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3 books match the query 'Captivity narratives'

cover of North Country Captives: Selected Narratives of Indian Captivity from Vermont and New Hampshire

North Country Captives

Selected Narratives of Indian Captivity from Vermont and New Hampshire

Edited by Colin G. Calloway

University Press of New England, 1992

Revealing firsthand narratives of Indian captivity from eighteenth-century New Hampshire and Vermont. Narratives of Europeans who experienced Indian captivity represent one of the oldest genres of American literature. They are often credited with establishing the stereotype of Indians as cruel and bloodthirsty. While early southern New England accounts were heavily influenced by a dominant Puritan interpretation which had little room for individual and cultural distinctions, later northern New England narratives show growing independence from this influence. The eight narratives selected for this book challenge old stereotypes and provide a clearer understanding of the nature of captive taking. Indians used captives to replace losses in their tribes and families, and also to participate in the French and British ransom market. These stories portray Indian captors as individuals with a unique culture and offer glimpses of daily life in frontier communities. Calloway complements them with valuable historical background material. His book will appeal especially to readers interested in Native American peoples and life on the north country frontier of Vermont and New Hampshire.
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cover of The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez: The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th-Century Pirates

The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez

The True Adventures of a Spanish American with 17th-Century Pirates

By Fabio López Lázaro

University of Texas Press, 2011

In 1690, a dramatic account of piracy was published in Mexico City. The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez described the incredible adventures of a poor Spanish American carpenter who was taken captive by British pirates near the Philippines and forced to work for them for two years. After circumnavigating the world, he was freed and managed to return to Mexico, where the Spanish viceroy commissioned the well-known Mexican scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora to write down Ramírez's account as part of an imperial propaganda campaign against pirates.

The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez has long been regarded as a work of fiction—in fact, as Latin America's first novel—but Fabio López Lázaro makes a convincing case that the book is a historical account of real events, albeit full of distortions and lies. Using contemporary published accounts, as well as newly discovered documents from Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch archives, he proves that Ramírez voyaged with one of the most famous pirates of all time, William Dampier. López Lázaro's critical translation of The Misfortunes provides the only extensive Spanish eyewitness account of pirates during the period in world history (1650–1750) when they became key agents of the European powers jockeying for international political and economic dominance. An extensive introduction places The Misfortunes within the worldwide struggle that Spain, England, and Holland waged against the ambitious Louis XIV of France, which some historians consider to be the first world war.

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cover of White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives

White Slaves, African Masters

An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives

Edited by Paul Baepler

University of Chicago Press, 1999

A remarkable collection of hard-to-find primary source accounts of nineteenth-century American captivity narratives
 
Some of the most popular stories in nineteenth-century America were sensational tales of whites captured and enslaved in North Africa. White Slaves, African Masters for the first time gathers together a selection of these Barbary captivity narratives, which significantly influenced early American attitudes toward race, slavery, and nationalism.

Though Barbary privateers began to seize North American colonists as early as 1625, Barbary captivity narratives did not begin to flourish until after the American Revolution. During these years, stories of Barbary captivity forced the U.S. government to pay humiliating tributes to African rulers, stimulated the drive to create the U.S. Navy, and brought on America's first post-revolutionary war. These tales also were used both to justify and to vilify slavery.

The accounts collected here range from the 1798 tale of John Foss, who was ransomed by Thomas Jefferson's administration for tribute totaling a sixth of the annual federal budget, to the story of Ion Perdicaris, whose (probably staged) abduction in Tangier in 1904 prompted Theodore Roosevelt to send warships to Morocco and inspired the 1975 film The Wind and the Lion. Also included is the unusual story of Robert Adams, a light-skinned African American who was abducted by Arabs and used by them to hunt negro slaves; captured by black villagers who presumed he was white; then was sold back to a group of Arabs, from whom he was ransomed by a British diplomat.

Long out of print and never before anthologized, these fascinating tales open an entirely new chapter of early American literary history, and shed new light on the more familiar genres of Indian captivity narrative and American slave narrative.
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