The Ordeal of Thomas Barton: Anglican Missionary in the Pennsylvania Backcountry, 1755-1780

James P. Myers Jr. is Graeff Professor of English at Gettysburg College, where he teaches Shakespeare and early Renaissance literature. Myers also offers courses in Irish literature, the literature of anarchism, the relationship of chaos and information theories to literature, and the literature of exploration and discovery, with special emphasis on geography and chorography.

His current research focuses on identifying and understanding the distinct kinds of eighteenth-century landscape wonder and the sublime in the works of Pehr Kalm, Thomas Pownall, and Thomas Jefferson.

With his wife, Dr. Myers lives near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on a ten-acre farmette which was originally settled about 1737 by the Quaker and Anglican frontiersmen alluded to in this book. The property has the distinction of containing both an eighteenth-century Church of England family graveyard and a burial ground once used by Native Americans of the late Archaic and early Woodland cultures.