Religion, Community, and Slavery on the Colonial Southern Frontier

James Van Horn Melton is Professor of History at Emory University, where he has served as Chair of both the Department of History and the Department of German Studies. His book The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2001) has appeared in Turkish and Spanish translation, and his book Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge University Press, 1988) won the 1990 Biennial Book Prize awarded by the Central European History Society. Melton has held fellowships from the NEH, the SSRC, the Fulbright Program, the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 2012-13 he served as President of the Central European History Society.

'Deftly navigating central European and North American archival sources and using micro-biography techniques, James V. H. Melton brings to life the religious and material dimensions of the Salzburger community, the First Peoples of the North American Southeast, and the enslaved Africans in the context of Atlantic history. No other study of this eighteenth-century British colonial experiment illustrates as succinctly both the admirable and the lamentable adaptability of human actors and whole communities to dominant religious, cultural, economic, and social attitudes and practices.' Gregg Roeber, Max Kade German-American Research Institute, Pennsylvania State University

• Introduction; Part I. From the Old World to the New: 1. The alpine world of Thomas Geschwandel; 2. Expulsion; 3. From Salzburg to Savannah; Part II. Ebenezer: 4. The making of a Pietist Utopia; 5. Governing Ebenezer: the early years; 6. Ebenezer and the struggle over slavery; 7. After slavery; Epilogue: Ebenezer is no more.