Beyond Words: The Many Modes of Communication in Early New England

Printing arrived early in New England. In the summer of 1638, only a few short years after the planting of Massachusetts Bay colony (and even as thousands of migrant hopefuls were stepping ashore at Boston), the first press landed in the English colonies. Its owner, Jose Glover, did not survive the Atlantic crossing. But the press itself, widowed and hulking and sturdy, went with Glover's wife to Cambridge and shortly became the centerpiece of the first printing house in the English colonies. That colonists wasted no time in setting the Cambridge press to work, of course, should not surprise historians. Among those English who settled in America, New England colonists, especially, were people of the book. As committed Protestants (most of them the "hotter sort" we know as "Puritans"), they believed each man and woman should be able to read scripture. As a culture, therefore, early New Englanders were more literate than most in the Anglophone world, and also, it seems, simply more enamored of reading and writing. Founders of the region, who envisioned it as a "city on a hill" that would beckon England toward reform, were intensely aware of their place in history, and they penned the histories to prove it. Nor was colonists' culture of print wholly dependent on the Cambridge press. As David D. Hall and others have demonstrated, the colonial world of print overlapped heavily with—and depended tremendously on—publications from Europe. No matter the type in which the story is set, it is abundantly clear: early New England, as scores of studies now attest, was a place of pens and ink, of studied reverence toward the book.

Such devotion to writing, the story goes, may have given English colonists the upper hand in their encounter with America's Natives. Indians, by contrast, had no alphabetic literacy; unlike the English, they relied primarily on oral communication to transmit information and to store memory. Such a stark divide in ways of communicating, historians have largely concluded, did not benefit Native people. Studies such as James Axtell's "The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands" (1987) and Jill Lepore's The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (1998) cast the written word as a profoundly destructive force in Indian lives: it eased the dispossession of Native people from land; it allowed the writing of enduring texts that excised them from history; and, as a tool of missionaries such as John Eliot, it aided an "invasion within" that robbed some Native converts of culture and identity. But if scholars have sometimes drawn a fairly stark line between Native orality and English literacy, recent studies are beginning to tell a more complex and nuanced tale. Colonists, of course, also partook of oral culture, in songs and sermons and stories, while Native people often used the power of writing for their own purposes. In Writing Indians: Literacy, Christianity, and Native Community in Early America (2000), for instance, Hilary E. Wyss finds early Native Christian writers fashioning a uniquely "bicultural" identity in writing. Such readings have been part of the scholarly conversation at least since the publication of Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett (1988), but new methodology is now pushing scholars toward new insights. Emblematic of what promises to be a new path in Native American studies, Kristina Bross' and Hilary E. Wyss' recent collection Early Native Literacies in New England: A Documentary and Critical Anthology (2008) insists on pushing our conceptions of "literacy" beyond the English alphabet in order to examine the varied literacies of which Native people were possessed. Such work invites scholars to consider even the material objects (baskets, burial goods, pictographs) that communicated messages among people.

In his ambitious new book, The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England, Matt Cohen takes up this mantle. The Networked Wilderness studies the world of communications in early New England before...