Fire along the sky
Robert Moss
Fleeing London for the unexplored America of the mid-1700s, Shane Hardacre seeks out his kinsman Sir William Johnson, the king's Superintendent of Indians.
Read Time: ~6.3 hr
White captives
by June Namias (2000)
About this book
White Captives offers a new analysis of Indian-white coexistence on the American frontier. June Namias shows that visual, literary, and historical accounts of the capture of Euro-Americans by Indians during the colonial Indian Wars, the American Revolution, and the Civil War are commentaries on the uncertain boundaries of gender, race, and culture. She demonstrates that these captivity materials, which most often feature as victims white women and children (the most vulnerable members of their communities), vividly portray anxieties about gender and ethnicity on the frontier and in American society. Namias begins by comparing the experiences and representations of male and female captives over time and on successive frontiers, from colonial New England to mid-nineteenth-century Minnesota, and explores how the stories transformed victims of historical circumstance into heroes and heroines. She then uses the narratives of three captives - Jane McCrea, Mary Jemison, and Sarah Wakefield - as case studies, arguing that they describe the fears of sexual contact between native cultures and white settlers and illustrate issues of female survival, independence, and competence. Moreover, she finds that these and other stories also reflect the major role of women and children in the migration process. According to Namias, both the historical reality and the reworked tales of capture offered white Americans new ways of looking at gender and ethnic relations by contrasting their own roles and value with those presumed to be Indian. Thus, while elements of horror, propaganda, mythmaking, and ethnographic documentary characterized the accounts, captivity materials served a larger purpose by providing a framework for notions of gender and cultural conflict on the frontier.
Setting / LocationLondon & UK
Story EraModern Era
Protagonist / CoreWhite captives Lead Character
Readers who enjoyed this also loved
Richard Carvel
Winston Churchill
[This] novel focuses on the life of Richard Carvel; a wealthy young man from a prominent Maryland family just before and during the Revoloutionary War... Set at first around Annapolis, it's about a boy (Carvel) who is kidnapped and sent to England by pirates under his wicked uncle's direction in order to cheat him out of his estate. Meeting all sorts of major figures of the day, including John Paul Jones and Edmund Burke, he has all kinds of adventures in London. When the war breaks out he goes to sea again, this time aboard a ship commanded by Jones. He participates in the famous sea battle between the "Bonhomme Richard" and the "Serapis" (these might be the best scenes in the book). Wounded, he is brought to London to recuperate; he marries his childhood sweetheart there and they both sail to Annapolis to live.
Virginia Woolf against empire
Kathy J. Phillips
From her first book to her last, Virginia Woolf consistently satirized British society. Only in recent years, however, has Woolf been recognized as a political thinker, let alone one with a sophisticated grasp of complex ideologies. In Virginia Woolf against Empire, Kathy J. Phillips makes a major contribution to the growing recognition of Woolf as a cultural commentator. Phillips argues that Woolf satirizes social institutions largely through incongruous juxtapositions that link empire making, militarism, and gender relations. One of Woolf's key insights, Phillips shows, is her exposure of a pervasive cultural image that equates women and land - a metaphor resulting from her culture's displacement of sexuality onto militarism and the transference of the individual's need to be included into an all-embracing empire. As Woolf's novels demonstrate, the metaphor works in both directions: to corrupt the relation of men to women with possessiveness and to turn England's relation to its colonies into a kind of substitute for sexual gratification. A unique feature of this study is Phillips's investigation of how Leonard Woolf's books on colonialism specifically influenced Virginia Woolf's novels and vice versa. Virginia Woolf drew her concepts of political systems and theories from her husband's anti-imperialist writings. Phillips also shows how specific factual details from Leonard Woolf's books help to illuminate some of Virginia Woolf's metaphors and allusions.
The traitor's smile
Patricia Elliott
In 1793, Eugénie de Boncoeur arrives at the home of her English uncle and cousin, but the French Revolution has pursued her in the form of Guy Deschamps, who is determined to bring her back to Paris to marry the Pale Assassin.