Why do narratives of Indian captivity emerge in New England between 1682 and 1707 and why are these texts, so centrally concerned with women's experience, supported and even written by a powerful group of Puritan ministers? In The Captive's Position, Teresa Toulouse argues for a new interpretation of the captivity narrative—one that takes into account the profound shifts in political and social authority and legitimacy that occurred in New England at the end of the seventeenth century. While North American narratives of Indian captivity had been written before this period by French priests and other European adventurers, those stories had focused largely on Catholic conversions and martyrdoms or male strategies for survival among the Indians. In contrast, the New England texts represented a colonial Protestant woman who was separated brutally from her family but who demonstrated qualities of religious acceptance, humility, and obedience until she was eventually returned to her own community. Toulouse explores how the female captive's position came to resonate so powerfully for traditional male elites in the second and third generation of the Massachusetts colony. Threatened by ongoing wars with Indians and French as well as by a range of royal English interventions in New England political and cultural life, figures such as Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and John Williams perceived themselves to be equally challenged by religious and social conflicts within New England. By responding to and employing popular representations of female captivity, they were enabled to express their ambivalence toward the world of their fathers and toward imperial expansion and thereby to negotiate their own complicated sense of personal and cultural identity. Examining the captivity narratives of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Dustan, Hannah Swarton, and John Williams (who comes to stand in for the female captive), Toulouse asserts the need to read these gendered texts as cultural products that variably engage, shape, and confound colonial attitudes toward both Europe and the local scene in Massachusetts. In doing so, The Captive's Position offers a new story of the rise and breakdown of orthodox Puritan captivities and a meditation on the relationship between dreams of authority and historical change.

White Captives offers a new perspective of Indian-white coexistence on the American frontier through analysis of historical, anthropological, political, and literary materials. --> Namias shows that visual, literary, and historical accounts of the capture of Euro-Americans by Indians are commentaries on the uncertain boundaries of gender, race, and culture during the colonial Indian Wars, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. She compares the experiences and representations of male and female captives over time and on successive frontiers and examines the narratives of captives Jane McCrea, Mary Jemison, and Sarah Wakefield.

In a radically new interpretation and synthesis of highly popular 18th- and 19th-century genres, Michelle Burnham examines the literature of captivity, and, using Homi Bhabha's concept of interstitiality as a base, provides a valuable redescription of the ambivalent origins of the US national narrative. Stories of colonial captives, sentimental heroines, or fugitive slaves embody a "binary division between captive and captor that is based on cultural, national, or racial difference," but they also transcend these pre-existing antagonistic dichotomies by creating a new social space, and herein lies their emotional power. Beginning from a simple question on why captivity, particularly that of women, so often inspires a sentimental response, Burnham examines how these narratives elicit both sympathy and pleasure. The texts carry such great emotional impact precisely because they "traverse those very cultural, national, and racial boundaries that they seem so indelibly to inscribe. Captivity literature, like its heroines, constantly negotiates zones of contact," and crossing those borders reveals new cultural paradigms to the captive and, ultimately, the reader.

A fascinating anthology of narratives from the period 1735-1830, by European women who recount their enslavement in North Africa. The first such collection, it includes an extensive introduction which links the discourse on contemporary Western women captives in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq with that of former white captives in North Africa.

The captivity narrative, the earliest genre of American popular literature, continues to be of cultural significance in late 20th-century Hollywood. Many popular films of the last four decades incorporate the most common elements of the captivity narrative tradition, including a politically contested frontier setting and a plot involving innocent, family-oriented white Americans held captive by hostile, culturally alien natives. At the same time, these films offer something new to the narrative tradition: they focus on the captive who resists rescue and the challenge this resistance poses to American cultural self-confidence. By focusing on the lost captive, these films, beginning with The Searchers (1956), deal with questions about American identity raised by a white American's cultural and potentially political transformation. Films as diverse as Little Big Man, Taxi Driver, and The Deer Hunter adapted the captivity narrative's conventions to criticize aspects of contemporary American society and reject outworn models of male heroism; at the same time, however, they retained the genre's traditional assumption of white superiority and its fear of female sexuality. Bibliography. Index.

