The Moravian Historical Society museum and historic site preserves, interprets, and celebrates the rich culture of the Moravians.
The Museum is open daily from 1 pm to 4 pm. Reserve a guided museum tour today
The Museum will be closed on November 18 and 19, 2024
167th Annual Meeting, Lecture, and Reception
Saturday, October 5, 2024; 2:30 pm: Meeting | 3:00 pm: Lecture
167th Annual Lecture by Dr. James A. Owen​:
"Our Class in America: John Comenius and Native American Education at Harvard in the Seventeenth Century"​​​
This talk explores the role of John Comenius in developing educational plans at Harvard Indian School. Puritan leaders at Harvard, including John Winthrop and John Eliot, admired Comenius and were in direct communication with him between 1641 and the late 1660s. Comenius's Pansophic education program, using Janua Linguarum Reserata and other books, became the standard for teaching Native American students at Harvard. Using archival documents from across Europe and the United States, this talk demonstrates how the Bohemian Brethren influenced the earliest Native American Christians. Tantalizing clues found in the papers of Puritans and European Protestant leaders suggest a more prominent role for Comenius in American education than has previously been known.
This event is free to attend. Seating is very limited; please reserve your ticket in advance.
James Owen is Assistant Director, Academic Professional Associate, and Instructor in the Institute of Native American Studies at the University of Georgia. He is a historian and musician from the mountains of Western North Carolina. He has held fellowships and received funding from the Newberry Library, the American Musicological Society, the Moravian Music Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the UGA Graduate School. James teaches undergraduate & graduate courses in US History, Native American History, Religion in America, and Senior Thesis courses, as well as Native American Studies and Indian Policy courses. His most popular classes include Indigenous Peoples and Globalization, and NAGPRA & the US, which covers the history, cultural context, and implications of the 1990 Native American Graves Protection & Repatriation Act. He advises INAS certificate students and the Native American Student Association (NASA). Owen's interdisciplinary work bridges the fields of Native American Studies, Appalachian Studies, New World Religious History, and ethnomusicology. He also works on historical research in the emerging field of ecomusicology, focusing on the sounds of North American and Caribbean places as Christianity and capitalist economies were introduced into Indigenous societies. This research explores the ways that social and economic changes are evident in the sound worlds and music of Indigenous places, engaging indigenous languages and Indigenous Knowledge systems.
Annual Meeting, Lecture, and Reception of the Moravian Historical Society
Since 1857, the Moravian Historical Society has presented its members with an update on the state of the organization and hosted an annual lecture. Many of these lectures have been published in the Transactions of the Moravian Historical Society, now known as the Moravian Journal. A complete listing of the Annual Lectures can be found here.
166th Annual Lecture
"A free wildlife:" Morale, Morality and Moravianism in Trinidad, 1885-1935
Rev. Dr. Winelle Kirton-Roberts
Saturday, August 19, at 4:00 pm
Keynote Address for the
Bethlehem Conference on Moravian History and Music
When Benjamin Romig, the President of the Moravian Provincial Board, visited Trinidad in 1886, he described it as a place where “careless,” formerly enslaved Tobagonians went to live “a free wildlife.” In the visitation report, Romig expressed concerns about the unacceptable immoral tendencies of the formerly enslaved Africans and proposed a prompt response to expand the Moravian work on the island.
As Rev. Dr. Winelle Kirton-Roberts argued in the Annual Lecture, in the context of a multicultural, multiethnic, and multi-religious Trinidadian community, the Moravians squandered the unique opportunity to meaningfully connect with the liberated Africans who migrated to Trinidad for better opportunities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead of offering a faith of affirmation and empowerment, Moravian mission work between 1885 and 1935 offered a message demonizing integral aspects of Africanism and Caribbeanism.
Rev. Dr. Winelle Kirton-Roberts is a native of Barbados. She holds a ThM in Ecumenics and Missions from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD in History from the University of the West Indies, Barbados. As an ordained minister in the Moravian Church, Eastern West Indies Province, Kirton Roberts served in pastoral and administrative positions. At present, she is the pastor of the Geneva Moravian Fellowship in Switzerland.
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Kirton-Roberts has been researching the history of missions in the Caribbean for over twenty years. While working in Trinidad, the Virgin Islands, and Barbados, she discovered the dearth and limitations of Caribbean church histories, an issue she has sought to address in her book, Created in Their Image: Evangelical Protestantism in Antigua and Barbados, 1834-1914 (2015). Her research has introduced the methodology of missiology to Caribbean church history, which brings together the important fields of history and theology. Through this approach, she has brought to the fore important discussions on the theological assumptions of the sending agencies and how these informed and shaped their missionary efforts in the Caribbean.
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