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The Massacre lives on in popular imagination, but so does the Boston Massacre, certainly one of the most non-massacres in American history.
On a personal note, my 7th generation great-grandfather Bernardus Bratt commanded the New York troops at Fort William Henry in the summer of 1756 and came out as a company commander in Sir William Johnson's regiment after the 1757 massacre.
Well-written and well-documented modern accounts of the French and Indian War are few and far between. Steele's book should remain the final word for some time to come.
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The best written are the biographies of Pocahontas by Kathleen Brown; Rev. John Cotton, Jr. by Sheila McIntyre; Bryan Sheehan by Margaret Connell Szasz; and Lewis Morris, Jr. by Michael Watson. Brown presents an example of early European-Amerindian relations and shows us the difficulty of determining what sources are truth versus what is self-promotion or legend. Cotton is a pastor twice accused of marital infidelity. His story gives us examples of how Puritans dealt with sinful citizens, of efforts to spread the Word of God to Amerindians, and of the importance of communication between community leaders. The story of Bryan Sheehan is an intersting read. We so often read success stories in American immigration. Sheehan is definately a failure: Roman-Catholic (and thus treated poorly in New England) and unable to hold a job with any promise of financial security, Sheehan joins the British Army during the French and Indian War. He survives several horrible battles to discover that, upon hearing a rumor of Sheehan's death, Bryan Sheehan's wife married another man and had a child by him. The Lewis Morris biography gives us an example of pre-Revolution politics in America. Of special note was the Anne Hutchinson biography by Marilyn Westerkamp. While it is obvious that her research was excellent and she succeeded in showing the reader that Hutchinson's popularity threatened the social order (e.g. she became too powerful and the religious leaders felt threatened) and the depth of Hutchinson's intelligence, Westerkamp didn't quite succeed in proving that Hutchinson's activities were not tolerated because she was a woman.
The only two biographies I didn't enjoy were the biographies of French missionary Gabrial Segard and Amerindian translator Isabel Montour. The biographical information available on the former is not exactly extensive, making for a confusing biography. With regards to the latter, it is probably more a fault of the reader that he didn't care about the role of a translator in English-Native politics.
Finally, in my opinion, not enough attention was paid to slavery in the American colonies. Olaudah Equiano was the only biography of a slave in this anthology, and it can hardly be said that his life was typical. A biography of some other person involved in slavery would have been informative as well--be it a slave, slave owner, slave trader, slave-master, slave-owner-turned abolitionist, etc. This could have been done at the expense of one of the many European-American cultural brokers biographies.
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