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Rebecca Goetz

Rebecca A. Goetz

Assistant Professor of History

Email: Rebecca.A.Goetz [] rice.edu Phone: x2886 Office: 334 Humanities

Education

  • Ph.D. Harvard University, 2006
  • M.A. Harvard University, 2002
  • B.A. Bates College, 2000

Areas of Interest

  • Early American history
  • American religion
  • history of race
  • American Revolution

Research and Teaching

Dr. Goetz received her PhD in 2006 from Harvard University. An historian of early North America, she specializes in the history of religion and race in the early Chesapeake. She also has broad interests in the growing history of the Atlantic World, and the French and Spanish colonial experience in North America. She teaches courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on many aspects of early American history.

Her current work, a manuscript tentatively titled “Potential Christians and Hereditary Heathens: Religion and Race in Early America,” seeks to place English Christianities at the center of both the history of the early Chesapeake and the history of race. The seventeenth-century English understanding of human difference, she argues, was predicated not only upon physical characteristics but also on changing perceptions of the spiritual capacities of Indians and Africans—their souls. Historians usually overlook the role of religion in fashioning Chesapeake society, and consequently the history of race in Virginia and Maryland excludes religion as a factor in defining bodies and souls. She corrects this oversight by investigating the importance of the settlers’ broadly Christian culture in essentializing Indians and Africans. Prior to 1660, the English saw other residents of the Chesapeake as potential Christians. Many explicitly religious relationships—baptism, godparenthood, and marriage for example—drew all three groups into a web of Christian connections. Between 1660 and 1710, a series of laws and cultural transformations facilitated the English construction of Africans and Indians as hereditary heathens—as being racially incapable of true Christian conversion. “Christian” came to mean white, English, and Protestant. This redefinition, while convenient for English planters, was not permanent. Africans and Indians contested the prevailing Chesapeake conceptions of Christianity through emerging groups like the Baptists. By 1740, the uneasy alliance between religion and race was undone, foreshadowing the power of religious arguments against slavery.

Selected Publications

  • “From Potential Christians to Hereditary Heathens: Religion and Race in Early America, 1550-1750.” Book Manuscript in progress.
  • “Emanuel Driggus” in The Dictionary of Virginia Biography, vol. IV (forthcoming, 2009).
  • “ ‘The Child Should be Made a Christian’: Baptism, Race, and Identity in the Early Chesapeake,” in John Garrigus, ed., Race and Identity in the New World (Forthcoming, Texas A&M Press, 2009).
  • “General Artemas Ward: A Revolutionary Remembered and Reinvented, 1800-1938,” The Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, October 2003.

 GoetzCoverOne
“General Artemas Ward:
A Revolutionary Remembered and
Reinvented, 1800-1938,” The Proceedings
of the American Antiquarian Society (2003)

Curriculum Vitae

CV as of 6/26/07