[Includes a bonus PDF with photographs][Read by Tom Weiner]The astonishing story of a unique missionary project--and the America it embodied--from award-winning historian John Demos. -- Near the start of the nineteenth century, as the newly established United States looked outward toward the wider world, a group of eminent Protestant ministers formed a grand scheme for gathering the rest of mankind into the redemptive fold of Christianity and ''civilization.'' Its core element was a special school for ''heathen youth'' drawn from all parts of the earth, including the Pacific Islands, China, India, and increasingly, the native nations of North America. If all went well, graduates would return to join similar projects in their respective homelands. For some years the school prospered and became quite famous. However, when two Cherokee students courted and married local women, public resolve--and fundamental ideals--were put to a severe test. -- The Heathen School follows the progress--and the demise--of this first true melting pot through the lives of individual students: among them, Henry Obookiah, a young Hawaiian who ran away from home and worked as a seaman in the China Trade before ending up in New England; John Ridge, son of a powerful Cherokee chief and subsequently a leader in the process of Indian ''removal''; and Elias Boudinot, editor of the first newspaper published by and for Native Americans. From its birth as a beacon of hope for universal ''salvation,'' the heathen school descends into bitter controversy as American racial attitudes harden and intensify. Instead of encouraging reconciliation, the school exposes the limits of tolerance and sets off a chain of events that will culminate tragically in the Trail of Tears. -- In The Heathen School, John Demos marshals his deep empathy and feel for the textures of history to tell a moving story of families and communities--and to probe the very roots of American identity.

Product Description: [MP3-CD audiobook format in Vinyl case. *NOTE: The MP3-CD format requires a compatible audio CD player.][Includes a bonus PDF with photographs][Read by Tom Weiner]The astonishing story of a unique missionary project--and the America it embodied--from award-winning historian John Demos...read more

Product Description: With the vision of a historian and the voice of a novelist, prize?winning author John Demos explores the social, cultural, and psychological roots of the scourge that is witch-hunting, both in the remote past and today. The Enemy Within chronicles the most prominent witch-hunts of the Western world?women and men who were targeted by suspicious neighbors and accused of committing horrific crimes by supernatural means?and shows how the fear of witchcraft has fueled recurrent cycles of accusation, persecution, and purging...read more

In the first edition of the Bancroft Prize-winning Entertaining Satan, John Putnam Demos presented an entirely new perspective on American witchcraft. By investigating the surviving historical documents of over a hundred actual witchcraft cases, he vividly recreated the world of New England during the witchcraft trials and brought to light fascinating information on the role of witchcraft in early American culture. Now Demos has revisited his original work and updated it to illustrate why these early Americans' strange views on witchcraft still matter to us today. He provides a new Preface that puts forth a broader overview of witchcraft and looks at its place around the world--from ancient times right up to the present.

Product Description: One of Greece’s leading photographers, John Demos captures the spirit of the people. He pictures the traditional life of Greece. These are people who simply do what they have always done—with their rituals of procession, feast days, marriages and burials...read more

The year 2000 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of A Little Commonwealth by Bancroft Prize-winning scholar John Demos. This groundbreaking study examines the family in the context of the colony founded by the Pilgrims who came over on the Mayflower. Basing his work on physical artifacts, wills, estate inventories, and a variety of legal and official enactments, Demos portrays the family as a structure of roles and relationships, emphasizing those of husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant. The book's most startling insights come from a reconsideration of commonly-held views of American Puritans and of the ways in which they dealt with one another. Demos concludes that Puritan 'repression' was not as strongly directed against sexuality as against the expression of hostile and aggressive impulses, and he shows how this pattern reflected prevalent modes of family life and child-rearing. The result is an in-depth study of the ordinary life of a colonial community, located in the broader environment of seventeenth-century America. Demos has provided a new foreword and a list of further reading for this second edition, which will offer a new generation of readers access to this classic study.

Product Description: The first of the women we now call Native American were among the prehistoric nomads who crossed the land bridge between Asia and North America 20,000 years ago. Over centuries, these nomads formed larger groups, and eventually farming villages, the seeds of the many tribes and nations of Native Americans...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Describes the 1704 French and Indian attack on Deerfield, Massachusetts, and the capture of Puritan minister John Williams and his five children.

Product Description: "These documents have been chosen, in every case, for the way they reflect lived experience among average people in our colonial past. There is no real substitute for such primary evidence -- no other way to capture the feel of events from day to day, year to year, generation to generation...read more

Ranging over the entire span of American history, this book discusses such topics as the changing nature of fatherhood, child abuse, adolescent and middle-age life from colonial times to the present, and the relevance of the past for present-day policy making.

Product Description: navy blue cloth hardcover