The Eliot Tracts With Letters from John Eliot to Thomas Thorowgood and Richard Baxter

Subjects:

• History » American History -- Colonial Era
• Religious Studies » History of Religion
• Multicultural Studies » Native American Studies

Reviews:

• The Eliot Tracts reprinted in this volume fully describe Eliot's missionary endeavor. They are thus the New England counterpart of The Jesuit Relations of the French colonies and the Spanish mission activities described in narratives of New Spain. Missionaries' records and narratives, used cautiously, can be good sources for ethnographic information about indigenous peoples. Researchers mine them with the knowledge that missionaries' observations have been filtered through preconceptions and culturally shaped perceptions and judgments. These documents may be even more useful for understanding the period and the encounter between Native and European peoples. Thus, this first gathering together in one volume of the serially and separately published Tracts will be useful to historians and anthropologists studying Native-European relations in the northern colonies....Colonial history and Native America collections will want this book. Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.
  —Choice July 2004
• Michael P. Clark has collected the Eliot Tracts in a single edition for the first time. This edition, which beautifully reproduces the title pages of the original tracts, is a long-awaited and much-needed contribution to early American studies.
  —The New England Quarterly March 2005

Table of Contents:

• Preface
• The Seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
• Introduction
• Map of the Praying Towns
• The Eliot Tracts
• Letters