From ther Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary College Quarterly, and Tyler's Quarterly.

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In The Baptism of Early Virginia, Rebecca Anne Goetz examines the construction of race through the religious beliefs and practices of English Virginians. She finds the seventeenth century a critical time in the development and articulation of racial ideologies—ultimately in the idea of “hereditary heathenism,” the notion that Africans and Indians were incapable of genuine Christian conversion. In Virginia in particular, English settlers initially believed that native people would quickly become Christian and would form a vibrant partnership with English people. After vicious Anglo-Indian violence dashed those hopes, English Virginians used Christian rituals like marriage and baptism to exclude first Indians and then Africans from the privileges enjoyed by English Christians—including freedom. Resistance to hereditary heathenism was not uncommon, however. Enslaved people and many Anglican ministers fought against planters’ racial ideologies, setting the stage for Christian abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using court records, letters, and pamphlets, Goetz suggests new ways of approaching and understanding the deeply entwined relationship between Christianity and race in early America. "Goetz has done an impressive job bringing religion to the center of the historiography on race, and her study is a must-read for all scholars interested in the development of race and the role of Protestantism in the Atlantic world."—Register of the Kentucky Historical Society "In a compact 173 pages, Goetz links race and religion in colonial Virginia in ways that few other scholars have even attempted."—Journal of American History "This is impressive scholarship grounded in letters, pamphlets, court records, colonial statutes, and a wide array of additional archival and secondary sources . . . It is a book that will find ready readership in graduate seminars, seminaries, and undergraduate classrooms."—Virginia Magazine of History and Biography "Professor Goetz . . . is to be warmly applauded for having produced a work of such methodological scope and intellectual sophistication, a most persuasive work that ranks as a major contribution to the field."—Slavery and Abolition Rebecca Anne Goetz is an associate professor of history at New York University.

"From the earliest records relating to Virginia, we learn the basics about many of these original colonists: their origins, the names of the ships they sailed on, the names of the "hundreds" and "plantations" they inhabited, the names of their spouses and children, their occupations and their position in the colony, their relationships with fellow colonists and Indian neighbors, their living conditions as far as can be ascertained from documentary sources, their ownership of land, the dates and circumstances of their death, and a host of fascinating, sometimes incidental details about their personal lives, all gathered together in the handy format of a biographical dictionary" -- publisher website (January 2008).