About five minutes ago, I was doing homework for my other religious studies class which, incidentally, is a blog as well. The assignment was to select something from Puritan history/tradition and do some research on it. I chose to look up Eliot's Bible, since I had never heard of it before and it turned out to actually be really interesting. Eliot's Bible was the first Bible printed in the U.S., printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1661. Surprisingly enough, however, it was not written in English, but in Algonquin. The translation was done by a Puritan pastor by the name of John Eliot. Unable to preach in England due to his Puritan beliefs, Eliot migrated to the New World in search of religious freedom and settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony alongside John Winthrop, the famous governor of said colony. Upon arrival, Eliot decided to learn the Algonquin language in order to be able to preach to and evangelize the local Native American tribe, a skill that would eventually allow him to translate the Bible. At the time, Algonquin was considered to be one of the most difficult languages to learn, and as a result, this task would take approximately ten years to complete. This translation of the Bible is a great example and symbol of the colonists' effots to convert the local peoples, and it dovetails with the Protestant belief that everyone should be able to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. For more information about the Eliot Bible, the following websites are pretty interesting:
http://www.solagroup.org/articles/historyofthebible/hotb_0005.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Eliot_(missionary) (I know this is Wikipedia, but it seems to have pretty good/interesting information!)
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