Good News From New England

First Published in 1624, Edward Winslow's Good News from New England chronicles the early experience of the Plimoth colonists, or Pilgrims, in the New World. His account was an attempt to convince supporters in England that the colonists had established friendly relations with Native groups and, as a result, gained access to trade goods. Although clearly a work of diplomacy, masking as it did incidents of brutal violence against Indians as well as evidence of mutual mistrust, the text nevertheless offers more complicated and nuanced representation of the Pilgrims' first years in New England than other primary documents of the period. In this scholarly edition, Kelly Wise cup supplements Good News with an introduction, additional primary texts, and annotations to bring to light multiple perspectives, including those of the first European travelers to the area. Native captives who traveled to London and shaped Algonquian responses to colonists, the survivors of epidemics that struck New England between 1616 and 1619, and the witnesses of the colonists' attack on the Massachusetts.

One of America's earliest books and one of the most important early Pilgrim tracts to come from American colonies. This book helped persuade others to come join those who already came to Plymouth.

In contrast to most accounts of Puritan-Indian relations, "New England Frontier "argues that the first two generations of""Puritan settlers were neither generally hostile toward their""Indian neighbors nor indifferent to their territorial rights.""Rather, American Puritans-especially their political and""religious leaders-sought peaceful and equitable relations""as the first step in molding the Indians into neo-Englishmen.""When accumulated Indian resentments culminated in the""war of 1675, however, the relatively benign intercultural""contact of the preceding fifty-five-year period rapidly declined.""With a new introduction updating developments in""Puritan-Indian studies in the last fifteen years, this third""edition affords the reader a clear, balanced overview of a""complex and sensitive area of American history.""

This book explores New England's founding, in terms of ordinary people and the transcendent meanings that those lives ultimately acquired.

Governing the Tongue explains why the spoken word assumed such importance in the culture of early New England. In a work that is at once historical, socio-cultural, and linguistic, Jane Kamensky explores the little-known words of unsung individuals, and reconsiders such famous Puritan events as the banishment of Anne Hutchinson and the Salem witch trials, to expose the ever-present fear of what the Puritans called "sins of the tongue." But even while dangerous or deviant speech was restricted, as Kamensky illustrates here, godly speech was continuously praised and promoted. Congregations were told that one should lift one's voice "like a trumpet" to God and "cry out and cease not." By placing speech at the heart of New England's early history, Kamensky develops new ideas about the complex relationship between speech and power in both Puritan New England and, by extension, our world today.

Four centuries after the Mayflower's arrival, a landmark collection of firsthand accounts charting the history of the English newcomers and their fateful encounters with the region's Native peoples For centuries the story of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower has been told and retold--the landing at Plymouth Rock and the first Thanksgiving, and the decades that followed, as the colonists struggled to build an enduring and righteous community in the New World wilderness. But the place where the Plymouth colonists settled was no wilderness: it was Patuxet, in the ancestral homeland of the Wampanoag people, a long-inhabited region of fruitful and sustainable agriculture and well-traveled trade routes, a civilization with deep historical memories and cultural traditions. And while many Americans have sought comfort in the reassuring story of peaceful cross-cultural relations embodied in the myth of the first Thanksgiving, far fewer are aware of the complex history of diplomacy, exchange, and conflict between the Plymouth colonists and Native peoples. Now, Plymouth Colony brings together for the first time fascinating first-hand narratives written by English settlers--Mourt's Relation, the classic account of the colony's first year; Governor William Bradford's masterful Of Plimouth Plantation; Edward Winslow's Good News from New England; the heterodox Thomas Morton's irreverent challenge to Puritanism, New English Canaan; and Mary Rowlandson's landmark "captivity narrative" The Sovereignty and Goodness of God--with a selection of carefully chosen documents (deeds, patents, letters, speeches) that illuminate the intricacies of Anglo-Native encounters, the complex role of Christian Indians, and the legacy of Massasoit, Weetamoo, Metacom ("King Philip"), and other Wampanoag leaders who faced the ongoing incursion into their lands of settlers from across the sea. The interactions of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag culminated in the horrors of King Philip's War, a conflict that may have killed seven percent of the total population, Anglo and Native, of New England. While the war led to the end of Plymouth's existence as a separate colony in 1692, it did not extinguish the Wampanoag people, who still live in their ancestral homeland in the twenty-first century.