Explore the vast range of titles available.

Previously, The Plantation of Virginia had been known only from an entry in the office-book of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels: August [1623] A Tragedy of the Plantation of Virginia, the contayninge 16 sheets and one may be acted companye at the Curtune Founde fault with the length of this playe & reformation in all their other playes.1 Scholars had long been fascinated by this entry, as it records the earliest English play known to have been set in the North American colonies; the earliest surviving play had been Aphra Behn's The Widow Ranter, written some sixty years later.2 The new discovery has exceeded expectations, as it reveals The Plantation of Virginia to have been the earliest known dramatization of the lives of Captain John Smith, the governor of Jamestown, and Pocahontas, the daughter of Chief Powhatan who married the plantation owner John Rolfe and became a celebrity in London before her untimely death in 1616. Gordon McMullan has argued that Fletcher's play has thematic connections with the marriage of Pocahontas and Rolfe;6 conversely, Quisara's regal and only partially exoticized demeanour may have been the author's model for Pocahontas, who was promoted in 1616-17 as the daughter of a mighty emperor.7 Any originality lacking in the main characters is made up for by the minor characters, as the author's wide reading produced some remarkable characterizations.\\n They did tell Us always you were dead, and I knew no Other till I saw thee here; yet Powhatan Did command Tomocomo seek you and Know the truth, because your countrymen will Lie much.

InBrethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675-76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676-1749. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves.Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, and court records, Newell recovers the slaves' own stories and shows how they influenced New England society in crucial ways. Indians lived in English homes, raised English children, and manned colonial armies, farms, and fleets, exposing their captors to Native religion, foods, and technology. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations. Newell also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. Newell finds that second- and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America. InBrethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675-76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676-1749. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves. Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, and court records, Newell recovers the slaves' own stories and shows how they influenced New England society in crucial ways. Indians lived in English homes, raised English children, and manned colonial armies, farms, and fleets, exposing their captors to Native religion, foods, and technology. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations. Newell also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. Newell finds that second- and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America.

Although long recognized as Maryland’s first capital, the site of St. Mary’s City also holds a wealth of archaeological evidence spanning over 10,000 years of Native American life. This long record is summarized with attention focused upon the settlement called Yaocomico that was inhabited in the early seventeenth century. It was at Yaocomico that the newly arrived English colonists first came into sustained encounter with Native people. In a remarkable situation, it was negotiated that half the town was given to the settlers while the Yaocomico continued residing in the other half until the corn harvest. From this peaceful beginning, the interaction between Maryland Indians and the English is briefly traced over the next 70 years. Attention is given to the material evidence of this interaction, especially Native-made tobacco pipes that are found in quantities on English sites from ca. 1640 until about 1675. Finally, recent work on Maryland Indian sites from the late seventeenth and turn of the eighteenth century is noted.

Captain John Smith (Figure 1) played a pivotal role in establishing Jamestown as a member of the governing council and in providing food for the settlers by trading with the Native Americans. The settlers were to explore, to look for the Northwest Passage to the western ocean and on to India, to seek gold and silver, and to interact with the natives and determine if a profitable trading relationship could be established.

Seventeenth century mercantilist economics is based on \"translating\": foreign wealth changes meaning or value in becoming domestic property. The Pocahontas story manipulates biographical evidence to mercantilist ends: she is \"translated\" by love and marriage into a British subject, \"domesticating\" her Indian lands into British/American property. Retelling this story keeps American mercantilism alive, reaffirming the mythic belief that the US is the inevitable end-product of all translation.

In June 1675, Awashunkes, thesaunksor female leader of the Saconets, an Algonquian people who lived on the coast of what the English called Narragansett Bay, had an important decision to make.¹ It was not one she could make alone, so she called for all those within her influence to gather for anickómmo,a ritual dance and feast. Two decades earlier, the colonist, trader, and sometime religious exile Roger Williams had noted that Narragansetts (as did other peoples in the region the English knew as New England) held the nickómmo in times of crisis—“in sicknesse, or Drouth,

It is widely recognized that Charles Olson's Maximus Poems attempt a historiography that imaginatively recreates the past. This historical recreation can be understood as a form of economics or, borrowing from the original Greek origins of the word, \"housekeeping.\" Housekeeping for Olson is a poetic rearrangement of present conditions that have been set in place by prior housekeepers and earlier economies. This process is inevitably endless and expansive, transforming domestic arrangements, material conditions, and cultural values. One important predecessor in Olson's version of American history is John Smith, the seventeenth-century explorer who is often read by critics as a hero of The Maximus Poems. This essay offers a new interpretation of Smith, using the rubric of housekeeping to demonstrate that Olson critically recreates Smith's complicated legacy. A poetics of housekeeping allows Olson to correct the potential dangers the explorer presents to the contemporary world, even as Olson embraces Smith's merits.

In a prefatory note to his brother Henry, the ninth Earl of Northumberland, George Percy clearly posits his \"Trewe Relacyon\" manuscript as a response to Smith's critical account of the colony in his self-promoting Generall Historie of the previous year:4 many untrewthes concerneinge Theis p[ro]ceedeinges have bene formerly published, wherein The author hathe nott Spared to apropriate many desertts to him selfe w[hi]ch he never p[er] formed and stuffed his Relacyons w[i]th so many falseties and malicyous detractyons nott onely of this p[ar]t and Tyme w[hi]ch I have selected to Treate of, Butt of former ocurrentts also: so thatt I coulde nott contein my selfe butt expresse the Trewthe unto your Lordshipp concerninge Theis affayers. Another family member's circumstantial connections to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 led King James to imprison the ninth Earl (Henry Percy, George's brother) in the Tower for his alleged complicity.5 Thus, while his ancestors had damaged the family name through their unlucky political associations at home, George Percy, presumably anxious to acquit the family name, removed himself to the New World and situated himself and his family at the center of a historic, colonizing endeavor tinged with nationalistic overtones.