Wednesday, November 5, 2008

The Stockbridge Bible


The Stockbridge Bible is not only the starting point for my blog, it also seemed to be the starting point for my interest in Algonkian Church History. (After giving it some thought, however, I remembered that I'd been interested in this kind of thing since I was in 3rd or 4th grade, but I started doing serious research decades later.)

The result of my research on the Stockbridge Bible is a paper that was published in The Book Collector (the world's foremost authority on old and rare books) in their Spring, 2007 issue (vol. 56, issue 1). The paper is ostensibly about book history, but in explaining the movements and ownership disputes of the Stockbridge Bible, I had to explain a lot about the history of the owners of the two volumes, the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.

Here's some of the main points of the paper that I wrote:
* During King George's War - one of a series of wars in which the French and the British vied for Native allies - a two-volume Bible that had been printed by John Baskett in London in 1717 was dedicated to "the Indian Congregation" at Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
*The Indians took care in transporting their tribal Bible all the way to their present homeland in Wisconsin.
*For a sixty year period the Stockbridge Bible was in white hands.
* It is now kept in the Tribe's museum on their reservation in Shawano County, Wisconsin.

Stay tuned, in the future I may "reprint" the paper on this blog.

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