Reviews for Captors and Captives

The average rating for Captors and Captives based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-08-02 00:00:00 Martin Pistilli This was one of my favorites that I've read for my exams...in fact, I should have "grad student read" this, which basically means to power peruse it in a few hours, but I enjoyed it so much (and it is so closely aligned with my exact field of study) that I just sat down and read it normally. I had wrongly assumed that it was going to be just the story of the Deerfield raid, which frankly is what it sounds like based on the title. But it is much more than that. The book uses the raid as a jumping off point for explaining the dynamics of the northeast at the time. Sweeney and Haefeli use this one conflict as an excuse to say, ok, who are these Frenchmen exactly who promoted and participated in this? Why did they attack Deerfield specifically? People typically just accept that Indians joined in the raid because they were allied with the French, but the authors point out that this is far too simple. The Indians did not just fight with the French for obligation's sake, and they were not simply "the Indians." There were at least four different groups of Indians involved, and each had its own motivations. Meanwhile there was a lot more mobility around the northeast than I had suspected, with a surprising number of English captives staying in New France, a number of French people relocating to New England towns, and various Indian communities dissolving and re-forming throughout the entire area from what is now upstate NY to eastern Maine. Just really fascinating stuff. This is a must for people who are studying this era.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-03-20 00:00:00 P. Silverman I think this must qualify as a definitive study of the events and context of the February 29 1704 (Julian calendar) raid on Deerfield, although I must confess it is the only complete book I've read on the subject so far. The authors view the event and its times (1670s to the 1760s) from every cultural and political angle, trace the origins and fates of captors and captives, the shifting alliances of European and Indian nations, and provide a marvelous window on an historical period that had been fairly obscure to me. My own personal interest of course stems from the escape of my 6th great grandmother, Thankful Nims, age 19, from the French led raiding party. While children had their heads bashed open and men and women were taken into captivity and houses burned, she and her husband Benjamin Munn hid in a primitive cellar house that was so covered with snow that it escaped notice. Thankful and Benjamin would remove south to Springfield where my 5th great grandmother, their child Sarah Munn would be born some twenty years later, understandably less close to the frontier. The subsequent generation would settle further north in Marlboro (Marlborough) Vermont. On the whole, this branch of our ancestors was by all appearances poor New England farmers all, living in large families on or near the frontier, and typically moving in search of new land with each generation. I found Haefeli and Sweeney's history fascinating and mind expanding, and intuitively plausible as a description of the cultural and political context of my ancestors' lives. I hope, some day, as my children or grandchildren peruse this list of my long ago readings, they will take the time to discover a little bit about Thankful Nims Munn and her family and circumstances as described here. (She does not actually appear in this book, but her parents and many of her siblings are mentioned.) The stories here of the cultural relationships between the many Indian nations and the French and the English provide a sense of the fluidity and connectedness of the cultures. Among the many revelations, this book provides a sense of just how few in number were the early settlers of New England and, even more so, how few were those of New France. A raiding party of some 200 was a huge undertaking, and the Deerfield raid was a singularly successful action on the part of New France, one that was really never equaled. While it became, particularly as a result of the contemporaneous book published about it (The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion by John Williams, 1665-1729) a rallying point for New England colonialists, the military action itself seems to have marked a high water point for New France as a Continental power, with subsequent raids experiencing less success as the French project in America dwindled and then collapsed over the ensuing decades. The final chapter on historiography and the effort to define the meaning of the "Deerfield Massacre" is particularly interesting - I like to go meta. This book has gripped me for many evenings. November 1, 2009