Stories of Indian captivity had long interested Anglo-American readers. Throughout the early republic, the genre of women's Indian captivity narratives took on another significance. "Captivating a Nation" places the scholarship of Indian captivity in conversation with American nationalism and reveals the ways in which Indian captivity narratives became the surface upon which American imagined their nation. "Captivating a Nation" is an examination of women's Indian captivity narratives published between 1787 and 1830. These narratives provided more than a continuous repository of settlers as victims in an untamed wilderness. They were narratives of nationhood in complex and contradictory ways. Indian captivity narratives were a popular genre among readers of the early American republic. Yet, less than half of those concerning male captives were published in multiple editions, while every narrative concerning a female captive was republished. Unlike the captivity narratives of men, those concerning women were re-published and re-consumed because settler women taken captive to Americans of the early republic symbolized the tenuousness and vulnerability of the young nation. That is, they simultaneously gave voice to fears related to national stability as well as contained those fears with the redemption of the woman and her return to white society. / History

Since the publication of Mary Rowlandson's, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God . . ., released six years after the close of King Philip's War and the death of the Pokanoket leader, Metacomet, in 1682, the Indian captivity narrative has operated as a widely influential component of American literary, historical, and cultural discourse. From the seventeenth century to the present, the metaphors, symbols, and the implicit ideologies of this literary genre have had a powerful and enduring influence on the public's perception of American Indian people, and the development of an expansionist American ideology. As a result, the operant binary of the bloodthirsty "savage" and the "civilized" Euro-American has become a common feature of discourses in which American Indian people have been, and continue to be, represented in American historiography, literature, art, film, and popular culture, while also serving as a primary textual justification for the territorial expansion of the United States, and as an implicit justification and historical alibi for the concomitant destruction of American Indian societies and cultures.In this work, my aim is to deconstruct and demystify the regime of literary and historical privilege that has become an explicit function of Rowlandson's text and subsequent narratives by presenting a critical perspective that is responsive to the complex array of social, cultural, and historical forces that were converging in the Massachusetts colony during the late seventeenth century. In so doing, I have attempted to present the "Indian side" of the story and examine the events that Rowlandson describes in her narrative from the perspective of Indian people who have been all too often silenced in American historical and literary discourses. I have addressed and attempted to answer some of the nagging questions surrounding the original publication and dissemination of Rowlandson's work in order to shed some much needed light on the complex cultural and social processes at work in Puritan society during the seventeenth century, while illustrating how texts such as Rowlandson's continues to shape our perceptions of others and our own conceptions of historical reality.

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