This article examines North Atlantic views of Protestant missions and race in the Dominican Republic between 1905 and 1911, a brief period of political stability in the years leading up to the U.S. Occupation (1916–1924). Although Protestant missions during this period remained small in scale on the Catholic island, the views of British and American missionaries evidence how international perceptions of Dominicans transformed in the early twentieth century. Thus, this article makes two key interventions within the literature on Caribbean race and religion. First, it shows how outsiders’ ideas about the Dominican Republic's racial composition aimed to change the Dominican Republic from a “black” country into a racially ambiguous “Latin” one on the international stage. Second, in using North Atlantic missionaries’ perspectives to track this shift, it argues that black-led Protestant congregations represented a possible alternative future that both elite Dominicans and white North Atlantic missionaries rejected.

Henry Beverhout looked out over the West African village of Freetown in 1792 with misgivings. From his own experience and from the complaints he received from other townspeople, he now recognized that the black men and women of Sierra Leone were not being afforded the equal treatment they had been promised. Exploited and discriminated against for most of their lives by white masters in America, these expatriates had arrived in West Africa determined to chart a new course for themselves. But the path to economic, civil, and religious freedom was littered with obstacles. They soon encountered problems with white Sierra Leone Company officials over low pay, high prices, and the slow pace at which land was apportioned to the new settlers. Just as important, the black émigrés were dismayed by the company's system of justice, whose juries Beverhout said did not “haven aney of our own Culler in” them. Having absorbed the British and American legal traditions of trial by a jury of one's peers, he demanded that in any “trial thear should be a jurey of both white and black and all should be equal.” Going even further, he then made the explosive claim that “we have a wright to Chuse men that we think proper to act for us in a reasnenble manner.”

Around 1790, two young sisters born into a slaveholding free black family began instructing Antiguan slaves in literacy and Christianity. The sisters, Anne (1768–1834) and Elizabeth (1771–1833) Hart, first instructed their father's slaves at Popeshead—he may have hired them out rather than using them on his own crops—then labored among enslaved women and children in Antiguan plantations and in towns and ports like St. John's and English Harbour. Soon the sisters came to write about faith, slavery, and freedom. Anne and Elizabeth Hart were moderate opponents of slavery, not abolitionists but meliorationists. When compared to their black American, British, and West African contemporaries, the Hart sisters illuminate the birth of a black antislavery Christianity in the late eighteenth century precisely because they never became abolitionists. The Hart sisters shared with their black contemporaries a vivid sense of racial identity and evangelical Christianity. Yet as meliorationists, the Hart sisters did not oppose slavery as an institution, but rather the vice it spread into the lives of blacks. The difference between the Hart sisters and their contemporaries such as Richard Allen, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Lemuel Haynes, and John Marrant—all luminaries of black abolitionism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—was that the abolitionists felt themselves citizens of a modern nation-state characterized by power that could be used against slave traders and slaveholders. The Hart sisters never thought of themselves as citizens and abjured political means, including revolution, of ending slavery. This essay aims to describe the Hart sisters' faith and antislavery activity and to analyze the difference between meliorationism and abolitionism in terms of a black writer's ability or inability to identify as a citizen of a modern nation-state.

Fray Diego de Landa's harsh inquisition against the Maya Indians of Yucatán has generated passionate controversy for over four centuries. This essay reexamines documentary sources related to the case in order to better understand both the event and Landa's interpretation of his own actions. The evidence suggests that Landa's reading of and response to the Mayan apostasies were shaped by the millenarian ideas of Spanish Franciscanism. Within this millenarian context, a richer and more consistent account of Landa's character and actions becomes possible.

This article describes and interprets the ebb and flow of religious liberty in Argentina from 1943 to 1955, concentrating on the restriction of Protestant liberties. Most authors have not included the situation of Protestants in their discussions of the first Perón regime, but since new source material on the subject has become available, it may be treated somewhat objectively. The following essay will evaluate the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the intricate developments which led to the coercion of Protestants and will examine the role played by General Perón during the last year of his first regime as it affected Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity.

This article sketches an archeology of the apocryphal myth of Santa Efigenia, the Ethiopian virgin saint celebrated in the southern coastal of valley of Cañete, Peru. The history of Santa Efigenia is used to analyze the invention of popular myths and processions in a rural community in contrast to the cornerstone of popular national religiosity in Peru, the Lord of the Miracles (Señor de los Milagros). The popular worship and diffusion of these devotions and processions intersect with the contested formation of national identity in early and late twentieth century Peru. Moreover, they speak to how traditional and popular forms of religious worship are valued and devalued.

The African diaspora in Peru and the Pacific coast of South America has been difficult to historicize because of the scant cultural evidence for an Afro-Andean nostalgia or separation from an African homeland. The rediscovery and devotion of Santa Efigenia and her emergent popularity in Peru and larger presence in Brazil and Cuba is compelling evidence that Afro-Peruvians have a direct connection with African culture and history and the early religious history of Catholic saints and virgins.

In the mid-1600s, the Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya reported that man-eating jaguars were helping to convert Guaraní Indians to Catholicism. This article tests his claim by aggregating multiple mentions of jaguars found in the accounts and letters of Jesuit missionaries in the reductions of Paraguay and the Moxos from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, including the writing of Jesuits Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, François-Xavier Eder, Alonso Messia, and Martín Dobrizhoffer. Cumulatively, their predator sightings and references suggest that, indeed, the actions of real jaguars were transforming local religious beliefs. The presence of jaguars in Jesuit records also reveals the complexity of missionary and indigenous attitudes towards animals. Jesuits often associated jaguars with pre-Christian jaguar-shaman rituals, but also considered them to be divine instruments. Indigenous peoples sometimes preserved older practices, but also occasionally took real jaguars as an impetus to convert to Christianity. Both Jesuits and indigenous peoples reacted to jaguar incursions with violence as well as spiritual reflection. Most importantly, the prominence of active jaguars on this contested religious frontier suggests that animals should be viewed as more than symbols in Christian history. Jesuit records indicate that jaguars were key third players in zones where Europeans and indigenous populations met.

By the mid-seventeenth century, radical protestant tolerationists in Britain and the British Atlantic began to conceive of religious liberty as a civil liberty applicable to all subjects, in contrast to contemporary puritans who limited toleration to orthodox protestants. This essay seeks to explain why certain puritans, however small in number, came to adopt radical views on toleration in contrast to the religious mainstream in the Anglophone world. Drawing upon a longer history of ecclesiastical independence than considered in the existing scholarship on religious toleration, it identifies a hitherto unexplored relationship between ecclesiastical independence in England and the Atlantic World.