Samson Occom and the Christian Indians of New England

Originally published in 1899, W. Deloss Love's biography of Samson Occom is a work of its time. This classic account reveals one of the most unusual actors to step on stage in the eighteenth-century American colonies. Mohegan yet Christian, a native speaker of Mohegan and fluent in English--and literate in Greek, Latin, and French--Occom strode across the cultures of his time and place.

Occom was a man passionate about his advocacy for Native Americans in education and religious training. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he was a spiritual and educational broker among cultures immersed in an era of tumultuous change. As a businessman, he secured the funding necessary for the creation of Dartmouth College. He proved to be a dominant and influential presence in the eighteenth-century world of the Great Awakening of the 1740s, the War of Independence, and the emergence of the Young Republic.