Great Awakening and Native Americans

Essay One: Great Awakening

Introduction

Religion continued to heavily influence England's colonies on the North American mainland in the early eighteenth century through the Great Awakening and other religious influences. Over three-fourths of the colonial population attended churches in the first four decades of the century, with a major religious revival, the Great Awakening, sweeps through the colonies in the latter portion of that period.

Revival

This revival involved other parts of the English-speaking world, including England, Wales, and Scotland, and heralded the arrival of Evangelicalism, which emboldened Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches and their supporters. Less pleased by the spreading of the gospel by itinerant and educated clergy alike were Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Quakers. Little affected were the German settlers who continued to practice their faith as Mennonites, Dunkers, Moravians, or Lutherans. Later in the century, another religious movement influenced a smaller but significant portion of the American populace, including several leading intellectuals (Faragher , Buhle, Czitrom & Armitage, pp. 106). Deism, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, highlighted morality, refuted the notion of Jesus' divinity, and appealed to thinkers on the order of Thomas Jefferson and john Adams. Small numbers of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews also appeared in England's North American colonies. Native American religions, spiritual influences from Africa carried over by slaves, and the Catholicism of French and Spanish explorers, priests, and settlers helped lend striking diversity to the religious makeup of the territories of the thirteen original colonies and the land abutting them.

A New Period of Religiosity The Great Awakening ushered in a new period of religiosity, but the trend in the colonies was toward greater secularization. The American colonists appeared particularly inclined to pragmatic approaches, including architecturally, linguistically, and even philosophically. That suited the American version of the Enlightenment, particularly as filtered through Great Britain. The American Enlightenment was perhaps best exemplified by Benjamin Franklin, the former indentured servant and intellectual jack-of—all-trades, who became a well-known writer, a renowned editor, a renowned scientist, and a leading politician, among his other pursuits. Franklin embodied the Enlightenment's central precept of reason, its distrust of dogma, its celebration of science; it is contesting of superstition, its more optimistic perspective regarding humankind's sheer possibilities. The American Enlightenment also proved to be particularly flexible, fostering practical solutions and presaging pragmatism.

Essay Two: Native Americans and Conflicts

Jamestown Settlement Jamestown is the first permanent settlement of English colonists in North America in the present state of Virginia, which was founded in 1607. Historically, it was the second permanent settlement in the area of today's United States. It was created when three English ships named Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery were established in order to create the first permanent English colony on the coast of the U.S., with a group of 39 sailors and 104 settlers on board, under the command of captains Christopher Newport, Bartholomew Gosnolda and John Ratcliffe. The settlement from the beginning had trouble because of conflicts with local tribes, Indian Federation of Powhatan as early as two weeks after arrival, when Smith ...