| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Nicholas P. Cushner. Why Have You Come Here? The Jesuits and the First Evangelization of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 255. Cloth $74.00, paper $29.95.
This disappointing book takes on a large and important subject: Jesuit missionary efforts among the natives of the Americas, a topic ripe for comprehensive and comparative treatment. From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English Jesuits worked tirelessly, mostly on the edges of European empire, to convert the pagan nations to Christianity. Acute observers and prolific writers, they left rich and copious records to the benefit of historians interested in both the Indian and the European experience of colonization and cultural change. Jesuit sources have fueled an outpouring of scholarly activity in recent decades, but mostly within narrowly regional silos. To soar above this partitioned historiographic landscape and survey Jesuit missions across the hemisphere is to take on a daunting challenge and Nicholas P. Cushner deserves credit for his ambitious effort at synthesis, even if his book is incomplete and conceptually flawed.	1
Cushner devotes chapters to the missions in Florida, northern Mexico, Andean Peru, Paraguay, Canada, and Maryland, but his treatment of these respective mission fields is quite unsystematic, making anything more than the most casual comparisons impossible. The Florida chapter concentrates on relations with natives, while the Maryland chapter examines Jesuit plantations with hardly a word about Indians. Brazil, site of the first and one of the most important Jesuit missions to the Americas, is hardly mentioned. Moreover, when he ventures outside Latin America, the author literally gets lost: in the New France chapter, he has La Prairie east of Sillery instead of west, he locates Mount Desert Island in present-day Nova Scotia rather than Maine, and he thinks Father Paul LeJeune, travelling northeast from Quebec City, suddenly plunged into "what is today upper New York State" (pp. 152, 154, 158).	. . .

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