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CHARLOTTE GORDON
Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America's First Poet
From Publishers Weekly
When Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672) published her first book of poetry, The Tenth Muse, in 1650, she called it the "ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain." Yet, as poet Gordon (Two Girls on a Raft)
demonstrates in this plodding and unilluminating biography, Bradstreet
uttered those words more out of self-defense than regret. From her
adolescence to the publication of her book, the Puritan poet viewed her
work as a vocation that enabled her to worship God in vivid homespun
images and to express sometimes complex theological ideas in plain
language. Gordon depicts Bradstreet as a woman of her time, required to
submit to her father and husband in religious and social matters.
Gordon demonstrates that Bradstreet nevertheless benefited from the
privileges of a literary education. Her family's social and religious
circle included the most important figures of the early 17th century,
from John Winthrop to Roger Williams. While her book was very popular
at its publication, Bradstreet's reputation waned after the Civil War,
to be recovered in the 20th century by her influence on poets such as
Anne Sexton and John Berryman. Regrettably, Gordon's wearisome focus on
the well-known facts of Bradstreet's upbringing leaves little room for
a significant exploration of her poetic life and works. 8 pages of
b&w illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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CHARLES MANN
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
1491 is not so much the story of a year, as of what that year
stands for: the long-debated (and often-dismissed) question of what
human civilization in the Americas was like before the Europeans
crashed the party. The history books most Americans were (and still
are) raised on describe the continents before Columbus as a vast,
underused territory, sparsely populated by primitives whose cultures
would inevitably bow before the advanced technologies of the Europeans.
For decades, though, among the archaeologists, anthropologists,
paleolinguists, and others whose discoveries Charles C. Mann brings
together in 1491, different stories have been emerging. Among
the revelations: the first Americans may not have come over the Bering
land bridge around 12,000 B.C. but by boat along the Pacific coast 10
or even 20 thousand years earlier; the Americas were a far more urban,
more populated, and more technologically advanced region than generally
assumed; and the Indians, rather than living in static harmony with
nature, radically engineered the landscape across the continents, to
the point that even "timeless" natural features like the Amazon
rainforest can be seen as products of human intervention. Mann is
well aware that much of the history he relates is necessarily
speculative, the product of pot-shard interpretation and precise
scientific measurements that often end up being radically revised in
later decades. But the most compelling of his eye-opening revisionist
stories are among the best-founded: the stories of early
American-European contact. To many of those who were there, the
earliest encounters felt more like a meeting of equals than one of
natural domination. And those who came later and found an emptied
landscape that seemed ripe for the taking, Mann argues convincingly,
encountered not the natural and unchanging state of the native
American, but the evidence of a sudden calamity: the ravages of what
was likely the greatest epidemic in human history, the smallpox and
other diseases introduced inadvertently by Europeans to a population
without immunity, which swept through the Americas faster than the
explorers who brought it, and left behind for their discovery a land
that held only a shadow of the thriving cultures that it had sustained
for centuries before.
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DAVID MURRAY
Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Early Indian-White Exchanges
Whether they involved goods, words, or ideas, acts of giving and trading were fundamental in early Indian-white contacts. But how did these transactions function across the two cultures, and what did they mean to each? In this book, David Murray explores a range of early exchanges between Europeans and Indians, showing how they operated within a set of interlocking economies-linguistic, religious, as well as material.
Murray begins by examining the crucial role of gift-giving. Like the double function of the key, which both locks and unlocks, the gift-with its simultaneous action of offering something and demanding a return-expressed the paradoxical nature of early Indian-white encounters. Because the power to give was associated with ideas of sovereignty, both sides often preferred to represent exchanges as gift-giving rather than trading or selling.
To illustrate the complexities of these cross-cultural transactions, the author looks closely at the work of linguist, trader, and missionary Roger Williams, whose A Key into the Language of America at once serves the purposes of translation, conversion, and trade. Murray also examines the changing meaning and representation of wampum, the quintessential medium of exchange in the early colonial period, as well as the multiple processes of conversion taking place as Christian ideas were incorporated into Indian cultures.
According to the author, only by recognizing the ways in which objects and ideas circulated and took on value in interrelated economies can we understand the contested "middle ground" between Europeans and Indians of the colonial Northeast.
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NATHANIEL PHILBRICK
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In this remarkable effort, National Book Award–winner Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea)
examines the history of Plymouth Colony. In the early 17th century, a
small group of devout English Christians fled their villages to escape
persecution, going first to Holland, then making the now infamous
10-week voyage to the New World. Rather than arriving in the summer
months as planned, they landed in November, low on supplies. Luckily,
they were met by the Wampanoag Indians and their wizened chief,
Massasoit. In economical, well-paced prose, Philbrick masterfully
recounts the desperate circumstances of both the settlers and their
would-be hosts, and how the Wampanoags saved the colony from certain
destruction. Indeed, there was a first Thanksgiving, the author notes,
and for over 50 years the Wampanoags and the Pilgrims lived in peace,
becoming increasingly interdependent. But in 1675, 56 years after the
colonists' landing, Massasoit's heir, Philip, launched a confusing war
on the English that, over 14 horrifying months, claimed 5,000 lives, a
huge percentage of the colonies' population. Impeccably researched and
expertly rendered, Philbrick's account brings the Plymouth Colony and
its leaders, including William Bradford, Benjamin Church and the
bellicose, dwarfish Miles Standish, vividly to life. More importantly,
he brings into focus a gruesome period in early American history. For
Philbrick, this is yet another award-worthy story of survival. (May 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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BRENTON D. SIMONS
Witches, Rakes, And Rogues:
True Stories of Scam, Scandal, Murder, And Mayhem in Boston, 1630-1775
Brenton Simons gives us true stories that portray a sampling of the
creatively scandalous characters in colonial Boston. Their escapades
survived in diaries and journals, letters, court records, newspapers,
and broadsides. He put together a fascinating group of
never-before-told episodes, and he researched the truth behind
fragments of tales which had been handed down.
Witches, Rakes, and Rogues provides a window into the lives of
colorful colonial Bostonian characters and their innocent "victims," at
a time when the get-away vehicle was a horse, or a boat. The reader
will discover women and men who were unsavory, persuasive and
seductive, conniving, stealthy, unethical, and just plain ridiculous in
their expectations that they could fool or delude others into thinking
they were engaged in legitimate pursuits. Some of these characters are
likeable on the surface, and despicable underneath.
Are we more sophisticated and knowledgeable today, to avoid getting
swindled by some of the too-good-to-be-true deals which were offered to
the gullible, in these pre-Revolution stories? I highly recommend the
book to readers who enjoy true tales of intrigue, as well as to
historians and genealogists curious about some of the "real" people and
the times in colonial Boston.
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RICHARD SOLTKIN & JAMES K. FOLSOM (EDITORS)
So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676-1677
For the newly established
New England colonies, the war with the Indians of 1675-77 was a
catastrophe that pushed the settlements perilously close to worldly
ruin. Moreover, it seemed to call into question the religious mission
and spiritual status of a group that considered itself a Chosen People,
carrying out a divinely inspired "errand into the wilderness." Seven
texts reprinted here reveal efforts of Puritan writers to make sense of
King Philip's War. Largely unavailable since the 19th century, they
represent the various divisions of Puritan society and literary forms
typical of Puritan writing, from which emerged some of the most vital
genres of American popular writing. Thoroughly annotated, the book
contains a general introduction and introductions to each text.
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TERESA A. TOULOUSE
The Captive's Position:
Female Narrative, Male Identity, and Royal Authority in Colonial New England
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.
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