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From the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central – a hugely original fictional history of Pocahontas, John Smith, and the Jamestown colony in Virginia In Argall, the third novel in his Seven Dreams series, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend surrounding Pocahontas, John Smith, and the founding of the Jamestown colony in Virginia-as well as the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it. With the same panoramic vision, mythic sensibility, and stylistic daring that he brought to the previous novels in the Seven Dreams series--hailed upon its inception as "the most important literary project of the '90s" (The Washington Post)--Vollmann continues his hugely original fictional history of the clash of Native Americans and Europeans in the New World. In reconstructing America's past as tragedy, nightmare, and bloody spectacle, Vollmann does nothing less than reinvent the American novel.
"Half a thousand years ago, a young Indian "princess" named Pocahontas might or might not have rescued an English mercenary named John Smith from being executed at her father's command. She might or might not have been in love with him. Legend has it that thanks to Pocahontas, the colony at Jamestown was saved, and the English and the Indians became friends. Of course, they didn't. Massacres occurred on both sides until the Indians were dispossessed. And Pocahontas never married John Smith; kidnapped, brainwashed, and held hostage by the colonists, she found herself the bride of an ambitious tobacco planter who despised the culture she came from. Shipped off to England as a curiosity, she died young." "In Argall, William T. Vollmann alternates between extravagant Elizabethan language and gritty realism in an attempt to dig beneath the legend, and the betrayals, disappointments, and atrocities behind it, in order to imagine what the lives of John Smith and Pocahontas might really have been like. His array of characters also includes Pocahontas's loving and anxious father, the despot Powhatan, and her uncle Opechancanough, who knows how to hold his rage against the English until just the right moment; Smith's patron, Lord Willoughby, and Lieutenant George Percy, fourth president of the Jamestown colony, whose tainted nobility draws him into genocide. Behind all of them stands the terrifying figure of Captain Samuel Argall, who will kidnap Pocahontas, burn Indian towns, and bring black slavery to North America."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
In many accounts of Native American history, treaties are synonymous with tragedy. From the beginnings of settlement, Europeans made and broke treaties, often exploiting Native American lack of alphabetic literacy to manipulate political negotiation. But while colonial dealings had devastating results for Native people, treaty making and breaking involved struggles more complex than any simple contest between invaders and victims. The early colonists were often compelled to negotiate on Indian terms, and treaties took a bewildering array of shapes ranging from rituals to gestures to pictographs. At the same time, Jeffrey Glover demonstrates, treaties were international events, scrutinized by faraway European audiences and framed against a background of English, Spanish, French, and Dutch imperial rivalries. To establish the meaning of their agreements, colonists and Natives adapted and invented many new kinds of political representation, combining rituals from tribal, national, and religious traditions. Drawing on an archive that includes written documents, printed books, orations, landscape markings, wampum beads, tally sticks, and other technologies of political accounting, Glover examines the powerful influence of treaty making along the vibrant and multicultural Atlantic coast of the seventeenth century.
The True Story of Pocahontas is the first public publication of the Powhatan perspective that has been maintained and passed down from generation to generation within the Mattaponi Tribe, and the first written history of Pocahontas by her own people.
"Covers all major wars and conflicts in North America from the late-15th to mid-18th centuries, with discussions of key battles, diplomatic efforts, military technologies, and strategies and tactics ... [E]xplores the context for conflict, with essays on competing colonial powers, every major Native American tribe, all important political and military leaders, and a range of social and cultural issues."--Publisher's Web site.