W. Deloss love’s biography of Samson Occom is a work of in time. Long out of print, 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.
Drawing on primary source material—manuscript collections, Occom’s diaries and letters—Love brings a vast historical knowledge and a degree of critical evidence unmatched by any recent modern work on Occom.
W. DeLoss Love was a Congregational minister, a history scholar, and businessman. He was educated at Hamilton College and Andover seminary.
June 2000
