You're listening to an airwave media podcast.

Ben Franklin's world is a production of Colonial Williamsburg Innovation Studios.

So, what did it mean for an English settler in this relatively small town of Boston because this is before Boston really boomed as a trade port?

Boston was just a small little corner, a kind of island in a Spanish sea, and this is the first instance

that we know of of any kind of literary or textual effort to make contact.

to make contact.

Hello and welcome to episode 376 of Ben Franklin's world the podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of

our early American past have shaped the present day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Kovart.

Catholics and Protestants haven't always gotten along with each other.

In fact, we know that during the 16th through 18th centuries, England, Germany, and the Netherlands

formed Protestant alliances to help them counteract the Catholic alliances of Spain, France,

and the Holy Roman Empire.

And this world of religious alliances and rivalries

is the world that gave birth to colonial America.

Now one way we can see these alliances and rivalries playing out is in the missionary efforts to the Americas.

As we know, Spain and later France sent Catholic priests and friars to North and South America and the Caribbean,

purportedly to save the souls of indigenous Americans

by converting them to Catholicism.

We also know that Protestants did similar work

to help counteract Catholic work in the Americas.

Now one Protestant who sought to counteract the work of Catholic conversion was Cotton Mather,

...