Author: Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147980598X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
Get Book
Book Description
The captivating story of four young people—English and Powhatan—who lived their lives between cultures In Pocahontas and the English Boys, the esteemed historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman shifts the lens on the well-known narrative of Virginia’s founding to reveal the previously untold and utterly compelling story of the youths who, often unwillingly, entered into cross-cultural relationships—and became essential for the colony’s survival. Their story gives us unprecedented access to both sides of early Virginia. Here for the first time outside scholarly texts is an accurate portrayal of Pocahontas, who, from the age of ten, acted as emissary for her father, who ruled over the local tribes, alongside the never-before-told intertwined stories of Thomas Savage, Henry Spelman, and Robert Poole, young English boys who were forced to live with powerful Indian leaders to act as intermediaries. Pocahontas and the English Boys is a riveting seventeenth-century story of intrigue and danger, knowledge and power, and four youths who lived out their lives between cultures. As Pocahontas, Thomas, Henry, and Robert collaborated and conspired in carrying messages and trying to smooth out difficulties, they never knew when they might be caught in the firing line of developing hostilities. While their knowledge and role in controlling communication gave them status and a degree of power, their relationships with both sides meant that no one trusted them completely. Written by an expert in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Atlantic history, Pocahontas and the English Boys unearths gems from the archives—Henry Spelman’s memoir, travel accounts, letters, and official reports and records of meetings of the governor and council in Virginia—and draws on recent archaeology to share the stories of the young people who were key influencers of their day and who are now set to transform our understanding of early Virginia.
Author: Henry Spelman
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 147980164X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 96
Get Book
Book Description
A memoir of one of America’s first adventurers, a young boy who acted as a link between the Jamestown colonists and the Patawomecks and Powhatans "Being in displeasure of my friends, and desirous to see other countries, after three months sail we come with prosperous winds in sight of Virginia.” So begins the fascinating tale of Henry Spelman, a 14 year-old boy whose mother sent him to Virginia in 1609. One of Jamestown’s early arrivals, Spelman soon became an integral player, and sometimes a pawn, in the power struggle between the Chesapeake Algonquians and the English settlers. Shortly after he arrived in the Chesapeake, Henry accompanied another English boy, Thomas Savage, to Powhatan's capital and after a few months accompanied the Patawomeck chief Iopassus to the Potomac. Spelman learned Chesapeake Algonquian languages and customs, acted as an interpreter, and knew a host of colonial America’s most well-known figures, from Pocahontas to Powhatan to Captain John Smith. This remarkable manuscript tells Henry’s story in his own words, and it is the only description of Chesapeake Algonquian culture written with an insider's knowledge. Spelman's account is lively and violent, rich with anthropological and historical detail. A valuable and unique primary document, this book illuminates the beginnings of English America and tells us much about how the Chesapeake Algonquians viewed the English invaders. It provides the first transcription from the original manuscript since 1872.
Author: Camilla Townsend
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429930772
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 245
Get Book
Book Description
Camilla Townsend's stunning new book, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, differs from all previous biographies of Pocahontas in capturing how similar seventeenth century Native Americans were--in the way they saw, understood, and struggled to control their world---not only to the invading British but to ourselves. Neither naïve nor innocent, Indians like Pocahontas and her father, the powerful king Powhatan, confronted the vast might of the English with sophistication, diplomacy, and violence. Indeed, Pocahontas's life is a testament to the subtle intelligence that Native Americans, always aware of their material disadvantages, brought against the military power of the colonizing English. Resistance, espionage, collaboration, deception: Pocahontas's life is here shown as a road map to Native American strategies of defiance exercised in the face of overwhelming odds and in the hope for a semblance of independence worth the name. Townsend's Pocahontas emerges--as a young child on the banks of the Chesapeake, an influential noblewoman visiting a struggling Jamestown, an English gentlewoman in London--for the first time in three-dimensions; allowing us to see and sympathize with her people as never before.
Author: Paula Gunn Allen
Publisher: Speaking Volumes
ISBN: 164540501X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383
Get Book
Book Description
"A gripping account of a fascinating woman and the role she played in the shaping of America."—TONY HILLERMAN AMERICA'S FOUNDING MOTHER In striking counterpoint to the conventional account, Pocahontas is a bold biography that tells the extraordinary story of the beloved Indian maiden from a Native American perspective. Dr. Paula Gunn Allen, the acknowledged founder of Native American literary studies, draws on sources often overlooked by Western historians and offers remarkable new insights into the adventurous life and sacred role of this foremost American heroine. Gunn Allen reveals why so many have revered Pocahontas as the female counterpart to the father of our nation, George Washington. "This first-rate biography of Pocahontas, one of the most important and elusive women in American history, ought to be required reading."—N. SCOTT MOMADAY, author of the Pulitzer Prize—winning House Made of Dawn "A fascinating study of the life and times of one of the most famous and at the same time least-known American women. I urge everyone to read this great eye-opener and monumental work."—ROBERT J. CONLEY, author of Sequoyah "Nothing less than a watershed event in the historiography of the Americas—not to mention one of the wittiest and wisest biographies I have ever read."—THE NEW YORK SUN "Gunn Allen attempts to place Pocahontas firmly in her Algonquin world and tell her story honoring the oral tradition of which Pocahontas was a part."—CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER "[In] Ms. Allen's spirited revision, [she] insists that Pocahontas cannot be understood except within an Algonquin Indian context."—WALL STREET JOURNAL "[F]ascinating and provocative . . . [Gunn Allen's] book gives powerful insight into the relationship between Native Americans, American colonists, and the British."—TIKKUN
Author:
Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
ISBN: 1555918670
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 135
Get Book
Book Description
The True Story of Pocahontas is the first public publication of the Powhatan perspective that has been maintained and passed down from generation to generation within the Mattaponi Tribe, and the first written history of Pocahontas by her own people.
