Captivity Narratives Research Articles

Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean, by Gillian Weiss

Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in Early Modern Mediterranean, by Gillian Weiss, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2011. xvi, 389 pp. $65.00 US (cloth). Gillian Lee Weiss has widely published on ransoming and redemption of French captives in North of Africa in Modern Age. Her book under review here, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in Early Modern Mediterranean, is undoubtedly a major contribution to both growing literature on early modern slavery, and existing literature on sociopolitical dynamics in Western Mediterranean. The book sets itself a highly ambitious task. Through a rich blend of diplomatic, social, and cultural sources, it aims at showing that between 1550 and 1830, liberating French slaves from North Africa changed from expression of Christian charity to a method of state building and, eventually, a rationale for imperial expansion (p. 2). The book advances new arguments about the fluid nature of slavery, association between liberation and state building, and imperialism's roots in (p. 5), as it seeks to understand France's response to and captivity came to form a foundation myth of French empire (p. 6). The book is divided into eight chapters. In first, Weiss offers insights into Mediterranean slavery. Chapter Two analyses politics of captivity and redemption in first half of seventeenth century. Weiss explores crown's failure both to prevent enslavement and to redeem slaves. Chapter Three evaluates how French belonging and Barbary captivity came to seem incompatible, and it examines flowering of first-person French-language captivity narratives. Chapters Four and Five chronicle Louis XIV's politics toward North of Africa. In Chapter Six, Weiss explores contradiction between North African servitude and French idea of freedom. In Chapter Seven, author addresses issue of in Sahara, implications of North African in a time of colonial ascendancy, and racialization of Barbary slavery. Chapter Eight focuses on conquest of and the abolition of white slavery debate. Captives and Corsairs concludes with some paragraphs which return to previous assertions on pertinence of longue duree approach to study of relations between France and North of Africa. Weiss affirms that regeneration and racial servitude, brought together in a broader discourse about liberation, helped make possible France's takeover of Algiers (p. 171). Published in 1949 and reissued in 1966, Fernand Braudel's seminal work The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World in Age of Phillip II helped establish Mediterranean as a field of study, but had little impact in producing a Mediterranean focus in French historiography. In sixties, Mediterranean also became, in words of Dionigi Albera, an anthropological laboratory. In last three decades, many anthropologists and historians have examined whether Mediterranean is a convenient and homogeneous unit of anthropological and historical study. …

Aging Out of Crime

Research on desistance from crime has focused largely on Western regions. While culture has been identified as an important factor to consider, desistance studies largely hold cultural context constant. In this exploratory article, we offer one of the first qualitative examinations of ex-convict resettlement in East Asia. We focus on three aspects salient to the narratives of former prisoners in Hong Kong: their views regarding aging and aging out of crime, their felt sense of agency or willpower to “go straight,” and challenges to expressions of agency related to employment and facing family members. The pivotal importance and mediating effects of social support is underscored. Implications for research on desistance focused outside of occidental regions are explored.

A Cross-Cultural Encounter in Pre-Colonial Burma: Henry Gouger’s Narrative of Commerce and Captivity, 1822–26

An Anglo-Indian merchant, Henry Gouger traveled to Ava on a private trade mission in 1822 and was interned for the duration of the First Anglo-Burmese War (1824–26). This article offers an analysis of his well-known account of these events in A Personal Narrative of Two Years’ Imprisonment in Burmah (1860). A colorful, sentimental narrative, Gouger’s book affords a rare opportunity to study the mentality of a private trader. My article seeks to explain the diversity of views of Burma and its people found in Gouger’s text, with special emphasis on his commercial purpose, shifting fortunes, and unsettled identity. I place Gouger’s experience in the context of diplomatic and military relations between the rival expanding empires of Ava and the English East India Company, and engage with recent scholarship on cross-cultural encounters and travel writing. In so doing, I dissent from grand narratives of colonial contact and question the contention that in the early 19th century, British views of Asia coalesced into a monolithic “Orientalist” stereotype that served colonialist agendas.

