“Renewing Homeland and Place” explores the complex intertwining of evangelical Christianity and notions of place and homeland in Algonquian communities in southern New England during the eighteenth century. In particular, this dissertation examines the participation of Algonquian men and women in the Protestant evangelical revivals known generally as the “First Great Awakening,” the adoption of New Light beliefs and practices within Algonquian communities, and the ways in which the Christian faith shaped and informed Algonquian understandings of place and community, and the protection of their lands. Mohegan, Pequot, Niantic, Narragansett, and Montaukett people living in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and on Long Island (New York) struggled continually throughout the eighteenth century to protect their land, resources, and livelihoods from colonial encroachment and dispossession. Christianity provided many Algonquians with beliefs, practices, and rituals that renewed, rather than erased, the spiritual and sustaining values they attached to their lands and that strengthened, rather than diminished, the kinship ties and sense of community that linked their settlements together. Equally as significant, the adoption of Christian beliefs and practices brought to the surface the dynamic and contested nature of community and place, and the varying ways in which Algonquians responded to colonization. As a number of Algonquians attended formal schools, assumed roles as ministers and teachers within their own settlements and among the Haudenosaunee in New York, and formed their own churches, they disagreed within their communities over issues of land use and political authority, and between their communities over the best response to the infringements they continued to suffer. By the 1770s a number of Christian leaders began to consider relocation to Oneida lands in New York as a solution to the land loss and impoverishment they faced in New England. While many Algonquians left their coastal homelands for central New York in the 1780s to form the Christian community of Brotherton, a number of Christians remained behind, highlighting the varying paths of adaptation and survival that Natives tread by the end of the century. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-24 13:20:16.449

The Prodigal Daughter (1736) is a poem that, on the surface, appears to be an approachable text that was likely geared towards a children’s audience during New England’s first Great Awakening, within the approachable format of a chapbook. However, when explored further, The Prodigal Daughter reveals a complicated textual history during a time of theological and social revival in New England. This thesis considers the historical context of The Prodigal Daughter’s narrative, as well as the poem’s publication history. The text’s transmission is carefully examined and encapsulated in this edition—giving the reader a transcription that is the result of collating twenty-eight surviving witnesses of The Prodigal Daughter. This thesis serves as a critical edition of The Prodigal Daughter, with an introduction which includes a careful consideration of gendered theology, homiletics, the literary marketplace, and the role of the devil in the female conversion narrative during New England’s first Great Awakening.