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Political Manhood: Red Bloods, Mollycoddles, and the Politics of Progressive Era Reform

and historians from Europe and North America. To varying degrees, the essays bear marks of their origin, a conference on “David Zeisberger, Native Americans, and Cultural Exchanges in Early Modern North America” that was sponsored by the Max Kade German-American Research Institute. This conference commemorated the publication of a critical translation of Zeisberger’s 1772–81 diaries as a Moravian missionary in the Upper Ohio Valley. Zeisberger thus figures rather prominently in many essays, and the process of translating the diaries is the focus of the volume’s conclusion. Yet this is not a volume on Zeisberger; several essays do not even mention him or use his diaries. After an editor’s preface, David Edmunds opens the volume with an insightful and unconventional assessment of the Moravian conversion of Delaware Isaac Glikhikan. Edmunds’s conclusion that “Glikhikan’s conversion was indisputably real” (16) fits nicely in a volume of essays that frequently lean toward accepting the written word of the missionaries. The rest of the volume is organized in three sections. The first explores the connection between language and our understanding of the past, especially in the writing of ethnography and ethnohistory. Christian F. Feest, for example, explores the development of ethnography as a unique genre and places the Moravians and Zeisberger within this tradition. Hermann Wellenreuther’s exemplary essay on Delaware political succession shows how earlier mistranslations obscured the role of consensus and kinship there. Similarly, Robert S. Grumet explores how Zeisberger’s diaries provide an ethnohistorical baseline for understanding Delaware sociopolitical history. The second section primarily focuses on the internal dynamics of the missions and missionaries to provide careful interpretations of their actions. Dominique Deslandres’s ethnohistory of the missionaries unapologetically declares that these men of God were “incorruptible of the faith” and “would never accept the religious ideas of these Others they had come to save” (72). Luca Codignola offers a less optimistic look at the missionaries, detailing their waning effects in the eighteenth century and the growing reality that “the farther the distance from the real aborigines, the stronger the impulse to assist them in their salvation and to trust in their goodwill” (90). In two other notable essays, Christopher J. Bilodeau explores the complexity of the Wabanaki response to the Catholic missions and the unintended consequences of conversions, while Rowena McClinton demonstrates how Moravian diaries among the Cherokee provide a sympathetic ethnographic source. Walter W. Woodward ends the section with perhaps the best essay in the volume. He demonstrates that the Moravians’ success may have resulted from a shared belief in song. Singing hours, various ceremonies that prioritized singing, and even schools became the means for proselytizing. Essays focusing on Native American responses to the missions appear in the third section. Siegrun Kaiser assesses the rejection of the Moravians by the Munsees, who used the missionaries for their political gains. Jane Merritt, using the idea of a gender frontier, explains why Delaware women may have found comfort in Moravian conversions because of their familial needs and preexisting traditions. Finally, in an interesting essay (which, unfortunately, seems out of place in the volume), Alyssa Mt. Pleasant details the rise of a “Christian-Pagan split” among the Senecas who dealt with Presbyterian missionaries in New York. Ethnographies and Exchanges will appeal to scholars of Native Americans and early modern religion, as it demonstrates the virtues of interdisciplinary studies. Although the essays vary in length and tone, they are uniformly well written and researched, and they engage questions of great importance.