Empowering words: outsiders and authorship in early America

Standing outside elite or even middling circles, outsiders who were marginalised by limitations on their freedom and their need to labour for a living had a unique grasp on the profoundly social nature of print and its power to influence public opinion. In Empowering Words , Karen A. Weyler explores how outsiders used ephemeral formats such as broadsides, pamphlets, and newspapers to publish poetry, captivity narratives, formal addresses, and other genres with wide appeal in early America. To gain access to print, outsiders collaborated with amanuenses and editors, inserted their stories into popular genres and cheap media, tapped into existing social and religious networks, and sought sponsors and patrons. They wrote individually, collaboratively, and even corporately, but writing for them was almost always an act of connection. Disparate levels of literacy did not necessarily entail subordination on the part of the less literate collaborator. Even the minimally literate and the illiterate understood the potential for print to be life changing, and outsiders shrewdly employed strategies to assert themselves within collaborative dynamics. Empowering Words covers an array of outsiders including artisans; the minimally literate; the poor, indentured, or enslaved; and racial minorities. By focusing not only on New England, the traditional stronghold of early American literacy, but also on southern towns such as Williamsburg and Charleston, Weyler limns a more expansive map of early American authorship.

Haunted Ground: Journeys Through Paranormal America

Haunted Ground: Journeys Through Paranormal America

“This is a Book about Choices”: Gender, Genre and (Auto)Biographical Prison Narratives

Taking a point of departure in theoretical explorations of who is able to speak and be heard in particular generic contexts, this article examines a recent life-writing trend in Sweden: the publication of (auto)biographical narratives of incarceration, in particular written by female inmates. The article investigates the changing production and consumption practices of autobiographical texts. What is the reader assumed to want from these texts? Through a focus on five autobiographies about and sometimes by female convicts, this article investigates which criminal lives reach the publication circuit at the present moment, which life schemas are presented, and what engagement the texts invoke from the reader. Having stood before the law, the autobiographical subject now stands before the reader. The article argues that specifics pertaining to criminal life are downplayed as the event of the crime and the imprisonment are presented as obstacles to be overcome and the narrative becomes a post-imprisonment one that predominantly deals with strategies of coping. These life narratives are part of a larger neoliberal life-writing trend, offering readers ways of working on the self.

James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma and the Mission in Iraq

Our Nation Has a Missionthough the united states no longer uses Western films to discuss national issues, the films' relationship to American history, or their place in national mythologies, occasionally a Western is released that reminds us their power. Director James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma (2007) is such a Western. It is, I want to argue, an Iraq War Western. And since it is a remake the 1957 3:10 to Yuma, it is able to place the in Iraq in the context two other American missions-the settling the West and the Cold War.In 2003 the United States undertook the liberation Iraq under the banner the most deeply held belief American patriotism, that are a people set apart, a people with a providential (McKenna 6). America needs missions in order to affirm its sense itself as exceptional, alone among the nations the world favored by God. In film, which so often displaces the political with the personal, the idea America's exceptional is often conveyed through stories exceptional Americans. It is the heroic individuals art who often carry the meaning national destiny. In the willingness these characters to act courageously, we see a model for national action. And we see in their virtue and triumphs the promise that a virtuous America will be successful.A number anti-Iraq War films focused specifically on the nature heroism in that conflict in order to deny that war the legitimacy that heroism can bestow. In the Valley Elah (2007) and Redacted (2007) dealt with soldiers who lost their humanity fighting in Iraq, and Hurt Locker (2009), more ambiguously, reduced heroism to an adrenaline addiction. As a character says in In the Valley Elah, you shouldn't send heroes to places like Iraq, [where] everything is fucked up.No genre is more famous for creating heroes and incorporating grand, national themes in the personal stories Americans than the Western. has said that Westerns are about great mythical landscape, Mt. Olympus, in which all the great American themes are played out in this kind fever dream (James Mangold A15). And although the Western returns again and again to the same myths, it does so, according to Mangold, to place the events the day in that mythic landscape. Westerns have a tradition, he noted in an interview, of being able to gracefully and easily fold into their subtext ideas about the moment (Esther 28).The continued influence the cowboy narrative was integral to the way George W. Bush presented himself, the war on terror, and his war in Iraq. It was immediately after 9/11 that he likened Osama Bin Laden to a Western whom he wanted dead or alive. More significant was his mission accomplished announcement. In a culture used to the updating the Western hero to fighter pilots in Star Wars (1977), Top Gun (1986), and Space Cowboys (2000), for example, the link between Bush stepping out the jet in full fighter uniform and the symbolism the Western hero could not be missed. His speech on the aircraft carrier that first day May in 2003 continued the Western theme his visual presence tried to establish. He called Iraq an outlaw regime, invoked the cavalry goal bringing order to parts the country that remain dangerous, used the language Manifest Destiny to announce to the world that our nation has a mission, and at the end tied America's to God (as well as to the Western captivity narrative)-To the captives, come out, he said, quoting from Isaiah 49:9.But just as Western films have long provided mythic examples courageous men who subdue vicious outlaws, as in the original 3:10 to Yuma, which could be used to support American policies such as the Cold War, they also have a history that dates at least to the Vietnam War debunking the myth the Western hero and the idea American exceptionalism that the hero carries. …

