Joshua's Story: Biography from the Margins

This presentation will reflect on the larger project I am currently undertaking: a microhistorical biography of an obscure eighteenth-century Mohican-Moravian man who lived 1742-1806. While Joshua has been relegated to a few footnotes here and there—mostly relating to his dramatic death—Joshua was at the center of many of the most important events of the revolutionary eighteenth century in America. His village was caught up in the midst of the Protestant Evangelical Awakening approached by New England Congregational and Moravian missionaries. His community was burned to the ground by Delawares who opposed Christian missionaries. They were targeted by the infamous Paxton Boys  in the aftermath of Pontiac’s Rebellion. During the Revolution, Joshua was charged by the British with spying for the Americans. Two teenaged daughters were among the 96 pacifist Moravian Indians killed by an American militia in 1782. Twenty years later, Joshua witnessed the beginnings of the frontier revivals in Kentucky and was soon himself caught in the crossfire of another religious revival – accused as a witch and burned at the stake by the Shawnee Prophet.

Writing a biography of this obscure but fascinating figure provides unique interpretive and narrative possibilities. Through him, we can gain a new perspective on familiar events of revival and revolution. This one life defies many of the oppositional interpretive categories long used to examine this era of American history: Indian versus white, accommodationist versus nativist. Thus, Joshua’s story seeks not only to bring to light a lost story from early America, but also to build on newly emerging historiography that attends to the complexities rather than the binaries of political, religious, and cultural identities.