Era of Persuasion

Pre-eighteenth century America was a uniquely pragmatic, utopian society—a new world in which the expectations of a new beginning brought by explorers, traders, and settlers often conflicted violently the Native Americans they encountered. In Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture 1521–1680, E. Brooks Holifield identifies the act of persuasion as the common ground on which these disparate groups stood. As he clearly documents and persuasively interprets an America that some readers may not recognize, Holifield includes compelling insights into the social expressions of Native Americans and Africans as well as Europeans. His view extends from the pueblos of New Mexico and the missions of France to the plantations of Virginia and the towns of New England. Era of Persuasion portrays an early American society populated by passionate visionaries with urgently persuasive purposes who lived by applied philosophy and inspired action, and will be appreciated by the curious reader and avid historian alike.

Reaching broadly across Native American, Spanish, French, and English cultures, Professor Holifield writes with both authority and grace., We have come to expect the highest standards of historical scholarship from Holifield, and again he does not disappoint us. Here in short compass he offers fresh insights into the intellectual life of seventeenth-century America. Holifield's focus upon the exercise of persuasion among writers and thinkers allows him to embrace the widest possible range of intellectual sources—geography, history, science, theology, political discourse, and social criticism—within one volume. It is especially noteworthy that he has integrated Native American materials and perspectives in this work. In his choice of category of persuasion Holifield has added a significant term to the lexicon of early American history., Era of Persuasion presents a strikingly original argument. E. Brooks Holifield invites us to see the frontiers of seventeenth-century America as fields of persuasion where people of different race and background battled more often with words than with arms. Holifield explores how these strangers imagined themselves in time and space, and how, in their search for meanings, they invented as many new worlds as there were opportunities for cultural interaction. This is an impressive synthesis of a rich and complex historical literature., With characteristic intelligence and lucidity, Holifield convincingly describes how the art and act of persuasion was at the center of early American thought and culture. . . . This work is a welcome addition to the intellectual history of the earliest years of America's development. Holifield has the eye for the unnoticed but important source, and the all-telling quotation, and thus Era of Persuasion should delight as it instructs.

E. Brooks Holifield is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of American Church History at Emory University. He is the author of The Covenant Sealed, The Gentleman Theologians, and A History of Pastoral Care in America: From Salvation to Self-Realization, and has written on a variety of topics in the history of thought in America.