Mission and history: the Sisters of the Assumption and Japanese Students in Canada during World War II

The educational work of women religious with Japanese evacuees in British Columbia during the Second World War and Canadian Catholic women’s missions in Japan have been overlooked by most historians. The Sisters of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin of Nicolet, Quebec published chronicles of their mission in Japan (begun in 1934) and in Slocan, B.C. (1943–1946) in their community journal, Assumpta. The community included francophone Canadians and Americans and some Japanese. During the War, the missionaries in Japan were either interned or repatriated. One of the latter Sisters, an American, taught at Slocan and then returned to Japan after the War. This essay draws on Assumpta chronicles to narrate the experience of the Sisters teaching the Japanese in Canada during the Second World War, and suggests that the framework of captivity narratives might be used to further discuss the complexities of the Sisters’ educational mission and history.

Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims as Captivity Narrative

Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims as Captivity Narrative

“The Most Solemn and Impressive Duty”

New York Tribune correspondent Albert Deane Richardson followed his December 1864 escape from a Confederate prison in Salisbury, North Carolina, with a campaign to relieve the suffering Civil War POWs he left behind. Through testimony to Congress, articles in newspapers and magazines, and lectures on the lyceum circuit, Richardson marshaled public outrage to pressure the U.S. government to resume prisoner exchanges or use the threat of retaliation to force the Confederates to treat their prisoners humanely. Richardson's letters reveal he carefully coordinated his testimony and publication of evidence about abuses at Salisbury. Analysis of his public communication reveals he tapped the power of a storytelling genre whose history stretched from the Civil War back to the nations origins: the captivity narrative.

Rehearsing Trauma: The Reader as Interrogator in Prison Narratives

Summary Accounts of detention survivors exert pressure on the theoretical framework that reserves a role for the reader in a post-Freudian hermeneutics of catharsis. In analysing the prison narratives of Ruth First and Emma Mashinini, I explore the position of the imagined reader in the complex dynamic at work when writing emerges from a position of woundedness. A reappraisal of the role of the imagined reader is warranted, in order to accommodate both the formative communality that operates in these texts and the complexity of a political context where “the public” is both ally and adversary, simultaneously enabling and complicating a survivor's self-construction.The task of asserting a new self in writing, to contest the criminalising “vocabulary” of the state security system, is both undermined and made all the more urgent by the overwhelming self-doubt which that system induces. Narrative self-construction can be thought of as an appeal as much as an assertion of self. The paradigm of trauma studies potentially enables attentiveness to the anxiety and vulnerability of detention survival. However, that attentiveness is undermined by theoretical abstractions that locate catharsis deep within individualised subjects and by attempts to imagine human connectedness across a generalised conceptualisation of trauma.

Captive Audiences: Gender, Storytelling, and the Closing of the Illinois Frontier

