SOURCE: "'Once More Let Us Consider': William Apess in the Writing of New England Native American History," in After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England, edited by Colin G. Calloway, University Press of New England, 1997, pp. 162-77.

In the essay below, O'Connell examines Apess's role in the documentation of Native American history in New England, concluding that Apess was a part of "a dissenting intellectual culture about which historians yet know little."

In what was once the conventional version of New England and much of American history, William Apess was a nobody. Born into poverty in 1798 in a tent in the woods in Colrain, Massachusetts, his parents of mixed Indian, white, and possibly African American "blood," this babe had attached to him nearly every category that defined worthlessness in the new United States. His upbringing would have struck respectable people then, as now, as...