#ERRAND INTO THE WILDERNESS SUMMARY HOW TO#
How do these texts serve to form enduring myths about America’s status as a chosen nation? About its role as an example to the rest of the world? About its inclusiveness? How do these early visions of America’s status overlap, undermine, or compete with one another? Unit 3 helps answer these questions by offering suggestions on how to connect these writers to their cultural contexts, to other units in the series, and to other key writers of the era. The video’s coverage of Winthrop, Rowlandson, and Penn introduces students to these writers’ influential utopian and dystopian visions of the promise of America. His text is imbued with the tolerance and pacifism of Quaker belief, envisioning a utopian community in which Europeans and Native Americans would “live soberly & kindly together.” Penn, a Quaker and the wealthy proprietor of the Pennsylvania land charter, took an entirely different view of Native Americans in his letter to the Delaware Indians, written before he left England for the New World.
Her narrative of her wanderings and sufferings is an example of a Jeremiad, recounting the “trials and afflictions” that destroyed her earlier spiritual complacency and testifying to the sweetness of her repentance and eventual salvation. A generation later, Rowlandson wrote from a different Puritan perspective, as a woman held captive by Native Americans whom she viewed as agents of the devil. The sermon serves as an optimistic blueprint for the ideal Christian community, or “City upon a Hill,” extolling the virtues of a clear social and spiritual hierarchy, interpreting the Puritan mission as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and exhorting fellow congregants to maintain their purity. Winthrop, a wealthy man and a leader within his Puritan congregation, delivered his lay sermon on board the ship Arbella before disembarking in Massachusetts. Thematically, stylistically, and generically, however, the texts are very distinct from one another, revealing important differences in the authors’ religious convictions and positions within their communities. The video for Unit 3 focuses on three texts that together represent the diverse early American visions of “the promised land.” John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” Mary Rowlandson’s narrative of her captivity among the Narragansett and Wampanoag Indians, and William Penn’s “Letter to the Lenni Lenape Indians” all participate in a tradition of understanding personal and communal experience as the working of God’s will.
This unit provides contextual background and classroom materials that explore how these early texts contributed to American literary traditions and helped create enduring myths about America. Unit 3, “The Promised Land,” examines the Utopian visions and dystopic fears represented in the works of William Bradford, Thomas Morton, John Winthrop, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Edward Taylor, William Penn, Sarah Kemble Knight, John Woolman, and Samson Occom. What kind of errand did the Quakers in Pennsylvania believe they had embarked upon? The Pilgrims at Plymouth? The Anglicans, Catholics, and Sephardic Jews who also settled on the East Coast in the seventeenth century? Whatever they believed their errands to be, New World settlers were confronted with a variety of challenges the physical difficulty of living in an unfamiliar land, friction with other immigrant groups, dissent within their own communities, conflicts with Native Americans that complicated their attempts to create ideal communities. While Miller was interested in the specific errand the Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans envisioned for themselves, we might use his notion of the “errand” to consider the motivations behind the journeys of other groups who came to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Borrowing a phrase from the New England Calvinist minister Samuel Danforth, the historian Perry Miller described the Puritans who came to America to form the Massachusetts Bay Colony as having embarked upon an “errand into the wilderness.” Here, the metaphor of the “errand” captures the immigrants’ belief that they were on a sacred mission, ordained by God, to create a model community and thereby fulfill a divine covenant.
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