IntroductionThe spring of 1832 was a season of war on the Illinois frontier. On the last day of May, readers of Springfield's Sangamo Journal could experience the horrors of war vicariously as they read a reprint of a week-old letter by an army lieutenant, Reuben Holmes, whose dramatic prose was matched by the horrifying details he related. Lieutenant Holmes reported:15 men, women and children, the victims of a most inhuman butchery, perpetrated yesterday morning by the ruthless, inhuman barbarians-The men were mutilated beyond the reach of a modest description; the women hung up by the feet, and the most revolting acts of outrage and indecency practiced upon their bodies.1As they read on, Springfielders learned that two teenaged sisters were yet from the site of the massacre, an isolated cluster of cabins on Big Indian Creek in LaSalle County. Readers were likely unaware that by the time they had read of the missing girls, their tribulations had already reached a conclusion. Abducted by the band of Potawatomi Indians that had perpetrated the massacre on May 20th, the sisters-seventeen-year-old Rachel and nineteen-year-old Sylvia Hall-were held captive for ten days, and had since been ransomed for the price of ten horses, wampum, and corn by a delegation of Ho Chunk2 Indians who subsequently delivered them into the custody of Colonel Henry Gratiot at Blue Mounds Fort in Wisconsin. The young women's return to white society had occurred on the same morning that the Journal had reported them missing. As a newspaper item, the story of the Indian Creek Massacre and the Hall captivity was over before it was reported. Yet, for years to come, the incidents would be among the most repeatedly recounted episodes of the four-month fiasco known as the Black Hawk War.3The episode and its subsequent replication provide a unique opportunity to witness the intersecting historical forces of gender, warfare, literature, and politics during Illinois' Jacksonian era. In their immediate context, the sources that chronicled the Halls' experience constitute a rich description of a brief piece of the military and social narrative of the Black Hawk War. As literature, the account eventually earned a place in the broader genre of the captivity narrative. As a repeated episode of gendered history, the Hall story has its appropriate place as a commentary on the role of femininity and masculinity on a violent frontier. While the Black Hawk War granted Illinois' frontier generation one last opportunity in which to forge their martial credentials against an unassimilated Indian foe, it was the constant repetition of a female narrative that would effectively script the meaning of manhood in a state free from Indian resistance.4The central purpose of the present essay is to conduct an analysis of three distinct generations of the Hall captivity tale-as they proliferated between 1832 and 1855-against the gendered landscape of Illinois' changing political culture. To ground the source material for such an endeavor, it is first necessary to set the context for the incident at Indian Creek itself. As such, a prologue of Indian-white relations in the region- beginning with the settlement story of the Old Northwest, narrowing eventually to the details of the Black Hawk War, and ultimately to the fate of Rachel and Sylvia Hall-will precede the interpretive portion of this essay.5The Long War for the Old NorthwestAn understanding of the broader sweep of history into which the Hall sisters and their Potawatomi captors stepped as they fled the grisly scene at Big Indian Creek in May of 1832 requires contemplating over two centuries of Indian crisis in the Western Great Lakes. Faced with demographic, economic, and imperial revolutions of unprecedented scale, the hundreds of Algonquian groups that inhabited the region bounded by the bounded by the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Appalachians, and the shores of the Great Lakes cobbled together as many policies as might be imagined to maintain their interests and their dignity as successive waves of Europeans fought and negotiated for access to land, resources, and loyalty. …

Captivity and hospitality in the New Americas

Abstract This article discusses the languages of hospitality as influential in the construction of nationhood. Concepts such as ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ and ‘otherness’ have all contributed towards the understanding of America as a boundary-enforced country, outlining the mapping and bordering of empire expansion in the New World. The relationship of hospitality with nation building manufactures a sense of entitlement, community and national identity among its citizens. In this context, hospitality links home and comfort to the building of a nation and continent, yet also in a more ominous fashion, implies the demarcation of boundaries, the violent hostility of host and homelands and implied hostility directed towards external factors threatening the conceptual and geographical borders of home. This article examines nineteenth-century captivity narratives by Mary Jemison and Susannah Johnson to further understand the negotiating process of home and visitor relationships between the Anglo European settlers and the Amerindians.

Enduring Captivity: French POW Narratives of World War II

The existence of thousands of post-war novels and autobiographical narratives written about the Second World War in French, many of them critical of the conventional myths and stereotypes bolstered by the political class and media establishment, shows the need for individuals and the sub-groups to which they belong to bear witness to traumatic experiences and to retrieve memories crucial to their identity and recognition as survivors, combatants, or spectators of overwhelming events. The purpose of this essay is to examine the contribution made by narratives of captivity to this process of individual and collective adjustment and reconciliation to defeat and humiliation. One immediate consequence of the 1940 armistice was the surrender and capture of some 1.8 million French soldiers, many of whom remained in German captivity for the rest of the war. Although some 500 mainly literary texts by or about French prisoners of war have been published, few of these narratives have attracted much notice, let alone detailed critical study. My aim here is to analyse a small but representative sample of fictional and semi-autobiographical accounts of captivity, concentrating mainly on authors such as Ambrière, Boulle, Guérin, Hyvernaud, Lanoux, and Perret, whose experience of captivity is presented in works that combine historical testimony with imaginative and innovative writing. Collectively, such works make a significant contribution to our understanding of how ordinary soldiers came to terms with the war and how they strove to communicate this to post-war generations; they also sometimes reveal how the French experience and cultural representation of World War II differ significantly from Anglo-American perceptions.

