Review of Linford D. Fisher's The Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America

Abstract

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.”