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The author reconstructs the lived experience of both captors and captives to show that captivity was always intertwined with gender struggles, providing a novel perspective on the struggles over female authority pervasive in colonial America.
It was on the frontier, where “civilized” men and women confronted the “wilderness,” that Europeans first became Americans—or so authorities from Frederick Jackson Turner to Theodore Roosevelt claimed. But as the frontier disappeared, Americans believed they needed a new mechanism for fixing their collective identity; and they found it, historian Molly K. Varley suggests, in tales of white Americans held captive by Indians. For Americans in the Progressive Era (1890–1916) these stories of Indian captivity seemed to prove that the violence of national expansion had been justified, that citizens’ individual suffering had been heroic, and that settlers’ contact with Indians and ...
How ordinary people use the past to shape their sense of self and community; People know who they are by fixing themselves in place and time. They keep the past in numerous ways - not simply by writing histories but also by telling stories, creating pictures, collecting memorabilia, preserving old homes, and tracing genealogies. As Michael C. Batinski shows in this imaginative study, the pastkeepers of Deerfield, Massachusetts, have long illustrated this human yearning to connect with past and place. For five centuries people in this small New England town have passed stories from one generation to the next, preserved homes, and established one of the nation's first historical societies and local history museums. Like many small places in the American landscape, Batinski points out, Deerfield does not fit into the history we learn in textbooks. With the exception of the famous French and Indian raid on the town in 1704, nothing of national significance has happened there. Yet that has not diminished the interest of local inhabitants in establishing and maintaining a vital connection to the past. Different groups, from Native Pocumtuck to Puritan settlers to the grandchildren of Pol
The volume Gardens of Madeira – Gardens of the World. Contemporary Approaches displays present tendencies in calling upon the idea of gardens, being a wide-range approach to their literary, sociological and cultural representations. The book`s four parts: “Madeira: A Garden in the Sea?”, “Gardens as Temporal and Spatial Category. Cultural and Literary Approaches”, “Gardens as an Expression. Socio-cultural Perspectives” and “Re-Creating the Archetypal Garden – Discourses and Practices” refer to vast geographical and cultural areas, starting with the very complex sample of the overseas-yet-European Island of Madeira, and then joining the exemplification material from histor...
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In Providence Tales and the Birth of American Literature, James D. Hartman uncovers the genesis of the captivity narrative in the English providence tale and its transformation in the seventeenth century. Exploring the cultural context in which both English providence tales and their American counterparts emerged - focusing in particular on the influence of religious, scientific, and literary developments during this critical period - Hartman offers a provocative reassessment of the origins of American literature.
Katherine Grandjean shows that the English conquest of New England was not just a matter of consuming territory, of transforming woods into farms. It entailed a struggle to control the flow of information—who could travel where, what news could be sent, over which routes winding through the woods along the early American communications frontier.