Captivity as a World Phenomenon

It was years ago. In the early 1980s I became a special student in the History of American Civilization graduate program at Brandeis University. A small group of the first-year graduate students met in mid-fall to present short papers in which we chose original sources that we might begin to explore for a future long paper for that semester and perhaps for a doctoral dissertation. Each of us worked with one of the Americanists in the program. There was one student at work on labor issues, one on the Paul Revere House, one who never did what he said he'd do and left the program, one I have forgotten, and then me. I discovered captivity narratives: early American narratives by Mary Rowlandson, Clarissa Plummer, and other women and men I'd never heard of. Our papers were run off early for the professors and for the other graduate students. At the end of our session, one of the professors came over to me and began talking about my topic. "How did you ever find out about this material?" We discussed it for a bit. I thought, "This must be pretty odd stuff to get this kind of a response."

No more. Captivity materials are out and about. No longer strange pieces of literature or unusual documents, there are major books out on captivity narratives, not only for the American colonists but for Native American peoples and Spaniards in the American Southwest, for issues regarding Southeast Native Americans and slavery, for Europeans and Anglo-Americans captured by Barbary captives, for English captives in India and the Mediterranean, and on and on.

For historians of British Atlantic history, captivity materials became highlighted in Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973), and then in the edited work of Slotkin and James K. Folsom, So Dreadfull a Judgment: Puritan Responses to King Philip's War, 1676–1677 (1978), and in Richard VanDerBeets's edition of Held Captive by Indians: Selective Narratives: 1642–1836 (1973). Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark's edition of Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724 (1981) became the commonly used version of early New England captivities. Gordon M. Sayre, Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (1997) brought in a strong French and English collection. There were also editions of old Northwest captives like Richard Drinnon's Memoirs of a Captivity among the Indians of North America: John Dunn Hunter [1824] (1973). A more popularized work, Fredrick Drimmer, Captured by the Indians: 15 Firsthand Accounts, 1750–1870 came out in a new edition in 1985.

Secondary works came on strong with James Axtell's The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (1981) and The Invasion Within: The Conquest of Cultures in Colonial America (1985). In the early 1990s, my White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (1993) was published. New England captives stayed at the forefront of the materials, including Colin G. Calloway's edition of North Country Captives: Selected Narratives of Indian Captivity from Vermont and New Hampshire (1992) and John Demos's The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994). As the Demos book popularized the Williams family of Deerfield and the Massachusetts story of the early 1700s with the French and Jesuits and the Kahnawakes of Quebec, Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney responded with Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and Indian Raid on Deerfield (2003).

But historians and anthropologists were coming at the subject from outside of the New England and Eastern colonial areas. The relationship between captivity and slavery comes through in Alan Gallay's, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American...