The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero

The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero

Author: Gordon M. Sayre

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2006-05-18

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0807877018

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The leaders of anticolonial wars of resistance--Metacom, Pontiac, Tecumseh, and Cuauhtemoc--spread fear across the frontiers of North America. Yet once defeated, these men became iconic martyrs for postcolonial national identity in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. By the early 1800s a craze arose for Indian tragedy on the U.S. stage, such as John Augustus Stone's Metamora, and for Indian biographies as national historiography, such as the writings of Benjamin Drake, Francis Parkman, and William Apess. With chapters on seven major resistance struggles, including the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the Natchez Massacre of 1729, The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero offers an analysis of not only the tragedies and epics written about these leaders, but also their own speeches and strategies, as recorded in archival sources and narratives by adversaries including Hernan Cortes, Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz, Joseph Doddridge, Robert Rogers, and William Henry Harrison. Sayre concludes that these tragedies and epics about Native resistance laid the foundation for revolutionary culture and historiography in the three modern nations of North America, and that, at odds with the trope of the complaisant "vanishing Indian," these leaders presented colonizers with a cathartic reproof of past injustices.


Savagism and Civilization

Savagism and Civilization

Author: Roy Harvey Pearce

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1988-05-12

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 0520908678

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First published in 1953, revised in 1964, and presented here with a new foreword by Arnold Krupat and new postscript by the author, Roy Harvey Pearce's Savagism and Civilization is a classic in the genre of history of ideas. Examining the political pamphlets, missionaries' reports, anthropologists' accounts, and the drama, poetry, and novels of the 18th and early 19th centuries, Professor Pearce traces the conflict between the idea of the noble savage and the will to Christianize the heathen and appropriate their land, which ended with the near extermination of Native American culure.


Blood on the Stage, 1800 to 1900

Blood on the Stage, 1800 to 1900

Author: Amnon Kabatchnik

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2017-09-22

Total Pages: 738

ISBN-13: 1538106183

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This volume examines the key representations of transgression drama produced between 1800 and 1900. Arranged in chronological order, the entries consist of plot summary (often including significant dialogue), performance data (if available), opinions by critics and scholars, and other features.


The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

Author: Austin Reed

Publisher: Modern Library

Published: 2017-01-24

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0812986911

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The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writer—recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars—sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America. “[A] harrowing [portrait] of life behind bars . . . part confession, part jeremiad, part lamentation, part picaresque novel (reminiscent, at times, of Dickens and Defoe).”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE In 2009, scholars at Yale University came across a startling manuscript: the memoir of Austin Reed, a free black man born in the 1820s who spent most of his early life ricocheting between forced labor in prison and forced labor as an indentured servant. Lost for more than one hundred and fifty years, the handwritten document is the first known prison memoir written by an African American. Corroborated by prison records and other documentary sources, Reed’s text gives a gripping first-person account of an antebellum Northern life lived outside slavery that nonetheless bore, in its day-to-day details, unsettling resemblances to that very institution. Now, for the first time, we can hear Austin Reed’s story as he meant to tell it. He was born to a middle-class black family in the boomtown of Rochester, New York, but when his father died, his mother struggled to make ends meet. Still a child, Reed was placed as an indentured servant to a nearby family of white farmers near Rochester. He was caught attempting to set fire to a building and sentenced to ten years at Manhattan’s brutal House of Refuge, an early juvenile reformatory that would soon become known for beatings and forced labor. Seven years later, Reed found himself at New York’s infamous Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir, which explores America’s first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmate’s point of view, recalling the great cruelties and kindnesses he experienced in those places and excavating patterns of racial segregation, exploitation, and bondage that extended beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding South, into free New York. Accompanied by fascinating historical documents (including a series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life), The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon beauty that tells a story of nineteenth-century racism, violence, labor, and captivity in a proud, defiant voice. Reed’s memoir illuminates his own life and times—as well as ours today. Praise for The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict “One of the most fascinating and important memoirs ever produced in the United States.”—Annette Gordon-Reed, The Washington Post “Remarkable . . . triumphantly defiant . . . The book’s greatest value lies in the gap it fills.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Reed displays virtuosic gifts for narrative that, a century and a half later, earn and hold the reader’s ear.”—Thomas Chatterton Williams, San Francisco Chronicle “[The book’s] urgency and relevance remain undiminished. . . . This exemplary edition recovers history without permanently trapping it in one interpretation.”—The Guardian “A sensational, novelistic telling of an eventful life.”—The Paris Review “Vivid and painful.”—NPR “Lyrical and graceful in one sentence, burning with fury and hellfire in the next.”—Columbus Free Press


The Early Republic and Rise of National Identity

The Early Republic and Rise of National Identity

Author: Jeffrey H. Hacker

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-11-20

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1317457366

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The Early Republic and the Rise of National Identity, a new title in the six-title series History Through Literature: American Voices, American Themes, provides insights and analysis regarding the history, literature, and cultural climate of the formative period of the Early Republic through the early 1860s. It brings together informational text and primary documents that cover notable historic events and trends, authors, literary works, social movements, and cultural and artistic themes. The Early Republic and the Rise of National Identity begins with an interdisciplinary Chronology that identifies, defines, and places in context the notable historical events, literary works, authors' lives, and cultural landmarks of the period. This is followed by a comprehensive overview essay that summarizes the era's major historical trends, social movements, cultural and artistic themes, literary voices, and enduring works as reflections of each other and the spirit of the times. The core content comprises 20-30 articles on representative writers of the period, along with excerpts from essential literary works that highlight a historical theme, sociocultural movement, or the confluence of the two. These excerpts serve the Common Core emphasis on "informational texts from a broad range of cultures and periods", including "stories, drama, poetry, and literary nonfiction".


Ghosts of Futures Past

Ghosts of Futures Past

Author: Dr. Molly McGarry

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008-05-26

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0520934067

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Ghosts of Futures Past guides readers through the uncanny world of nineteenth-century American spiritualism. More than an occult parlor game, this was a new religion, which channeled the voices of the dead, linked present with past, and conjured new worldly and otherworldly futures. Tracing the persistence of magic in an emergent culture of secularism, Molly McGarry brings a once marginalized practice to the center of American cultural history. Spiritualism provided an alchemical combination of science and magic that called into question the very categories of male and female, material and immaterial, self and other, living and dead. Dissolving the boundaries between them opened Spiritualist practitioners to other voices and, in turn, allowed them to imagine new social worlds and forge diverse political affinities.


Reimagining A Raisin in the Sun

Reimagining A Raisin in the Sun

Author: Rebecca Ann Rugg

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2012-04-15

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0810128136

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This book is a collection of four contemporary plays that reflect the themes of racial and cultural difference of Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.