Hannah Duston's Sister
Hannah Duston's Sister

Author: Sybil Smith

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2005-12

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0595368425

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A story of infidelity, kidnapping, lust, infanticide, murder; the synopsis reads like the cover of a true crime novel. The difference is, it happened four hundred years ago. Americans like to view their history through rose-tinted glasses. They imagine the Puritans dressed in their drab homespun, sweeping hearths and singing hymns. But a close examination of these "good old days" reveals our ancestors suffered more than their share of horror, abuse and pain. The true story of Hannah Dustan and her sister, Elizabeth, researched and written by an author descended from these very women, stunningly uncovers that hidden history. Once you begin to read this novel it grips you every bit as much as the tragic tales that fascinate us today. When you finish it you will see that humans, wherever and whenever they live, are prisoners of the same passions. It begins with two women riding in a wagon in June, 1693. One is Elizabeth Emerson, and the other is a black woman whose name is not recorded. Both have been convicted of murdering their newborn babes, and are going to their hanging on Boston Common. Read on to find out how it ends.

Massacre on the Merrimack
Massacre on the Merrimack

Author: Jay Atkinson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2015-10-01

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1493018175

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Early on March 15, 1697, a band of Abenaki warriors in service to the French raided the English frontier village of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Striking swiftly, the Abenaki killed twenty-seven men, women, and children, and took thirteen captives, including thirty-nine-year-old Hannah Duston and her week-old daughter, Martha. A short distance from the village, one of the warriors murdered the squalling infant by dashing her head against a tree. After a forced march of nearly one hundred miles, Duston and two companions were transferred to a smaller band of Abenaki, who camped on a tiny island located at the junction of the Merrimack and Contoocook Rivers, several miles north of present day Concord, New Hampshire. This was the height of King William’s War, both a war of terror and a religious contest, with English Protestantism vying for control of the New World with French Catholicism. After witnessing her infant’s murder, Duston resolved to get even. Two weeks into their captivity, Duston and her companions, a fifty-one-year-old woman and a twelve-year-old boy, moved among the sleeping Abenaki with tomahawks and knives, killing two men, two women, and six children. After returning to the bloody scene alone to scalp their victims, Duston and the others escaped down the Merrimack River in a stolen canoe. They braved treacherous waters and the constant threat of attack and recapture, returning to tell their story and collect a bounty for the scalps. Was Hannah Duston the prototypical feminist avenger, or the harbinger of the Native American genocide? In this meticulously researched and riveting narrative, bestselling author Jay Atkinson sheds new light on the early struggle for North America.

A Centre of Wonders
A Centre of Wonders

Author: Janet Moore Lindman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780801487392

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The American past of transcendentalism, utilitarianism, utopianism, and spiritual freedom here has its necessary counter or complement in this corporal history of early America providing "the historical importance of sentience and materiality in early American societies.. ." While the materialism of early Americans may be less than revelatory in an age of slavery, tribal genocide, and the more or less extreme proscription of women's activity, the approach is nonetheless useful to detail the interactions between, and conceptions about, bodies classified as white, black, red, male and female. Contributors, primarily professors of history, American studies, English, and religious studies, utilize the founding body (of) theories of Foucault, Mary Douglas, Elaine Scarry, Judith Butler, and Helene Cixous to examine American materialism from 1600-1830, primarily east of the Mississippi. c. Book News Inc.

Blood Sisters
Blood Sisters

Author: Barbara Keating

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2011-08-31

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 1446496562

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During their childhood years in the Kenya Highlands of the 1950s, three girls from vastly different backgrounds become blood sisters, promising that nothing will ever destroy the bond between them. But as they grow up love rivalries, broken promises and the tensions and violence of a newly independent Kenya threaten to tear their childhood dreams apart.

A Centre of Wonders
A Centre of Wonders

Author: Janet Moore Lindman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1501717634

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Images of bodies and bodily practices abound in early America: from spirit possession, Fasting Days, and infanticide to running the gauntlet, going "naked as a sign," flogging, bundling, and scalping. All have implications for the study of gender, sexuality, masculinity, illness, the "body politic," spirituality, race, and slavery. The first book devoted solely to the history and theory of the body in early American cultural studies brings together authors representing diverse academic disciplines.Drawing on a wide range of archival sources—including itinerant ministers' journals, Revolutionary tracts and broadsides, advice manuals, and household inventories—they approach the theoretical analysis of the body in exciting new ways. A Centre of Wonders covers such varied topics as dance and movement among Native Americans; invading witch bodies in architecture and household spaces; rituals of baptism, conversion, and church discipline; eighteenth-century women's journaling; and the body as a rhetorical device in the language of diplomacy.

Inventing Destiny
Inventing Destiny

Author: Jimmy L. Bryan, Jr.

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2019-09-20

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0700628185

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The mythmakers of US expansion have expressed “manifest destiny” in many different ways—and so have its many discontents. A multidisciplinary study that delves into these contrasts and contradictions, Inventing Destiny offers a broad yet penetrating cultural history of nineteenth-century US territorial acquisition—a history that gives voice to the underrepresented actors who significantly complicated US narratives of empire, from Native Americans and Anglo-American women to anti- and non-national expansionists. The contributors—established and emerging scholars from history, American studies, literary studies, art history, and religious studies—make use of source materials and techniques as various as artwork, religion, geospatial analysis, interior colonialism, and storytelling alongside fresh readings of traditional historical texts. In doing so, they seek to illuminate the complexities rather than simplify, to transgress borders rather than redraw them, and to amplify the under-told stories rather than repeat the old ones. Their work identifies and explores the obscure—or obscured—fictions of expansion, seeking a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of culture creation and recognizing those who resisted US territorial aggrandizement. In sum, Inventing Destiny demonstrates the value of cross-disciplinary approaches to the study of the multiple rationales, critiques, interventions, and contingencies of nineteenth-century US expansion.

Murder & Mayhem in Essex County
Murder & Mayhem in Essex County

Author: Robert Wilhelm

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2011-11-08

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 1614234310

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“The importance of the area to early America . . . make the book a must-read for anyone interested in the dark side of New England history” (Early American Crime). The idea of a criminal record originated in the early seventeenth century when the magistrates of the Massachusetts Bay Colony began recording dates, places, victims and criminals. Despite, or perhaps because of, the strict code of the Puritans, some early settlers earned quite the rap sheet that landed them either in the stocks or at the end of a noose. With biting wit and an eye for the macabre, local author Robert Wilhelm traces the first documented cases of murder and mayhem in Essex County, Massachusetts. Discover the story of Hannah Duston’s revenge on her Abenaki Indian captors, why the witchcraft hysteria hung over Salem and Andover and how Rachel Wall made her living as a pirate. Decide for yourself whether the accused are guilty or if history lends itself to something else entirely. Includes photos!