With our American Philosophy and Religion series, Applewood reissues many primary sources published throughout American history. Through these books, scholars, interpreters, students, and non-academics alike can see the thoughts and beliefs of Americans who came before us.

A vivid and disquieting narrative of Jesuit slaveholding and its historical relationship with Jesuit universities in the United States The Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, is renowned for the quality of the order’s impact on higher education. Less well known, however, is the relationship between Jesuit higher education and slavery. For more than two hundred years, Jesuit colleges and seminaries in the United States supported themselves on the labor of the enslaved. “Let Us Go Free” tells the complex stories of the free and enslaved people associated with these Catholic institutions. Walker Gollar shows that, in spite of their Catholic faith, Jesuits were in most respects very typical slaveholders. At times, they may have been concerned with the spiritual and physical well-being of the enslaved, but mostly they were concerned with the finances of their plantations and farms. Gollar traces the legacies of the Jesuits’ participation in the slaveholding economy, portrays the experiences of those enslaved by the Jesuits, and shares the Jesuits’ attempts to come to terms with their history. Deeply based on original research in Jesuit archives, “Let Us Go Free” provides a vivid and disquieting narrative of Jesuit slaveholding for the general reader interested in the historical relationship between slavery and universities in the United States.

This volume comprises a new collection of essays--four previously unpublished--by James Axtell, author of the acclaimed The European and the Indian and The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America, and the foremost contemporary authority on Indian-European relations in Colonial North America. Arguing that moral judgements have a legitimate place in the writing of history, Axtell scrutinizes the actions of various European invaders--missionaries, traders, soldiers, and ordinary settlers--in the sixteenth century. Focusing on the interactions of Spanish, French, and English colonists with American Indians over the eastern half of the United States, he examines what the history of colonial America might have looked like had the New World truly been a "virgin land," devoid of Indians.