The Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) were the largest political party in Russia in the crucial revolutionary year of 1917.  Heirs to the legacy of the People’s Will movement, the SRs were unabashed proponents of peasant rebellion and revolutionary terror, emphasizing the socialist transformation of the countryside and a democratic system of government as their political goals. They offered a compelling, but still socialist, alternative to the Bolsheviks, yet by the early 1920s their party was shattered and its members were branded as enemies of the revolution.  In 1922, the SR leaders became the first fellow socialists to be condemned by the Bolsheviks as “counter-revolutionaries” in the prototypical Soviet show trial.
      In Captives of the Revolution, Scott B. Smith presents both a convincing account of the defeat of the SRs and a deeper analysis of the significance of the political dynamics of the Civil War for subsequent Soviet history.  Once the SRs decided to openly fight the Bolsheviks in 1918, they faced a series of nearly impossible political dilemmas.  At the same time, the Bolsheviks fatally undermined the revolutionary credentials of the SRs by successfully appropriating the rhetoric of class struggle, painting a simplistic picture of Reds versus Whites in the Civil War, a rhetorical dominance that they converted into victory over the SRs and any left-wing alternative to Bolshevik dictatorship.  In this narrative, the SRs became a bona fide threat to national security and enemies of the people—a characterization that proved so successful that it became an archetype to be used repeatedly by the Soviet leadership against any political opponents, even those from within the Bolshevik party itself.  
      In this groundbreaking study, Smith reveals a more complex and nuanced picture of the postrevolutionary struggle for power in Russia than we have ever seen before and demonstrates that the Civil War—and in particular the struggle with the SRs—was the formative experience of the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state.
 

On February 29, 1704, a party of French and Indian raiders descended on the Massachusetts village of Deerfield, killing fifty residents and capturing more than a hundred others. In this masterful work of history, Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney reexamine the Deerfield attack and place it within a framework stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. Drawing on previously untapped sources, they show how the assault grew out of the aspirations of New England family farmers, the ambitions of Canadian colonists, the calculations of French officials, the fears of Abenaki warriors, and the grief of Mohawk women as they all struggled to survive the ongoing confrontation of empires and cultures.

Haefeli and Sweeney reconstruct events from multiple points of view, through the stories of a variety of individuals involved. These stories begin in the Native, French, and English communities of the colonial Northeast, then converge in the February 29 raid, as a force of more than two hundred Frenchmen, Abenakis, Hurons, Kahnawake Mohawks, Pennacooks, and Iroquois of the Mountain overran the northwesternmost village of the New England frontier. Although the inhabitants put up more of a fight than earlier accounts of the so-called Deerfield Massacre have suggested, the attackers took 112 men, women, and children captive. The book follows the raiders and their prisoners on the harsh three-hundred-mile trek back to Canada and into French and Native communities. Along the way the authors examine how captives and captors negotiated cultural boundaries and responded to the claims of competing faiths and empires—all against a backdrop of continuing warfare.

By giving equal weight to all participants, Haefeli and Sweeney range across the fields of social, political, literary, religious, and military history, and reveal connections between cultures and histories usually seen as separate.

Robert Hopkins was a man caught between two worlds. As a member of the Dakota Nation, he was unfairly imprisoned, accused of taking up arms against U.S. soldiers when war broke out with the Dakota in 1862. However, as a Christian convert who was also a preacher, Hopkins’s allegiance was often questioned by many of his fellow Dakota as well. Without a doubt, being a convert—and a favorite of the missionaries—had its privileges. Hopkins learned to read and write in an anglicized form of Dakota, and when facing legal allegations, he and several high-ranking missionaries wrote impassioned letters in his defense. Ultimately, he was among the 300-some Dakota spared from hanging by President Lincoln, imprisoned instead at Camp Kearney in Davenport, Iowa, for several years. His wife, Sarah, and their children, meanwhile, were forced onto the barren Crow Creek reservation in Dakota Territory with the rest of the Dakota women, children, and elderly. In both places, the Dakota were treated as novelties, displayed for curious residents like zoo animals.

Historian Linda Clemmons examines the surviving letters from Robert and Sarah; other Dakota language sources; and letters from missionaries, newspaper accounts, and federal documents. She blends both the personal and the historical to complicate our understanding of the development of the Midwest, while also serving as a testament to the resilience of the Dakota and other indigenous peoples who have lived in this region from time immemorial.

Throughout history, warfare and raiding forced captives from one society into another, forming an almost invisible stratum of many people without kin and largely outside the social systems in which they lived. Invisible Citizens explores the profound effects this mingling of societies and customs had on cultural development around the world.

The contributors to this volume explore the remarkable range in the conditions and experiences of captives, from abject drudge to quasi kinswoman and from war captive to sexual concubine. Developing methods for identifying captives in the archaeological record are established in light of the silence that surrounded captive-taking and enslavement in many parts of the world.

Invisible Citizens promises to attract attention from a number of fields concerned with the comparative, historical study of social inequality. It challenges scholars to develop robust, empirically grounded insights into the practices of slavery while attending to the forms and saliencies of its memories. .