A thrilling narrative of Indian captivity: dispatches from the Dakota War

A thrilling narrative of Indian captivity: dispatches from the Dakota War

An Authoring Tool for Educational Adventure Games

The genre of educational adventure games is a common and successful choice in game-based learning. The games combine captivating narratives that motivate players to continue playing with game mechanics that are conductive to learning: the gameplay is slow-paced, allowing players to learn at their own pace, and focused on puzzles that can be infused with educational content. While educational adventure games are well suited for learning in most settings, their creation is often challenging for non-technical experts. Furthermore, existing game editors do not account specifically for adaptive adventure games, which can maximize the learning effectiveness of the games by catering to the players’ needs. To address these two challenges, we present a game model for this genre and use this model to build an authoring tool that lowers the threshold for adventure game creation and supports adaptive educational games. The implementation of this concept was evaluated in several studies.

Ethan Allen and Daniel Shays: Contrasting Models of Political Representation in the Early Republic

Ethan Allen and Daniel Shays:Contrasting Models of Political Representation in the Early Republic James M. Greene (bio) In the winter of 1786-87, two of early America's most famous folk heroes nearly crossed paths, as Ethan Allen, chief of the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont, met briefly with two associates of Daniel Shays, the purported leader of the protests in western Massachusetts that shook that state the previous autumn. Allen reported meeting with Luke Day and Eli Parsons shortly before their ill-fated January attack on the national arsenal at Springfield. During their meeting, Day and Parsons reportedly offered Ethan Allen command of the "revolutionary army" they were assembling.1 Allen undoubtedly appeared a kindred spirit to the disgruntled residents of western Massachusetts, having become famous for leading a frontier militia, the Green Mountain Boys, against the authority of both the colonial government of New York and the British Empire.2 The Massachusetts protesters likely imagined themselves as part of the same stream of local resistance as the residents of Vermont since both groups had used collective action to block the proceedings of a legal system they believed favored wealthy, metropolitan interests at the expense of rural communities.3 The protesters in western Massachusetts even adopted the same visual symbolism used by the Green Mountain Boys, with members of both groups placing a sprig of evergreen in their hatbands to show affiliation.4 Despite this apparent compatibility, however, Allen sought to distance himself from the Massachusetts uprising by refusing the offer of leadership and ordering Day and Parsons to leave Vermont. Allen then took the additional step of writing Governor James Bowdoin of Massachusetts to assure him the republic of Vermont would not give asylum to these rebels. In a Boston newspaper in March 1787, after the failed assault on Springfield and the subsequent rout of the insurgents by a small army led by former Continental Army general Benjamin Lincoln, Allen declared he had no further [End Page 125] contact with Shays or his adherents and that "he heartily despised both them and their cause" (Walton 380). While they may have shared similar goals and methods, there would be no collaboration between Ethan Allen and Daniel Shays. The politically savvy Allen likely realized a direct association with the insurgents in Massachusetts would only hamper his efforts to obtain recognition of Vermont's independence. While the threat of the Green Mountain Boys joining the fray in Massachusetts could be a means of pressing for inclusion in the national confederation, an actual collaboration would likely alienate the region from its neighbors. Thus, Allen chose to reject the offer from Day and Parsons, while also publicizing that this offer had been made. This attention to public perception highlights the contrast between Allen and Shays as leaders of popular uprisings: whereas Shays never sought to present himself as the head of a social movement, Allen consciously strove to be the spokesman for Vermont's independence. His talents for self-presentation have established Ethan Allen as a popular hero of the Revolutionary War, despite the fact that he spent much of the conflict either in British custody or at his home in Bennington. Daniel Shays, on the other hand, had served as a captain in the Continental Army and he repeatedly claimed the principles for which he fought the Massachusetts state government in 1786 were the same that had led him to fight the British ten years earlier. Yet Shays has become an iconic American hero only in hindsight, as during the 1780s his name was a watchword for anarchy among many of the early Republic's political elites.5 Why then was Ethan Allen successful in his own time at presenting Vermont's movement toward independence as part of the American Revolution, yet Daniel Shays failed in the effort to depict the claims of the Massachusetts backcountry as continuous with the goals of 1776? One source of this distinction must surely be Allen's prolific writings, especially his 1779 captivity narrative, which enabled him to define his public character in a way Shays never pursued. In much of his writing, Allen sought to position Vermont as a loyal and deserving member of...

