James Axtell

The Indian peoples of Eastern America : a documentary history of the sexes

Using the human life cycle as an organizational framework, Axtell has gathered a broad range of 17th and 18th century European documentation on Native North Americans. With its lucid introductions to each entry, suggestions for further reading, and bibliography, this sourcebook is invaluable for courses in history, anthropology, and native American and womens studies.

Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (review)

She moves with ease among the multiplicity of Jewish subcommunities—assimilationist, traditional, Hasidic, and Zionist—that populated the Habsburg lands, although her primary concern is the German-speaking Jews of Vienna, Bohemia, and Moravia. This focus becomes especially pronounced in her anal chapter on early postwar developments; more detail on the experiences of Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, and other Jews who sought redeanition in a changed world might have been helpful. By exploring the sociology and psychology of identity formation, as well as its politics, Rozenblit casts an illuminating beam on one of the enduring problems of European history in a manner that makes for engrossing reading. With surprising topicality, she also anticipates the argument offered by Burger, formerly director of Vienna’s University of Applied Arts, that Austria suffers from an excess of “remembering” its Nazi (and Jewish) past. Burger’s appeal “for forgetting” is admirably rebutted in her pages.2 A promised further volume, dealing with Jewish identity in interwar central and eastern Europe, will be welcome.

The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America

Deals with the encounters of Europeans and Indians in colonial North America. A blending of history and anthropology, the author draws on a wide variety of sources, including archaeological findings, linguistics, accounts of colonists, art, and published scholarship.

Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives, 1642-1836

Among the early white settlers, accounts of Indian captivities and massacres became Americas first literature of catharsis - a means by which a population that disapproved of fiction and play-acting could satisfy its appetite for stories about other peoples misfortunes. This collection of unaltered captivity narratives, first published in 1973, remains an invaluable source of information for historians and ethnologists, providing a fascinating glimpse of a vanished era. For this edition, VanDerBeets has written a new preface discussing the proliferation of recent scholarship about captivity narratives, especially those written by women.