The Journals of the Moravian Mission to Georgia, 1734–1737

From Herrnhut to Savannah

Edited by Achim Kopp and John Thomas Scott

This book offers the first English translation of journals written by four leading figures in the Moravian Church who spent time in the British colony of Georgia between 1735 and 1737. Authored by August Gottlieb Spangenberg, David Nitschmann, Johann Töltschig, and Johann Andreas Dober, these documents are a vital source of historical and cultural information. Offering new insights into the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the journals address a range of fascinating topics, including missionary travel to the Americas, life in colonial Georgia, and Moravian theology and practices. Originally written in an archaic script and housed in a remote German archive, the journals have not been widely available to readers until the publication of this book. Presenting a valuable resource for scholars and general audiences alike, John Thomas Scott and Achim Kopp have translated the diaries into a readable version of English that also remains faithful to the original German. In addition to featuring explanatory annotations of the journal entries, the book also includes a list of the Moravians who traveled to the Georgia colony, profiles of the settlers and of each of the journal authors, and a timeline of the Georgia Moravian settlement. Supported by this contextual apparatus, The Journals of the Moravian Mission to Georgia offers an important new perspective on a key historical moment in the founding of the modern West.

Reviews

The book is an invaluable resource for German-American studies, including as it does insights about the Swiss German settlement at Purrysburg, South Carolina and useful background material on individuals such as David Zeisberger. Maps, appendices, a chronology — and, a great gift absent in so many modern publications, an index — make this a powerful scholarly container for the full history of a missionary moment that can be understood either as a failure or as a completed, exploratory effort.
— Medium

With the publication of this expertly edited book, the diaries of Moravian settlers in colonial Georgia have been translated and made available to readers for the first time, providing fascinating firsthand accounts of their journey and their ensuing activities in Georgia. The journals shed light on their religious beliefs and on various issues affecting the missionary community including their practical worries about money and supplies, their struggles with internal conflicts, and their interactions with native people and others in the colonies. Scholars and general readers will find this book to be informative and highly engaging.
— Paul Peucker, PhD, Director and Archivist, Moravian Archives

This well-edited collection by Kopp and Scott makes available to readers in English important and otherwise obscure documents in German script regarding the early European settlement of Georgia. It will help readers deepen their understanding of early pietist immigrant efforts in the colonies, including their conflicts and accomplishments, along with the often tense relations among revival pietist groups. Moreover, these documents shed light on the immigration of non-British settlers into early Georgia and European engagement with Native Americans, as well as life and death during the origins period of a European colony in North America.
— Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Distinguished Research Professor, Northern Illinois University

ISBN

978-1-61146-356-9

Year

2023

Order Online

Cover of Journals of the Moravian Mission showing etching of port with ships and settlement.

Recent Praise for LUP Books

Cover of The Final Days of Egard Allan Poe. Sepia-toned portrait of Poe.

The Final Days of Edgar Allan Poe, by David F. Gaylin, has been "recommended for all readers" by Choice Reviews and was listed in their Community College Top 75 titles.

Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision, Edited by Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery

Review in the Journal of Gender Studies

"This engaging collection redresses the balance of Poe studies to consider his work from the perspective of women, those in his works and those reading them. . . . [It] offers a welcome emphasis on the irrepressibility of women in his work who ‘die but do not stay dead’"

-- Sara Williams, University of Hull

Book cover, Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought in Later Medieval Literature

Gender, Poetry, and the Form of Thought in Later Medieval Literature, Edited by Jennifer Jahner and Ingrid Nelson

Review in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology:

Very much in the spirit of Robertson's many impacts on our field, this collection opens a range of fascinating apertures into the medieval literary world that promise to be useful, both to fellow scholars and in a variety of literature classrooms.

--Emily Houlik-Ritchey, Rice University

New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature, Edited by Amy N. Vines and Lee Templeton

New Directions in Medieval Mystical and Devotional Literature not only makes a fitting tribute to a beloved scholar and teacher; it constitutes a significant contribution to the field in its own right. The essays in this beautifully presented book will be essential reading for anyone interested in late-medieval vernacular theology and its reception, both in England and beyond.

--Nicholas Watson, professor of English, Harvard University

Placing Charlotte Smith, Edited by Elizabeth A. Dolan and Jacqueline M. Labbe

Dolan and Labbe’s wide-ranging yet cohesive collection of essays offers a comprehensive and convincing breadth that succeeds in its mission of placing Charlotte Smith. Beyond Smithian scholarship, the volume comes at a prescient time.

--Heather Heckman-McKenna University of Missouri-Columbia

Wife of Bath in Afterlife: Ballads to Blake, by Betsy Bowden

Bowden delves into each case study so expansively that at the end of reading the book, the reader has been immersed in many different eighteenth-century cultural worlds. This is an immensely learned and valuable book that dares to be different and, as a result, breaks new ground.

-- Marion Turner, Jesus College, University of Oxford

Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Early Twentieth Century, Edited by Michael Snyder

Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Early Twentieth Century is a significant work. Snyder uses Mathews’ columns as a window into Mathews’ understanding of the Osage, its geology, its flora and fauna, as well as its human inhabitants.

-- Ruby Hansen Murray, Osage News