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Item 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 ArtsShoemaker’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.”Item Review of Craig Atwood's Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem(The University of Chicago Press, 2004) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsColonial Moravians are far more popular today than they ever were in the eighteenth century. Then, Moravians were suspected of being “papists” on account of their liturgical practices, mistrusted because of their close relations with Indians and slaves, and thought more than a little odd in their communal living arrangements. These qualities, combined with their prodigious record keeping, have proven enticing to sociologists, historians, and ethnohistorians alike, studying everything from the life course of religious movements (Gillian Lindt Gollin, Moravians in Two Worlds [New York, 1968], and Beverly Smaby, The Transformation of Moravian Bethlehem [Philadelphia, 1988]) to interracial religious communities (Jon Sensbach, A Separate Canaan [Chapel Hill, NC, 1998]) to the dynamics of ethnic identity in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania (Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads [Chapel Hill, NC, 2003]). All of the studies cited above treat Moravian belief and practice to a greater or lesser extent, but none goes so far as Craig Atwood’s new work in taking seriously the distinctive religiosity of the Moravian Bru¨dergemeine. Community of the Cross is a dual biography of the colorful Saxon Count, Ludwig von Zinzendorf (the main force behind the growth of the Moravian movement in the eighteenth century) and of the community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which Atwood treats as the incarnation of Zinzendorf’s theology.Item Review of Daniel R. Mandell's Tribe, Race, History: Native Americans in Southern New England, 1780-1880(MIT Press, 2009) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal ArtsVirtually every nineteenth-century local history of a New England town begins with a chapter about the last “red man” to have lived there. The tone is generally somber but optimistic—marking the sad but inevitable passing away of a noble race, thus allowing for the rise of true civilization. Scholarship of the last decade or so has been chipping away at this trope, but none has done so as comprehensively as Mandell. Studies of New England Indian history are rich, though heavily weighted to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the larger field of Indian history, the Old Northwest garners most attention in the era of the early Republic, before shifting to the Southeast in the era of Removal, and the West in the latter half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.