Author: Edward Eggleston
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1627931538
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 131
Get Book
Book Description
Continuing the biographical approach to teaching history found in his Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans, Eggleston draws a more in-depth picture of the development of the United States using the stories of the living and breathing Americans who made it all happen.
Author: Helen C. Rountree
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813933404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Get Book
Book Description
Pocahontas may be the most famous Native American who ever lived, but during the settlement of Jamestown, and for two centuries afterward, the great chiefs Powhatan and Opechancanough were the subjects of considerably more interest and historical documentation than the young woman. It was Opechancanough who captured the foreign captain "Chawnzmit"—John Smith. Smith gave Opechancanough a compass, described to him a spherical earth that revolved around the sun, and wondered if his captor was a cannibal. Opechancanough, who was no cannibal and knew the world was flat, presented Smith to his elder brother, the paramount chief Powhatan. The chief, who took the name of his tribe as his throne name (his personal name was Wahunsenacawh), negotiated with Smith over a lavish feast and opened the town to him, leading Smith to meet, among others, Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas. Thinking he had made an ally, the chief finally released Smith. Within a few decades, and against their will, his people would be subjects of the British Crown. Despite their roles as senior politicians in these watershed events, no biography of either Powhatan or Opechancanough exists. And while there are other "biographies" of Pocahontas, they have for the most part elaborated on her legend more than they have addressed the known facts of her remarkable life. As the 400th anniversary of Jamestown’s founding approaches, nationally renowned scholar of Native Americans, Helen Rountree, provides in a single book the definitive biographies of these three important figures. In their lives we see the whole arc of Indian experience with the English settlers – from the wary initial encounters presided over by Powhatan, to the uneasy diplomacy characterized by the marriage of Pocahontas and John Rolfe, to the warfare and eventual loss of native sovereignty that came during Opechancanough’s reign. Writing from an ethnohistorical perspective that looks as much to anthropology as the written records, Rountree draws a rich portrait of Powhatan life in which the land and the seasons governed life and the English were seen not as heroes but as Tassantassas (strangers), as invaders, even as squatters. The Powhatans were a nonliterate people, so we have had to rely until now on the white settlers for our conceptions of the Jamestown experiment. This important book at last reconstructs the other side of the story.
Author: Ann Uhry Abrams
Publisher: Westview Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 410
Get Book
Book Description
Art historian Abrams traces how the two founding myths have been expressed in art, literature, and popular literature, finding surprising similarities between them as well as the expected differences. She shows how they were invoked in debates concerning immigration, women's rights, abolition, Indian removal, and other national issues, and how the stories fueled the flames of the Civil War. She includes many black-and-white reproductions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Charles Dudley Warner
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3732645045
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 42
Get Book
Book Description
Reproduction of the original: The Story of Pocahontas by Charles Dudley Warner
Author: Karen Ordahl Kupperman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801482823
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Get Book
Book Description
In this vividly written book, prize-winning author Karen Ordahl Kupperman refocuses our understanding of encounters between English venturers and Algonquians all along the East Coast of North America in the early years of contact and settlement. All parties in these dramas were uncertain--hopeful and fearful--about the opportunity and challenge presented by new realities. Indians and English both believed they could control the developing relationship. Each group was curious about the other, and interpreted through their own standards and traditions. At the same time both came from societies in the process of unsettling change and hoped to derive important lessons by studying a profoundly different culture.These meetings and early relationships are recorded in a wide variety of sources. Native people maintained oral traditions about the encounters, and these were written down by English recorders at the time of contact and since; many are maintained to this day. English venturers, desperate to make readers at home understand how difficult and potentially rewarding their enterprise was, wrote constantly of their own experiences and observations and transmitted native lore. Kupperman analyzes all these sources in order to understand the true nature of these early years, when English venturers were so fearful and dependent on native aid and the shape of the future was uncertain.Building on the research in her highly regarded book Settling with the Indians, Kupperman argues convincingly that we must see both Indians and English as active participants in this unfolding drama.
