American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • American History >
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

MAYHEW, EXPERIENCE

(5 February 1673, Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard, MA-29 November, 1758, Martha's Vineyard). Education: Local schooling, Martha's Vineyard. Career: Preacher and missionary, Martha's Vineyard, with support of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England,1694-1738.

Experience Mayhew is generally regarded as the ablest missionary in a family that ministered to the Indians of Martha's Vineyard throughout the colonial period. As a boy he learned the Vineyard dialect from his father and local Indians. He preached to the Indians for more than half a century and translated the psalms and a lecture by Cotton Mather into the Massachusetts tongue. The Indians on Martha's Vineyard were organized into several congregations, served by native priests. Mayhew went from one to the next to preach and to catechize the young. His Indian Converts, published in 1727, tells the stories of many natives and is one of the best accounts we have of the Christian Indians of New England. Although Mayhew did not receive a college education, he is credited -with having one of the best minds of his day and was awarded an honorary M.A. by Harvard in 1720. He wrote a tract criticizing George Whitefield· because of the excesses of the Awakening, but he also published a treatise on the doctrine of grace.

The island domain of Martha's Vineyard was a remote part of New England in those days and had been an independent colony for a time. But Mayhew's career shows how persons in all areas of New England were part of a common religious culture.

Bibliography
A: Massachuset Psalter (Boston, 1709); A Discourse Showing That God Dealeth with Us as with Reasonable Creatures (Boston, 1720); Indian Converts (London, 1727); Grace Defended (Boston, 1744).
B: AAP I, 133; DAB 12,453-54; SH 7, 264; C. E. Banks, The History of Martha's Vineyard, 3 vols. (Boston, 1911-25), vol. 1: 249-54.