Recent research has demonstrated that early modern slavery was much more widespread than the traditional concentration on plantation slavery in the context of European colonial expansion would suggest. Slavery and slave trading, though little researched, were common across wide stretches of Eurasia, and a slave economy played a vital part in the political and cultural contacts between Russia and its Eurasian neighbours. This volume concentrates on captivity, slavery, ransom and abolition in the vicinity of the Eurasian steppe from the early modern period to recent developments and explores their legacy and relevance down to the modern times. The contributions centre on the Russian Empire, while bringing together scholars from various historical traditions of the leading states in this region, including Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire, and their various successor states. At the centre of attention are transfers, transnational fertilizations and the institutions, rituals and representations facilitating enslavement, exchanges and ransoming. The essays in this collection define and quantify slavery, covering various regions in the steppe and its vicinity and looking at trans-cultural issues and the implications of slavery and ransom for social, economic and political connections across the steppe. In so doing the volume provides both a broad overview of the subject, and a snapshot of the latest research from leading scholars working in this area.

From the first European encounters with Native American women to today's crisis of sexual assault, The Oxford Handbook of American Women's and Gender History boldly interprets the diverse history of women and how ideas about gender shaped their access to political and cultural power in North America. Over twenty-nine chapters, this handbook illustrates how women's and gender history can shape how we view the past, looking at how gender influenced people's lives as they participated in migration, colonialism, trade, warfare, artistic production, and community building. Theoretically cutting edge, each chapter is alive with colorful historical characters, from young Chicanas transforming urban culture, to free women of color forging abolitionist doctrines, Asian migrant women defending the legitimacy of their marriages, and transwomen fleeing incarceration. Together, their lives constitute the history of a continent. Leading scholars across multiple generations demonstrate the power of innovative research to excavate a history hidden in plain sight. Scrutinizing silences in the historical record, from the inattention to enslaved women's opinions to the suppression of Indian women's involvement in border diplomacy, the authors challenge the nature of historical evidence and remap what counts in our interpretation of the past. Together and separately, these essays offer readers a deep understanding of the variety and centrality of women's lives to all dimensions of the American past, even as they show that the boundaries of "women," "American," and "history" have shifted across the centuries.

Authority, Piracy, and Captivity in Colonial Spanish American Writing examines the intricate bond between poetry and history writing that shaped the theory and practice of empire in early colonial Spanish-American society. The book explores from diverse perspectives how epic and heroic poetry served to construe a new Spanish-American elite of original explorers and conquistadors in Juan de Castellanos’s Elegies of Illustrious Men of the Indies. Similarly, this book offers an interpretation of Castellanos’s writings that shows his critical engagement with the reformist project postulated in Alonso de Ercilla’s LaAraucana, and it elucidates the complex poetic discourse Castellanos created to defend the interests of the early generation of explorers and conquistadors in the aftermath of the promulgation of the New Laws and the mounting criticism of the institution of the encomienda. Within the larger context of a new poetics of imperialistic expansion, this book shows how the Elegies offers one of the earliest examples of the reconfiguration of some of the main tenets of Petrarchism/Garcilacism, as well as the bold transmutation of dominant poetic discourses that had until then been typically associated with the nobility. Focusing on the practice of poetic imitation (imitatio) and the themes of authority, piracy, and captivity, this book shows the transformation undergone by heroic poetry owing to Europe’s encounter with America and illustrates the contribution of learned heroic verse to the emergence of a Spanish-American literary tradition.

Part 1 of the final volume of A History of the Native People of Canada treats eastern Canada and the southern Subarctic regions of the Prairies from A.D. 500 to European contact. It examines the association of archaeological sites with the Native peoples recorded in European documents and particularly the agricultural revolution of the Iroquoian people of the Lower Great Lakes and Upper St. Lawrence River. Part 2 was never completed, as the author passed away.