Samuel D Carpenter

Category: interesting research

  • Conference paper: Henry Williams’ intellectual formation in English Dissent

    … and his views on the Waitara controversy, c. 1860. The slides and recording below represent a conference paper given at the New Zealand Historical Association Conference last week, at the University of Auckland. (The NZHA conference is the main conference of Aotearoa-NZ historians held biennially.) Abstract of paper: The Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary…

  • Marianne Williams and the Missionary Impulse

    In this postcolonial age, many things are said and written concerning missionaries to foreign/ indigenous lands. I have just been reading a source which reveals that in its purest, Christian form, the missionary impulse was, well, pure and Christian. It would also, doubtless, have seemed reckless and ridiculous to many contemporary observers, not to mention…

  • Translating the Scriptures into te reo Māori in Aotearoa-New Zealand in the 1830s

    RECENTLY PUBLISHED: Samuel D. Carpenter, “A Historical–Contextual Analysis of the Use of “Tapu”, “Utu” and “Muru” in the Māori New Testament and Book of Common Prayer,” Religions 15, no. 9, art. 1109 (2024). Link to open access article here: https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091109 ABSTRACT: Building on Wittgenstein’s theory of ordinary language use and Lamin Sanneh’s insights into the…

  • From the Archives, no. 8

    I have taken great pleasure recently in writing a concise narrative of the great sea battle of January 1815 between HMS Endymion and USS President, which took place at the close of the War of 1812 with America – after which the Napoleonic Wars in Europe also drew to a close. I received the other…

  • #From the Archives

    Exciting to discover today various sources new to me, on the amazing digital collection of CMS records on the National Library Australia website (https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-1350490952/findingaid?digitised=y) – only recently digitized. One record I definitely hadn’t seen before was Henry Williams offering himself for missionary service, in January 1820. This is about five years after he was discharged…

  • Legacies of Empire #1: academic debates

    Recent conversations about the good, bad, ugly and indifferent legacies of the British Empire… The debate about the legacies of the British empire does not go away. Various academic projects are devoted to it, while public discourse usually responds reactively to contemporary issues and debates such as Black Lives Matter. This blog series will highlight…

  • imperial projects

    Another couple of interesting ‘imperial projects’ currently in progress: Alan Lester is leading a project called ‘Snapshots of Empire’ based at the University of Sussex. This project will analyse in detail three separate years of correspondence (1838, 1857, 1879) coming in and going out of the Colonial Office and East India Company/ India Office to see how the empire…