A 1660s board game made by a Jesuit missionary sent to the Mohawk Valley in North America is the subject of New Generation Thinker Gemma Tidman's essay. This race game, a little like Snakes and Ladders, depicts the path of a Christian life and afterlife. Gemma explores what the game tells us about how powerful people have long turned to play, images, and other persuasive means to secure converts and colonial subjects.
Dr Gemma Tidman is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University London and a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to put research on radio. You can hear more from her in Free Thinking discussions about Game-playing, and Sneezing, smells and noses.
Producer: Torquil MacLeod
Kant today, Spice Girls Reunited, Impersonating an Animal
New Thinking: Exploring the local
Tacitus, Byron's fanmail and Bluey
Change, scrabble and cultural christianity
Hobbes, Abba, Waterloo and margarine
Unravelling plainness
Pranks
What does feminist art mean?
New Thinking: Light and Darkness
Approaches to death
New Thinking: East West artistic connections
Writing Place
Arteries of tomorrow
New Thinking: How water shapes our history and environment
The Legacy of the Laundries
Gas, oil and the Essex blues
Weird Viking Bodies
From algorithms to oceans
Germany’s Mary Wollstonecraft
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Global News Podcast
Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4
The Infinite Monkey Cage
You’re Dead to Me
Elis James and John Robins