American arabesque: Arabs, Islam, and the 19th-century imaginary

American Arabesque examines representations of Arabs, Islam and the Near East in nineteenth-century American culture, arguing that these representations play a significant role in the development of American national identity over the century, revealing largely unexplored exchanges between these two cultural traditions that will alter how we understand them today. Moving from the period of America's engagement in the Barbary Wars through the Holy Land travel mania in the years of Jacksonian expansion and into the writings of romantics such as Edgar Allen Poe, the book argues that not only were Arabs and Muslims prominently featured in nineteenth-century literature, but that the differences writers established between figures such as Moors, Bedouins, Turks and Orientals provide proof of the transnational scope of domestic racial politics. Drawing on both English and Arabic language sources, Berman contends that the fluidity and instability of the term Arab as it appears in captivity narratives, travel narratives, imaginative literature, and ethnic literature simultaneously instantiate and undermine definitions of the American nation and American citizenship.

Fumbling at Your Soul

Fumbling at Your Soul

The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries , and: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century (review)

Reviewed by: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries, and: The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century April Lidinsky (bio) The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland and Mary Klages. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press, 2004, 1384 pp., $45.00 paper. The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume Two: The 20th Century edited by Lisa Maria Hogeland and Shay Brawn. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Press, 2008, 1456 pp., $45.00 paper. While readers will surely gain upper-body strength from toting the splendid two-volume Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, their size also makes an argument: “Look how much we have been missing!” Academics sometimes assume that the white, male American literature canon has been corrected; after all, haven’t we been reading and writing about alternative voices for decades now? But students still commonly emerge from even good high schools nearly untouched by American women writers beyond Harper Lee, a small dose of Emily Dickinson, and perhaps a novel by Zora Neale Hurston or Toni Morrison. The students entering our college literature classrooms may know only the narrowest range of American women’s literary voices. Further, gender and women’s studies departmental survey courses, often still canon-heavy, hardly leave room for lesser-known texts to add more than a dash of diversity to the feast of American literature. How many new voices are enough? And, O weighty judgment: Which voices? Who could envy the task before general editors Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, and Shay Brawn, who, along with their coeditors, set out to offer a fresh perspective on the varied landscape of American literature? The prefaces of the two volumes—Volume One: 17th through 19th Centuries and Volume Two: The 20th Century—offer conversation-sparking reflections about “how fraught” the categories of “ ‘American’ and ‘Literature’ truly are” (Hogeland and Klages 2004, xxix). The editors explicitly build on feminist scholarship that works to “make these forgotten texts breathe again, knowing that their vitality will fundamentally alter the ways we think about American literature, American history, and the cultural constructions of identity, such as gender” (xxiii). With the cultural work of literature cast this way, they also remind us that the skeptical question beneath proposed revisions to the Grand Old Canon—“Is it any good?”—sidesteps what critic Jane Tompkins argues are more significant questions: “ ‘Good for whom?’ ‘When?’ and ‘Why?’ ” (1985, 2), and, I would add, [End Page 130] “According to whose opinion? In relation to what agenda?” The editors invite students to consider these big questions as they usefully lay bare their decision to select texts that “represent ways that women’s voices enter into public discourse” (xxiv), noting that they privilege “certain themes and topics that have been underrepresented” in other anthologies, such as sexualities, disabilities, and the rights of native peoples and people of color. For instructors, the texts have been selected “with an eye toward ways they might work together in provocative and teachable constellations” (xxviii), and the editors offer a range of topics and issues that would allow students to dwell in a specific historical moment or to make connections over centuries. In sum, this is a text for teachers, made transparently inviting for students. Volume One differs from most American literature anthologies, in which readers’ fingers trail far down a table of contents of male writers before happening upon some Anne Bradstreet poems. The Aunt Lute collection includes generous selections by Bradstreet, but opens with “The Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown,” an explosive record of the 1637 heresy trial. This fiery text makes evident that Hutchinson’s gender is on trial as well as her theology (“not tolerable nor comely in the sight of God nor fitting for your sex” [1]), and launches this volume with apocalyptic energy. The editors include excerpts from Salem trials and a thick slice of Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, along with lesser-known texts such as “The Life of Mary Read” and “The Life of...