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and the Research Grants Committee at the University of Alabama (UA). The chair of the UA history department, Kari Frederickson, helped secure funding for image permissions.

      Archivists and staff made research not only possible but much easier and more pleasant at the Bermuda National Archives, the Boston Athenæum, Connecticut Historical Society, Friends’ House Library, Historic Deerfield, Huntington Library, John Carter Brown Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Newberry Library, Newport Historical Society, Public Record Office of the National Archives of the United Kingdom, and Rhode Island Historical Society. At the UA Libraries, I would especially like to thank Brett Spencer and Pat Causey.

      I would also like to offer a most heartfelt thank you to those who extended their hospitality during my peripatetic research wanderings following an Atlantic topic: John Aler, Andrew and Rosie Doughty, Matt Garcia, Rebecca Goetz, Evan Haefeli, Marie Martineau, Julia Kopelson, Kevin Kopelson, Margie and Peter Lloyd, Maria Mendez, Walter Woodward, and Irene Woodward. Thanks to John Adams and Andrew Trimingham, Charlotte Andrews, John Cox, Karla Hayward, Clarence Maxwell, William S. Zuill, and Rebecca Zuill, Bermuda quickly felt like a second home. I am grateful for my compatriots who helped me survive the rigors of graduate school, especially the members of United Electrical Local 896–COGS and the feminist theory reading group.

      I am deeply appreciative of the assistance and guidance of my mentors Mark Peterson and Linda K. Kerber. The comments and suggestions of audiences at a multitude of conferences and seminars have improved many parts of this book. I would particularly like to thank participants of seminars at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Columbia University, the McNeil Center, Virginia Tech, Ohio State University, and Rice University; as well as the Harvard early American working group, with a special thanks to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for inviting me to participate. An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Early American Studies, while portions of chapters 9, 10, and 11 appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly.

      Friends and colleagues not already mentioned who have commented on chapters, offered encouragement, or assisted in nonacademic ways include: the 2006–2007 MCEAS Fellows, Margaret Abruzzo, Douglas Baynton, Kristen Block, Vincent Brown, T. Dwight Bozeman, Joyce Chaplin, Christian Crouch, Jennifer Davis, Yvonne Fabella, Linford Fisher, Christina Frantom, Charles Foy, Travis Glasson, Robert E. Harvey, Dennis Hidalgo, Michael Jarvis, Catherine Kelly, Karen Kupperman, Jill Lepore, Annie Liss, Ann Little, Alice Nash, Paul Mapp, Brendan McConville, Jennifer Morgan, Margaret Newell, Katherine Paugh, Yvonne Pitts, Ann Marie Plane, Jennifer Purvis, Dana Quartana, Daniel Richter, Sharon Romeo, Todd Romero, Phillip Round, Jenny Shaw, and Lee Spilberg. At NYU Press, Deborah Gershenowitz was everything an author of a first book could hope for in an editor. Debbie moved to a different press before this book was through publication, and so I also have the pleasure of thanking another wonderful editor, Clara Platter. Constance Grady kept everything running on an even keel. An anonymous reader and Ann Little offered insightful comments and questions that guided me in strengthening the book in fundamental ways, and Ann even read the manuscript a second time.

      My family has provided innumerable kinds of support and lots of love. My parents, Robert and Reiko Kopelson, and my sister, Julia Kopelson, have helped in ways grammatical, global, retail, and artistic. The child-care assistance given by Brittany and Emily Innis made possible the timely completion of an earlier incarnation of this book. The dedicated, highly skilled teachers at the Capitol School have helped Teo explore and understand the world, while Jessie Tuggle has been a second mother to Alessandra, gifts for which I am incredibly thankful. And to my partner, Michael Innis-Jiménez: thank you for sharing in the navigation of our life together.

      Introduction

      To the casual observer, the crystals appear to be inert lumps of quartz, roughly shaped. But to the seventeenth-century individuals who placed them in the corners of their new building at Magunkaquog in the heart of their homeland, they were hope and insurance for the future, connection to the past, and an active shaping of their present. The crystals not only expressed the intent to continue The People’s place in the land that was theirs, to sink deep into the earth in the face of all the changes that followed on the heels of the Coat-men who had invaded it—often clumsily yet so destructively—they were one means by which to accomplish that goal. By the time The People buried the crystals beneath where they would gather to join in words and song in ways their ancestors had not known, they knew the Coat-men called themselves English and that their new way to reach other-than-human persons was called being a Christian. They had come to live in this place to be with their kin and others who had lost much so that together they could practice the new forms of interaction with the unseen members of their community. When Daniel Gookin, the puritan missionary and superintendent of Indian affairs for the colony of Massachusetts, came to encourage them in 1674, they gave the entire building over to his use during his visit. He prayed with them, briefly joining with them as one of their number. But most English living in what they called New England did not think that it was possible for Indians and English to be members of a congregation. Increasingly after the violence of the conflict the English came to call King Philip’s War (after the Pokanoket sachem who had tried to orchestrate alliances across long-standing tribal enmities), it seemed to English puritans that Natives could not be Christian, that something inherent made it impossible for them to incorporate into a body of Christ. Had Gookin known about the crystals beneath the floor as he led the community in prayer and exhorted them to strive to live a godly life, he might have doubted his firm conviction that they were Christian. The People did not; they knew that they were. And they continued to be, even after fifteen Natick Indians, inhabitants of another praying town, sold Magunkaquog lands to Harvard College.¹

      Figure I.1. Native territories and English colonial claims in southern New England, ca. 1665.

      Half an ocean away, Hannah Manena McKenney contemplated her future and the future of her family. Her husband, Anthony, had just bought her freedom as soon as he had finished his own indenture. They could try to stay in Bermuda as free people of color, to ensure that their children stayed out of entangling indentures. There were certainly some who did, deciding to take the risk that no one would try to make an issue of their freedom with the local justice, rather than to start over in a new place, far away from family and friends, that also held no guarantee of respect for their free status. Hannah did not relish that prospect. Although moving would mean leaving her parents and grandparents, it might also mean the chance to live in a community with fewer legal obstacles. And Anthony had heard that there were other families like them, who looked like them, with whom they might worship without being confined to an area far from the pulpit.²

      In many ways, the Nipmucs who lived at Magunkaquog and built the meetinghouse for the settlement and Hannah and Anthony McKenney lived very different lives, but in certain key ways the challenges they confronted were part of the same context. The Nipmucs were in the territory that their people had held since time out of mind, while the McKenneys were only two or three generations removed from Europe and Africa. The McKenneys grew up fully enmeshed in an intimate system of racialized slavery in which only Bermudian Bermudians were free in any significant numbers. But for Natives who had to confront the competing spaces of colonial New England, the line of unfreedom was not so stark. Algonquian tribes were very much present and active, but individual Natives could not always remain free of debt indentures because of increasing colonial encroachment and attacks on their lands, goods (including livestock), and persons.

      These variations were part of many larger contexts that scholars have so fruitfully researched and continue to investigate: the long-standing innovation and incorporation of outsiders (of whom Europeans were only the most recent) by the multitude of indigenous peoples of the Americas; the consolidation of power within many tribes in northeastern portions of North America; the growth of the transatlantic slave trade and forced African immigration to the Americas driven by European demand for labor; the increasing immigration of Europeans who by their very presence invaded Native land. More recently, another context to which scholars have turned their attention is the interaction of race and religion in ideas about and practices of human difference in various parts of the early modern Atlantic world. In taking the religions of all seventeenth-century inhabitants seriously,

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