstrate how cultural differences perceived by American native inhabitants and European newcomers gradually came to be understood as symbolic or representative of essential differences. By the end of the eighteenth century, “white” and “red” people were presumed to be shaped and motivated by essential characteristics of their “race.”
Review of Carole Blackburn’s Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America, 1632-1650
(MIT Press, 2001) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
Blackburn proposes a new reading of the encounter between Jesuit and Indian in seventeenth-century New France. A work of historical anthropology driven by the insights and agenda of colonial discourse studies, Harvest of Souls sets out to show how the Jesuit missionary reports (transcribed, translated, and published between 1896 and 1901 by Reu-ben G. Thwaites as The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents) were implicated in the practice of colonialism. Her method is to “examine the intent, effect, and meaning of the texts in their entirety” (as opposed to more narrowly focused ethnographic or historical readings), searching for and exposing the “sedimented meanings that inhabit the Jesuit texts” in order to “situate these meanings in relation to the politics of colonial-ism and conversion” (8, 11). The Relations were not “just the byproducts of a political process,” they were “a more integral component of the politics of colonialism, because they expressed the themes, ideas and ideologies that served domination and justified the colonial endeavor.”
Review of Linford D. Fisher's The Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America
(The University of Chicago Press, 2014) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
Linford Fisher’s The Indian Great Awakening joins a growing body of scholarship on Native American engagement with Christianity. Much of that work so far (including my own) has focused on particular individuals or communities. Fisher’s is the first to take a broader, longer scope to survey the landscape of Native engagement with Christianity in southern New England (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Long Island, and western Massachusetts) through the eighteenth century (1700–1820), and it offers a welcome contribution. Fisher’s aim is to understand Native encounter with Christianity “in the fullest possible context of local colonial interactions and the broader, transatlantic tugs of imperial power.”
Review of Jane T. Merritt's At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier
(MIT Press, 2004) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
It has been more than a decade since White published The Middle Ground,a monumental study of the shared world of colonists and Indians in the Great Lakes region during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.1The middle ground, argued White, was called into existence by the mutual dependence of Indians and colonists. So long as Britain and France contested control of North America, a pragmatic accommodation prevailed. The persuasiveness and significance of White’s work is reflected by the abundance of middle grounds that scholars have since brought to light. Among the most recent contributions is Merritt’s At the Crossroads,which weds the middle ground to the transatlantic world of empires and subjects. Drawing largely on the wealth of sources in the Moravian mission archives, Merritt’s study provides a richly detailed look into the complex relations of Indian and white individuals and communities on the mid-Atlantic frontier from 1700 to 1763. At the Crossroads is one of a string of recent works—starting with Jon Sensbach ,A Seperate Canaan: The Making of an Afro-Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840(Williamsburg, 1998)—that draws on the vast but virtually untapped sources of the relatively obscure Moravian communities to explore issues of race, culture, and religion in colonial and revolutionary America.

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